The year that marks six decades of ‘Revolver’, it is also time to face the death of John Lennon again thanks to the reissue of ‘Season of Glass’, the first album that Yoko Ono published after his murder. Looking back at that cover, with the bloody glasses Lennon was wearing the night Mark David Chapman shot him in front of the Dakota Building, is still a shocking experience. The contrast between that object, converted into a symbol of violence, and the rest of the scene – the views of the park, the glass of water, the dim light – transmits an unexpected, although very intentional, sensation of calm after the tragedy.
The curious thing is that, more than four decades later, we are still constantly confronted with Lennon’s death. Not just because of ‘Season of Glass’, but because we’ve never really stopped talking about the British icon. Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980, just a few weeks after publishing the then misunderstood ‘Double Fantasy’ with Yoko Ono and when he was preparing to return to the fore after five years. His story was cut short so abruptly that there always seems to be a pending conversation with him.
The circumstances of his murder have not failed to fuel that feeling either. Annie Leibovitz’s unforgettable photograph, taken just hours before, with a naked Lennon hugging Ono; the recently completed demo of ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, the tape of which he was carrying with him when he was shot; or the fact that Mark David Chapman is still alive (he is 71 years old) and continues to unsuccessfully request parole make the story return again and again to the present. Every piece of news related to any of these elements inevitably reactivates the memory of that night.
Added to this is that the Beatles’ universe continues to expand. In recent years we have seen John Lennon again in the documentary ‘Get Back’ by Peter Jackson, we have heard his voice in ‘Now and Then’ thanks to AI-assisted restoration and we will soon see him played by Harris Dickinson in the biopic of Sam Mendes, a film that will probably not elude his death. Because it is impossible to talk about John Lennon’s life without mentioning how short it was: he died at just 40 years old, too young an age for anyone. As with other premature deaths in music, the feeling of an unfinished work continues to fascinate us.
Also influencing is the fact that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr continue to release albums, both this year, and take to the stage. The two surviving Beatles keep alive the legacy of the most popular group in history, but without Lennon there was no Beatles. Recently, Macca has recognized that Lennon was the favorite of the rest of the Beatles: “We all admired him. “He was a leader and a very witty guy.”
Lennon’s legacy doesn’t depend solely on the Beatles, either. Songs like ‘Imagine’ – despite the animosity it may have aroused – or his version of ‘Stand by Me’ continue to accumulate hundreds of millions of streams, while Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon have worked for decades to preserve their work through reissues, documentaries and unpublished publications. Even Sean’s career, collaborating with contemporary artists, keeps alive a link with the figure of his father. Likewise, interviews like the one Lennon and Ono gave to Dick Cavett in 1971 continue to reveal to new generations the person behind the icon.
Perhaps that is why it is worth remembering, now that Hollywood is once again interested in this story, that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were not characters in a trashy Netflix true crime, but rather real people. ‘Season of Glass’ retains all its force precisely because it humanizes both. Ono stops being the character on whom so many prejudices were projected to become someone who has just lost his life partner, while Lennon stops being a rock statue to recover the status of a man whose life was taken away in an absurd way.
The reissue of ‘Season of Glass’ also recovers an album that offered a worthy reflection on grief and resilience. Far from being paralyzed by fear, Ono turned the trauma into a work that sought to move forward. She herself refused to interpret Lennon’s death as “the end of an era” and preferred to affirm that the 80s were full of possibility, convinced that that was what he would have liked to hear. Lennon never got to know that decade, but time has shown that the Beatles era never ended. And, in a way, neither did John Lennon’s.
