Magenta, when I first read your letter I perceived it as a personal attack, then I reread it and saw that perhaps it wasn't, You seem to be railing against the human race (myself included?) because of the fact that I stated Lennon was only truly appreciated when he was dead. To a large extent this is true. You weren't born yet when he died so you weren't around to see it but the world went into shock for precisely this reason. He had been ignored and now he was gone.

I was a fan of his before but as I stated I became a bigger fan after. There isn't so much as you say a sickness in people it was the fact that Lennon hadn't been putting out music as good as he had done previously for years. Plus his relationship with Yoko soured a lot of people, blaming it for the breakup of the Beatles etc. After he died though there was more perspective-such as how he lived his whole life instead of what he had been doing the past few years. I don't see this as being unnatural or sick, I think it could be seen as very logical.


To put in some perspective this is from "The New Rolling Stone Record Guide" 1979. The period from Imagine up until before Double Fantasy.

* * * Imagine / Apple (1971) If JL/POB was sparked by the cry "The dream is over," the message of Imagine, a much more accessible pop album, was "Long live the dream": as a popular artist, the angry man simply could not endure without a dose of utopianism in his music, his sense of romance and his politics. Imagine, despite its notorious attack on Paul McCartney ("How Do You Sleep?"), felt like a breath of fresh air in 1971; "Gimme Some Truth," a nasty rocker, "Oh Yoko," an almost girl-groupish ditty and the lovely "Jealous Guy" still do. At this point, John seemed to know where he was going, and to be going in a good direction.
* Some Time in New York City / Apple (1972) * * Mind Games / Apple (1973)* * Walls and Bridges / Apple (1974)
It didn't seem that way after Some Time, a disastrous collaboration between John, Yoko and the leftish rock band Elephant's Memory. This was a two-LP set divided between horrendous Phil Spector-produced protest epics and live recordings (some with Frank Zappa): the politics were witless and the live jams mindless. After John's ideological flip-flops of the previous years (from the Maharishi to "peace" to primal therapy, each em­braced as an absolute Answer), it was hard to take his new political commitments seri­ously; here the question of taking his music seriously never came up.
Both Mind Games and Walls and Bridges were drastic retreats from the anti-pop stance of Some Time, and both produced hits: "Mind Games," the trendy "Whatever Gets You thru the Night" and "#9 Dream." The sound was lush and conven­tional, the singing assured, but there was no real point of view at work—no point at all, in fact, save for continuing a career for its own sake; only "Going Down on Love" (Walls) recalled the gutty realism of JL/ POB, which seemed very far away. Like so many veterans of the Sixties trapped in the Seventies, Lennon (by then the subject of a brutal but accurate parody on the National Lampoon's Radio Dinner LP) had no idea of how to relate to his audience: with what ap­peared to be panic, he substituted production techniques for soul, building a bridge to his listeners with his sound but erecting a wall around himself with empty music.
* * Rock & Roll / Apple (1975) Lennon knew it; he just didn't know what to do about it, and so, again like many others, he tried to escape a dead end by going back to his roots with an oldies album. Rock & Roll (1975, a year that also saw John pop­ping up on a couple of Elton John 45s) began as a collaboration with Phil Spector, who needed a shot of rhythm & blues as much as John did, but the partnership soon came to grief—as did most of the album. Remakes of "Stand by Me" and "Just Be­cause" were deeply touching, but with the rest of the tunes—mostly classic hard rock­ers—John never found a groove. And so, no doubt tired of his helpless drift back and forth between adventure (JL/POB, Some Time) and retreat (Imagine, Mind Games, Walls, R'n'R), Lennon shut up, his battle with Paul McCartney apparently conceded.


Now of course anyone can disagree with these reviews but I am just trying to show that he was not held in nearly the reverence he is today and why.

While he was alive he had 2 number one albums "Imagine" and "Walls and Bridges". Each one stayed at the number one spot for one week. After he died "Double Fantasy" stayed at the number one spot for eight weeks. His best album "Plastic Ono Band" only reached number 6.

PS. I noticed in the "10 reasons" list every song was from 1971 or earlier-none from the time period I have been talking about.