December 8 of this year will mark the 43rd anniversary of the death of John Ono Lennon, who, at 40 years old, was killed outside his New York apartment. While I could use this as a chance to comment on gun violence in America, the relative lack of improvement in mental healthcare and mental health research since the 1980s, or the world’s deafening refusal to “Give Peace a Chance” (Everybody’s talking about Israel/Palestine, fentanyl and xylazine, left wing and right wing, and freight trucks and Starbucks...), I will instead use this time to talk about love and memory.
Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono’s life story and career have long been overshadowed by the world’s preoccupation with who her husband was. An accomplished artist, musician, and activist in her own right, Ono has lived for decades with the reputation of being the woman who broke up the Beatles, a moniker which is both unfair to her and overstates the influence she had on Lennon’s career, and the Beatles as a group. Recently, fans and academics alike have begun to acknowledge that the response to Ono in the 1960s, which has persisted now for over fifty years, was largely based in racism and misogyny and her role in Beatles history needs to be thoroughly reconsidered (I highly recommend the chapters on Yoko Ono in Lily E. Hirsch’s Can’t Stop the Grrrls: Confronting Sexist Labels in Pop Music from Ariana Grande to Yoko Ono, linked below, as well as Christine Feldman-Barrett's A Women’s History of the Beatles). Nevertheless, since 1980, Ono has adapted to the shadow she now inevitably lives under and has accepted her role as the one to carry and hold up her husband’s legacy. Ono has dedicated much of the last 43 years of her life to telling not only her version of Lennon’s story, but other people’s as well.
In 2005, 25 years after Lennon’s death, Ono released a book which she coordinated, compiled, and edited, titled Memories of John Lennon. This book features stories from 75 celebrities, writers, photographers, and artists who knew Lennon when he was alive about some of their favorite memories of him. One of the most poignant of these was submitted by the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who conducted Lennon’s last photoshoot just hours before he was killed. Leibovitz offers no words but instead allows her pictures to tell the viewer who John Lennon was to her.
Annie Leibovitz’s photos of John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken hours before his death on December 8, 1980. This spread is presented as seen on pages 130–131 of Memories of John Lennon, edited by Yoko Ono.
More recently, another group of artists has taken to memorializing John Lennon. On November 2, 2023, the Beatles released what is being marketed as the “last Beatles song.” Though Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are the only two Beatles still alive, all four original members of the band do indeed appear on the track, with none other than Lennon on lead vocals.
Originally recorded in 1974, the song existed as a demo only for nearly fifty years. In the mid-1990s, the three surviving Beatles, McCartney, Starr, and George Harrison, attempted to use this demo to create a “new” Beatles song to release alongside the two songs they ended up releasing in this period, “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird.” However, due to constraints presented by the technology of the period, they were unable to finish their work on “Now and Then.” That changed, though, in the early part of this decade, when filmmaker Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings trilogy fame) was working on the documentary The Beatles: Get Back (2021).
For Get Back, Jackson helped develop and utilized state-of-the-art remastering techniques and AI technology in order to restore hundreds of hours of film and audio tape from January 1969, when the Beatles were working on what would become their final album, Let It Be (a note for hardcore Beatles fans: I know Abbey Road was recorded last; I am merely referring to album release chronology). At this time, McCartney and Starr approached Jackson to see if he would also be willing to take a stab at restoring Lennon’s “Now and Then” demo and splitting Lennon’s vocals and piano. Amazingly, Jackson was reportedly able to do that in mere minutes.
With Jackson’s help, McCartney and Starr were finally able to complete this decades-old project. They each recorded backing vocals, Starr recorded a drum part, and McCartney took up the same bass guitar he used back in the 1960s. Tapes from the 1990s of Harrison, who passed away in 2001, were also used in the final version of “Now and Then,” and, in order to honor Harrison’s memory as well as Lennon’s, Paul McCartney recorded an electric slide guitar solo in his best approximation of Harrison’s style of playing, which can be seen in both the music video and the behind the scenes “making of” video for the song.
“Now and Then,” like Memories of John Lennon, is a beautiful tribute to John Lennon. Each is sad, but indelibly marked with love, friendship, the pain of loss, and, most interestingly, hope, as well as the persistence of these things across time. Though Memories of John Lennon was released 25 years after his death, his friends were able to talk about him as if they’d only seen him a few days before and might even see him again before too long. In a similar vein, Ringo Starr said when he, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison were working on “Now and Then” the first time, they chose to pretend John Lennon was there, but had just stepped out of the room to get a cup of tea because that made working on his song a little easier.
Now, 43 years on, we can hear the result of that in this “last Beatles song.” The age in McCartney and Starr’s voices contrasts starkly with the youth that persists in Lennon and Harrison’s, and in this way, we can hear friendship reaching across time as they sing together one last time, “Now and then, I miss you. Now and then, I want you to be there for me, always to return to me.”
Memories of John Lennon by
Can't Stop the Grrrls by