Lennon would have been 66 this month. He is still relevant. In many ways he was way ahead of his time.
The Beatles' Cirque-du-Soleil Las Vegas Musical, The Beatles LOVE, is running at The Mirage. The soundtrack, a mashup album, will be released in November. George Martin and his son, Giles, are the producers.
The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a documentary, opened in NYC last month and
two weeks ago nationally. A.O. Scott of the New York Times wrote that
the documentary did some interesting historical spade work and was
flavored with the era's excesses and oddities. It tells the tale of
Lennon's anti-war activism and the effort to deport him by Nixon in
order to silence Lennon.
In a review, John Weiner of The Nation wrote, "Those "activities" – planning a concert tour that would combine rock
music with antiwar organizing and voter registration for the 1972
election – were stopped cold by Nixon's deportation order," and the tour never happened. Fast forward to more
than 30 years later, in the '04 election, and "another group of rock stars
finally did exactly what Lennon had been thinking about doing...when Bruce Springsteen and a group of activist rock musicians did an
election year concert tour of battleground states with a strategy very
much like Lennon's. The tour, organized
by MoveOn PAC, brought the Dixie Chicks, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, and a dozen
others on a tour of swing states, with the explicit goal of getting
young rock fans to register to vote and vote against the Republican in
the White House."
John Lennon's killer denied parole again, according to an article in the SF Gate. Mark David Chapman 51, killed John Lennon in 1980. A lot of things happened on October 15 in The Beatles' history... this blog has some interesting facts, fyi.