Friday, Sep 5, 2008
After 14 years of disappointment, Julian Lennon is finally doing it his way.
Jul 8, 1998 | In America, Julian Lennon is known for many things, but making first-rate records is not one of them. His 1984 debut, "Valotte," sold more than a million copies, but today only 37 are known to exist. Ditto for the album's singles, even the No. 5 hit "Too Late for Goodbyes," which presaged the ska revival by a good 10 years.
Now, for the first time -- even by his own admission -- Julian Lennon has made a great album. He is performing to six-figure crowds throughout Europe. He is getting rave reviews from England's most jaded critics. He is planning an American comeback.
He has his work cut out for him.
Lennon's failure to win the hearts of Americans can be attributed, in large part, to his failure to live up to what listeners and critics believed to be John Lennon's legacy. When the Beatles broke up in 1970, they were immediately canonized by the rock press. Nearly 30 years later, they remain untouchable, impervious to criticism. The difference is that today, when rock critics say they like the Beatles, what many of them really mean is that they like John Lennon. And the Lennon they idolize is the countercultural icon -- the Lennon of the bed-ins and protests, Yoko's partner in outrageousness, the revolutionary.
Atlantic Records released "Valotte" the same week that America voted Reagan into office for a second term. But for many, the Reagan era had really begun four years earlier when John Lennon was murdered. The Beatles' American fans, still smarting from the loss, expected John's 21-year-old son to carry his father's rebellious torch.
As it happened, Julian did speak with his father's voice -- the similarity was so eerie that it spooked many listeners. The songs, however, were lightweight pop confections, about as countercultural as a Levi's commercial. It was as if Atlantic intended for "Valotte" to act as a mere stopgap between Phil Collins albums -- which, in fact, it did.
Forced to carry an unrealistic burden of expectations, Julian crashed. The downward spiral began in 1986 with the failure of his second album, "The Secret Value of Daydreaming," and continued until 1991, when he took a much-needed break from the music business.
"After I left school at 17, it was only a year or two later that I went into the music business -- there hadn't been any relevant part of my life not associated with music," explains Lennon, now 35, as he sits down for an interview after practicing with his band at a rehearsal studio on the west side of London. He is dressed in black boots, black jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt, and sporting a light goatee. My fears of being unable to look at him without seeing his father prove unfounded, although the resemblance remains strong. The vocal similarity, however, is unmistakable. He speaks unaffectedly in that same nasal Liverpool accent, in jarringly familiar tones. "It was necessary for me to find out who I was outside of the business. If music stopped tomorrow, who am I?"
While Julian laid low, the rock press's search for a new Lennon continued unabated. On May 18, when he re-entered the recording world with the European release of "Photograph Smile," many critics felt they had finally found their man -- only the long-awaited heir to the Lennon throne wasn't Julian, but his younger half-brother, 22-year-old Sean, who released his debut album, "Into the Sun," that very same day on the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label. What was supposed to be Julian's moment in the sun turned into the U.K.'s biggest press battle since Blur vs. Oasis. Not surprisingly, given Julian's reputation for less-than-sterling releases, most of the media put its money on Sean.
As the era of conservatism came to a close in both America and England, critics no longer measured a new John Lennon by the same standard that they did in 1984. Instead of a countercultural savior, they wanted a countercultural fashion plate, someone with an air of radical chic, but without the incontrovertible artistic genius that made John Lennon and his music such powerful weapons against the establishment. By that token, Sean had the stuff of a rightful heir: radicalism (he claimed the CIA assassinated his father), avant-gardism (he spent two years in an expensive studio to make his album sound like a demo) and a romance with a wacky Japanese artiste, Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto.
In England, the arbiters of taste had to do an about-face when both "Photograph Smile" and its single, "Day After Day," made the charts, while "Into the Sun" faded into the ether. Julian, however, took no joy in the "victory," telling reporters that he would much rather have avoided the battle. In fact, to avert a similar head-to-head confrontation in the states, he delayed the American release of "Photograph Smile" (on his own Music From Another Room label) until October 1998. He needn't worry. Despite near-unanimous rave reviews, "Into the Sun" has dropped from Billboard's Top 200 album chart (it peaked June 6 at No. 153).
The close relationship that Lennon once was said to have had with his brother had already been strained in recent years, a situation exacerbated by the concurrent releases. Could it have been a coincidence? "I know for a fact that Sean's representation were looking into exactly when mine was being released," he insists. "Apparently, they were asking some of the same companies that we're working with distributionwise to release his either a week before or at the same time as me. I know that for a fact. Not that I'm putting Sean down," he asserts. "I love Sean and I like what he does, but I don't know whether he's completely aware of who's doing what around him."
When I ask Lennon what he thinks of "Into the Sun," he answers quickly, "I like it." That hangs in the air for a second before he adds, "It surprised me. I'd heard a lot of [Sean's] earlier demos, a couple of years before, which were more just him, and I was surprised to hear that it felt like more of a duet album. There was a lot of influence from his girlfriend, which surprised me for a debut album. If that's what he wants, then cool, I'm very happy for him. It just surprised me, because the stuff I'd heard on demos felt like they were more inside of him."
Lennon has to rely on the media for information on what's going on inside his brother's head. He says they haven't spoken in years. "I've exchanged telephone numbers with him a thousand times, but he's never called me back."
Ten days after Lennon uttered those words, it was reported that he and Sean met by chance in London, where they went out for dinner and seemed to get along famously. Judging from what Lennon said to me, the reunion would not have happened were Sean not separated from his usual circle: "I think maybe there's more influence than just his own that's holding him back from calling me."
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