The Boy on the Corded Rug

How John Lennon validated my self-belief

I was at a friend’s house that winter night when John Lennon was killed.

We were watching Monday Night Football and drinking beer. Howard Cosell announced the news as if the quarterback had been sacked on third down — “John Lennon, outside his home, shot twice in the back… dead on arrival.” It was December 8, 1980, my twenty-third birthday.

Ten years before, in December of 1970, Lennon’s debut solo album was released. It was called John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and it changed my life. That claim now sounds strange, even to me — grandiose, hyperbolic, almost obsessive, especially considering the who and why of his death. Still, it feels true.

Many of us feel a deep emotional connection to the music we love, and sometimes to the artists who made it. I’ve found many kindred spirits in many different styles of music. I’ve found solace, inspiration and comfort for the heart, reveled in excellence, danced and shouted in catharsis, wondered at cleverness. I wouldn’t say any of it changed my life in a profound way.

But John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band album did change my life, at least my view of life, and largely because of one song in particular.

I didn’t have much of a sound system then—a pale green plastic record player that was made by Westinghouse and folded up like a suitcase. I had scotch-taped a penny to the turntable arm to plow through any scratches that might skip the needle. It was another year or so before I saved up enough for the cheapest Sharp component stereo system in the Spiegel catalog.

I remember putting the needle down at the beginning of this brand new John Lennon record, then rushing to lie flat on my back on the big oval corded rug, my head on a pillow, the record player on an old TV tray behind me.

I closed my eyes and heard the sound of bells.

That’s how the first track on the album begins, a succession of church bells that warble and slur on top of a scratchy background hum as if the bells were recorded from a faint radio broadcast and then slowed down. It makes for a portentous, funereal effect, an appropriate lead-in to the song, which is simply called Mother, and deals with Lennon’s feelings of abandonment by both of his biological parents.

Mother you had me, but I never had you

I wanted you, you didn’t want me

So I… I just gotta tell you… goodbye

Like the opening pages teach us how to read the voice of a great, original novel, this first song sets a pattern that is echoed throughout the album, a pattern of deceptively simple lyrics that are rarely ambiguous, unusually direct, and at times uncomfortably, even brutally honest and revealing. And this is matched with sparse but dramatic musical arrangements, with surprisingly light production touches from the notoriously controlling Phil Spector.

Throughout the album, Lennon’s voice and guitar or piano is usually accompanied only by Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voormann on electric bass. There are no background singers, only the occasional artful out-of-phase doubling of Lennon’s own voice, singing in unison rather than harmony. The tone of his voice ranges from clear and airy to harsh and scratched raw, but he always controls it perfectly to convey the emotional content of the song. It never sounds affected, and he never indulges in showy vibrato or any other unwarranted vocal gymnastics. There’s a purity there that seems quite rare today.

Mother ends with multiple repetitions of the couplet, “Mama don’t go, Daddy come home,” which is first voiced as a mournful plea, but Lennon dials up the intensity with each repetition, eventually building to a desperate gut-wrenching scream that fades out and leaves an aftertaste of sorrow, but also a sense of a past reckoned with, a troublesome demon purged.

This was not Beatle John as we had previously known him, certainly not the cheeky, wisecracking John from Hard Day’s Night.

Even before the Fab Four cleared the mop-top phase of their career, Lennon was easy to identify as the troubled Beatle, with edgy introspective songs like I’m a Loser, and Help!, but the songs on Plastic Ono Band took this personal, confessional style to a whole new level that hinted at the realm of psychoanalysis.

At the time of these recording sessions, Lennon had recently undergone primal scream therapy with its originator, Arthur Janov, who taught that many psychological issues were tied to childhood trauma and could be resolved through re-experiencing and fully expressing the trauma in guided therapy sessions.

Hence, the alternative title for the album could have been There Will be Screaming. And there was. Not only in the opening track, Mother, but also memorably in the song, Well Well Well. That song’s verses suggest a certain cynicism about the prospect of social change, then lead to a chorus that simply repeats the words, “well, well, well, oh well,” but goes even further than the closing refrain of Mother, to a place where Lennon’s scream finally becomes something close to retching. It borders on disturbing, which I think was entirely intentional.

With Lennon’s best scratchy, accusatory voice and his stuttering fuzzy guitar sounding slightly out of tune, and in places out of time, plus Ringo’s dogged minimalist drumming and Voormann’s insistent bass, Well Well Well is nearly ragged and rollicking enough to throw into a proto-punk retrospective, if anything labeled proto-punk had been played by a thoughtful, sensitive, tortured musical genius, that is.

But there is more to this album than the screaming and casting out of demons. Again, as in a good novel, there is balance and contrast and an emotional rhythm. There is the bitterness of disillusion on I Found Out, and the tender self-care of Hold On; the demolition of traditional life models in Working Class Hero, and the childlike innocence of Love; the sneering irony of nostalgia in Remember, and the naked vulnerability of Look at Me.

Still, you might be thinking, so what, it’s a good album, maybe a great album, but how is that life-changing?

We have to go back to that thirteen-year-old boy on the corded rug. He knew nothing of Arthur Janov or primal scream therapy. He didn’t have the capacity (or the inclination) to break down the instrumentation or deconstruct the lyrics. He didn’t know much about Lennon’s personal battles. He was just a boy on the cusp of adolescence, a boy with his own struggles, a boy newly discovering his own doubts and disillusions.

He lay on the floor and closed his eyes and heard bells.

Isn’t it a shame that in today’s cluttered world we seem to have forgotten how to listen to music with that level of attention — with our mouths (and our typing fingers) shut down and our ears and hearts all the way open?

I see that boy now in my memory, and I wonder in what way I am still that person. Is that old saying even true that a person’s entire inventory of cells is somehow swapped out, thrown into the vast molecular recycling bin every seven years? What is it then, that somehow congeals and holds together a certain pattern of energy that is the individual you or me, even as we decay toward our inevitable disintegration?

I imagine my experience, lying on the floor in front of the plastic Westinghouse phonograph, was one of empathy and a sense of insight, a feeling of being trusted with someone’s most difficult truths. I knew Lennon was rich and talented and adored, but I wasn’t so aware that he had doubts and conflicts and scars and regrets and a few scores to settle, like everyone else. And there must have been an adolescent thrill in hearing Lennon break rules and cross lines that popular music didn’t usually cross, laying himself so bare, calling out critics and cultural authority.

Then came the song I claim changed my life. The title is as simple and direct as the rest of the titles on the album. Just one word.

GOD

God is a concept by which we measure our pain. I’ll say it again.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in I-Ching.

I don’t believe in Bible. I don’t believe in Tarot.

I don’t believe in Hitler. I don’t believe in Jesus.

I don’t believe in Kennedy. I don’t believe in Buddha.

I don’t believe in Mantra. I don’t believe in Gita.

I don’t believe in Yoga. I don’t believe in Kings.

I don’t believe in Elvis. I don’t believe in Zimmerman.

I don’t believe in Beatles. I just believe in me.

Yoko and me, and that’s reality.

The dream is over, what can i say.

The dream is over, yesterday

I was the dreamweaver, but now I’m reborn.

I was the walrus, but now I’m John.

And so dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.

The dream is over

To follow through with my comparison to a novel, every great novel comes to some kind of climax, some resolution of the conflicts embodied in its story. God is the climactic song that brings to a head all the pain, anger and realization of the rest of the album. It rejects the authority of received mythology, including the mythology of Beatle John.

To the boy on the rug, already a closet agnostic at thirteen, this was a loud shout of validation, and not just because of the questioning of religion.

In an even larger sense, the song offers broad affirmation and permission to all those who would throw off the shackles and blinders of culture and think for themselves, love for themselves, be themselves in a world that is always pressing on you to conform, to fit into one mold or another. And it offers a glimpse of moving past all of that into a clarified, illuminated future. The dream is over. Believe in yourself. Carry on. This faith in your own heart can be a refuge, a home you can return to when you get lost. Having that can change your life.

The shock of that December night has never quite faded. Like losing a family member before their time, there’s a sting to every memory of the man, every note of his music. Like the charged taste of metal when you test a battery with your tongue, not a lightning bolt anymore but still bitter and hard. John lost his future. His family lost their future with him. And we lost our future of connecting to him, of recognizing our growing, struggling selves in his music and his honesty about his own growing, struggling self.

The music lives on, as they say. And maybe somewhere in the world today there’s a doubtful pimply kid clicking around online who will stumble into a YouTube post of Plastic Ono Band, and he’ll stuff his earbuds in and push play.

And he will hear bells.