"Jealous Guy" by John Lennon

Singalong 004: Things I'd rather not face

A quick note here to acknowledge the super awkward timing of my last post, with the title of the song seemingly a reference to the ongoing calamity in Los Angeles. It was coincidental, I promise. I might have had a chance to edit or adjust the queue before the email went out, but I was occupied following the progress of the fire during a power outage here. I’m not too far away from what’s happening, but I’m not in harm’s way either. Several friends and loved ones have lost homes and are facing a monumental journey of grief and toil. But by the time I saw my post, so had all of you. I’m working on a pipeline of songs here, scheduling them in advance so I can make sure to keep up. A few of you wrote back to point out the oddness of the context, and I agree. Meanwhile, the music continues. I hope these songs and my writing are enjoyable to you. Here’s the next one.

"I was dreaming of the past"

When I first learned to sing "Jealous Guy" it was because I was blown away by the Donny Hathaway version and wanted to imitate it. The song is a confession.

My confession, though, is not just that I once had dreams of somehow singing like the Black guy I am not. This song haunts me at the deepest level.

At some level I hear this song's confessions in the voice of Lennon's killer.

"I didn't mean to hurt you"

People who ask today what it was like to grow up in the 70's and 80's, now that we're mostly just aware of the music that actually stood the test of time, might wonder at me when I tell them that back in those days, I would actively avoid listening to the music we call the "classics" of the era. I instead passed my days looking for the weirdest, most out-of-the-mainstream stuff I could find. I was the only kid I knew who was deeply into the avant-garde.

Because the Beatles and John Lennon were my parents' music, I liked them but I moved on pretty early.

I lived at the library, checking out stacks of tapes, CDs and LPs to cram into my little brain. Mostly obscure ECM stuff and jazz. And I didn't understand most of it, it just made sense to me that in order to have a hope of becoming “musical” myself, I should drown my ears in every possible foreign-seeming sound I could find.

“I was shivering inside”

In retrospect, I needed somewhere to hide. Music was my hiding place. It was my way of avoiding things I'd rather not face: the bigger kids, the less-afraid kids, relationships, family erosion, the light of day. My introversion was near-total.

I'd gotten into the Beatles as a kid, of course. My sister and I watched the movie "Help" on VHS about a hundred times. But my musical curiosity took on a momentum of its own and I became a listener who got bored immediately if the sounds I was hearing were remotely understandable. I gravitated away from pop in general for a while.

But there was something else that kept me from listening to John Lennon in the 80's. Because I knew he was special. I watched the news of his death in 1980 on TV and we all just sat there, stunned. I was seven years old. He had been in the mix, just a normal celebrity. Kind of a hero. A little older than my dad maybe. And then suddenly he was gone, in the most violent and upsetting way.

As a seven year old I was baffled. Here I was, just getting to know the man's material, and suddenly he got shot. Bloody assassination. A casualty of the times.

The adult inside my child self knew subconsciously that the world revealed by John's death, the world in which artists could be targeted for death by psychos who felt threatened by the beauty they created for us was too dark a world for me to contemplate just yet.

Scary, because I myself wanted one day to make music too.

So I stopped listening to The Beatles for a while.

"I was feeling insecure, you might not love me anymore"

The message sunk deep, too deep for me to access at that age. It goes something like this: “If you take it upon yourself to create beauty in the world, if you find a way to help people come together, if you give them something to sing together, celebrate needing love together, enjoy twisting and shouting together, if you help them ask questions about their inherited beliefs, if you challenge those beliefs, if you take the concept of "freedom" beyond the narrow limits prescribed by our society and invite your listeners to question those limits for themselves, if you dare to love differently, openly, then a motivated man might one day come and kill you to make a point.”

I now understand my teenage fascination with the avant garde as being a form of dissociation. I could not face my fear of making music people might understand and relate to, especially if it inadvertently stoked outsiders’ latent insecurities and hostilities.

It's better to hide, I concluded. I was too young to question it.

“I was trying to catch your eye / Thought that you was trying to hide / I was swallowing my pain”

I've still not read The Catcher In The Rye. I'm sure it's a great book, but the man who killed John Lennon, whose name you can look up if you want to but which I will not type here, cited it as the main inspiration for his act. That book, and also a couple of things John had said when he was too young to know better.

You can read elsewhere about that dude’s journey, his religion, his regrets, his depression, his instability. His ongoing imprisonment… but fuck him. The act he committed was furiously small-hearted, and to this day we all pay for it. More than we know.

The killer said he's sorry, but we’re still paying a tremendous price as a species, not just in the loss of John Lennon and all the music he might have made for us had he lived, but in the curse this violent act of pure cowardice created in the hearts of artists everywhere. It’s been rippling all these decades.

This curse speaks inside all of us with a loud voice, and not at all subtly:

“Succeed too much and they will kill you for it.”

“Love openly and you will pay.”

“Liberate people with your art and you will be taken down.”

“Give your gift and you will be punished.”

“Your message will be misunderstood.”

“Your followers will turn on you.”

“Your best work will be used against you.”

“Live too "large" and you will die.”

...and on...and on...

Fuck. That. Curse.

You must cast it out.

"I was swallowing my pain"

All I know is this: before I ever gave myself permission to write my first song, and every song since - let alone sing in front of people - I had to find a way to quell this voice inside my head. To neutralize the embedded belief that I would be punished for expressing myself.

And I'm just a little guy, I'm not important, I’m just a guy who loves making music. I'm one of us. I don’t give a shit about fame.

Steven Pressfield describes the internal resistance any creative person faces on a daily basis. In his book "The War Of Art" he calls it Resistance. We all have to overcome it in order to do anything at all, and it takes a different form all the time. It's a little book, might be worth your time. It’s one angle on the problem.

"I'm sorry that I made you cry"

All we really have in this life are our feelings, and the pain we will create if we don't take responsibility for them in time.

We each create stuff in our own way, and we're all held back by different things. But the killing of John Lennon was a blanket, wholesale act that - to this day - depresses and diminishes the already fragile hearts of artists the world over. It has cost humanity an incalculable amount of great connections, due to the fear it engendered in those who might dare dream of making anything at all.

But I, Trevor, am alive today because I learned to start taking responsibility for my feelings. To hear them, hold them, question them and learn from them. To forgive myself for having them in the first place.

To dare to let the dark ones go.

To apologize for my transgressions. One by one.

My life and my own small-hearted acts are my responsibility. Yours are yours. And forgiveness is not our business. We simply have to keep living.

And singing.

"All you need is love."

"I'm just a jealous guy."

"I'm sorry that I made you cry"

Thank you for singing. Keep singing.