GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

Feck Van as the Irish prophet poet in carnate. Liverpudlian wildass John Lennon was sum kind a distant son of a Dalriada Warrior Poet King. Flaming lust in his eye, gorging on the fields of excess. Capable of igniting so much real, human contact. Wrapt up in them never ending beatles contracts. Torn between women, lovers, artists, boyfriends and father figures. Fried to feck on acid. Crying on Janov’s floor over the day when his daddy’s cigarette smell went off to Aus and his mum’s perfume stayed in Liddypool. And Johnny had to choose Tug of Love for 4 year old Johnny, mum or dad. Which one, son? In the Janov session, in which this scene allegedly was reinacted, he ends weeping on the floor sinking in the sands, as a child at Blackpool beach. Helpless to feel amore the hot summer breeze or reach out to the joy of distant voices. Before and after Janov he was raw and real - bared his soul often an easy. Lennon didn’t filgree, emboss and over ween - tendencies inherent in work O’Partner Paul McCartney. Lennon still screams and seethes - into the void and beyond. Christ he left his mark, didn’t he? On the planet I mean. You dont think the Beatles dream thing would be alive if it was all just down to Macca, do you? Heard now the astonishing thing of Lennon’s art is its vertical integration of form, thought and feeling. The way he seizes cultural directness ala Horses era Patti Smith. That’s Patti Smith as absorbed and testamented in Mark Paytress’s joyful call to arms Break It Up : Patti Smith : Horses and The Remaking of Rock N Roll (£16.99 Portrait) the most illuminating and inspiring rocking Polemic currently on the block. Mark’s book is crammed with striking details and observances and is wonderful on how Patti’s shamanic onstage performance was preceded by a becoming. The actualisation of a rocking warrior Poetess Queen. To say that she didn’t influence Lennon is as daft as saying she did. FRom Horses arrival in 75 to John’s re-emergence in 1980 ? Just because Lennon only said about B52s and Madness dont mean he aint heard more. Anyway the acrid smell of the world Patti’d laid to waste, or just newly built, was in the air. Lennon lived sometime in New York, he must a smelt it. A fella I know saw him in a laundrette there. Dont know what date. But right up to the end he could break on through, mad as a fiery fish, taking on Dylan, no less, the daddy of all daddys, on Serve Yourself. I think you can feel the influence of Patti Smith, a picking up of the energy she’d breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out, like a rock n roll Ballerina, in this composition. Well on the acoustic, as opposed to the long - 8 something minutes really is too long, Long Gone John - slow rolling, New Orleanian performance of Serve Yourself. It is John’s answer song to Dylan’s end of decade( wind up ?) address, You Gotta Serve Somebody. Adopting the guise of a sage and homely EVangelist TV prototype - on acid - the most famous Jewish American rockstar in history set out on his Christian era. On the starkly recorded Slow Train Coming he delivered an album that was a testimony to his coinversion (coin because someone, Keith Richards perchance ? claimed it was a purely financial move on Dylan’s part, “the prophet of profit” eyeing up the ever buoyant religious market) Anyway Lennon was incensed. John had been to Mars and back he had danced with the aliens on the foreign shores behind Mount Excess. BUt he never thought the bastards would get to Bobby. Or else …the stark boldness of the Dylan Jerry Wexler produced album excited him so much he got to rocking and raging again. This acoustic Serve Yourself is one of the great moments in Lennon’s canon. But not because of what it says about Bob Dylan. But what it says about the world. Lennon had, with eagle eyed perception, seen the future in his 1958 exercise book at 14 writing in The Dail Howl of IRA bombs. 20 years later they were a horrible blight on the land from where he had fled. Anyway consorting with radicals, drug dealers, mystics, freaks and Phil Spector Johnny had seen a bit of the ole USA by the time he came to write Serve Yourself. Early in his BIg Apple daze he had wrote of Ireland again in Sunday Bloody Sunday. But Serve Yourself? Put it this way NOW its more alive than ever. On a Sunday in October 2006, 28 years after it was recorded (the length a time it takes a rock star to live die and be reincarnated) I stood in a crowded church on England’s south East coast. And looked at plaques on the wall telling of young Brish soldiers dying in distant lands at a young age (I spotted a 36 year old at Crimea in 1853, a 21 year old at Cario in 1883 and a 42 year old officer in India in 1902). John’s words, delivered in thick Scouse trashed acoustic like Billy Bragg hotwired to Lonnie Donegan rather than The Clash, came alive in my head. “It’s still the same old story/A bloody holy war/A fight for love and glory/ Aint going study war no more/A fight for God and country/We’re going to set you free/Or put you back in the stoneage if you won’t be like me/Geddit?” That’s the colonial Imperial voice eternal in those last lines. Its Bush and Blair talking to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. IT could also be a directindictment of so called freedom fighter terrorists who crash planes into buildings or blow up indescriminate innocents. Serve Yourself is the essential corrective to anyone who bought the phooey about Lennon being all squished and lovey dovey by the time Double Fantasy, and then Chapman, arrived.