John Lennon Story

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9th October 1940 - 8th December 1980) rose to world-wide fame as one of the founding members of the Beatles, and together with Paul McCartney formed one of the most successful song writing partnerships of the 20th century. Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager with his first band.

The story The John Lennon Anthology tells–that of the questing former Beatle who took five years off to raise his son before returning with an album of peaceful reflections on the househusband life–isn't new, but for all its monumental status, it does help bring Lennon into focus again as a person and a musician. Since his murder in 1980, Lennon-the-man-of-peace has too often obscured the rocker, the dad, the flawed human being in the public consciousness. While this massive stock of odds and ends–studio outtakes and chatter, live and alternate versions, demos–is necessarily diffuse, it does a great service. It restores the iconic Lennon to normal size.

At a time when the hottest issue in US immigration law is the proposed action by President Obama to protect from deportation as many as 5 million illegals in the United States, the 1972 John Lennon deportation case takes on special relevance today, notwithstanding the passage of forty years since he was placed in deportation proceedings.