While listening to Pandora during my exercise routine, I was reacquainted with a much-loved tune by George Harrison, “All Those Years Ago”. It is a tribute to John Lennon. My mind turned to the symbiotic relationship between words and music. A lovely tune can make words have a strong pull on our sentiments and carry with them the ring of truth. Words standing alone can be easily rejected, but wrap them up in music and they can seem like the siren call of the angels. Yet, are they? I think not.
With deep sincerity, Harrison turns Lennon into something of a wise prophet when he refers to two of Lennon’s songs: “Imagine” and “All You Need Is Love”. Harrison recalls that others saw his friend as “so weird”. Yes, Lennon was caricatured as “weird”, and in a sense he was. I don’t mean in the literal meaning of the word. Lennon absorbed an emerging ethos of the 60’s that the world’s problems could be cured with “love”. Now that’s weird, and categorically wrong. Separating “love” from God and espousing a sterile and secularized form of it, as Lennon does in “Imagine”, leaves us with a longing for a vacuous impossibility: the universal embrace of a love-without-God. It’s self-defeating and ignores the reality of ourselves and our experience.
I fully empathize with Harrison’s purpose in his striving to fondly remember his dear friend, but his dear friend came to symbolize in the public imagination much that was wrong with the counter-culture and peace movement. We are still living with the consequences in our drug epidemics, a promiscuity that has emasculated the family, and a self-centeredness that has brought many to ruin.
Oh well, enjoy the tune. Ironically, I find it to be one of Harrison’s best.
Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested:
I’m shouting all about love
While they treated you like a dog
When you were the one who had made it so clear
All those years ago
I’m talking all about how to give
They don’t act with much honesty
But you point the way to the truth when you say
“All you need is love”
Living with good and bad
I always looked up to you
Now we’re left cold and sad
By someone, the devil’s best friend
Someone who offended all
We’re living in a bad dream
They’ve forgotten all about mankind
And you were the one they backed up to the wall
All those years ago
You were the one who imagined it all
All those years ago.
Deep in the darkest night
I send out a prayer to you
Now in the world of light
Where the spirit free of lies
And all else that we despised
They’ve forgotten all about God
He’s the only reason we exist
Yet you were the one that they said was so weird
All those years ago
You said it all though not many had ears
All those years ago
You had control of our smiles and our tears
All those years ago.
All those years ago …
All those years ago …
All those years ago …
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: George Harrison
All Those Years Ago lyrics © Sm Publishing (poland) Sp. Z O.o., Umlaut Corporation (ascap)
RogerG