Strom Thurmond was senator from South Carolina, not Mississippi as stated in the article.

Lennon is "working class"?

He must be, because he wrote 'Working Class Hero' right? Obvious. Write it down. Similar analytical skills may prove helpful should you need to write about 'I Am The Walrus'.

Clearly, that level of accuracy wil do for the US, but you also have readers outside America...

best,

Yes, the Lennon-Emerson bitchfest is a good clip, even by today's hypervolume, red-in-the-face FoxNews standards. It could even be a coda to "Let It Be." But remember, it's on film. If it became spontaneous, setting it up wasn't.

So who set up the meeting? Lennon? Emerson? Ono? And what was the original purpose?

John Lennon repeatedly refers to himself as "working-class," in this film and elsewhere in his public comments and writings. One could argue, I suppose, about the specific circumstances of his upbringing. The aunt and uncle who raised him were not poor, and could be construed as clinging to the underside of the middle class, if only just. He did not come from anything like the kind of stable, middle-class English family life that, say, Mick Jagger did.

Lennon's father was a merchant seaman and his mother was a housewife who had four children by three different men. Both of them abandoned him. I suspect those roots were what Lennon meant by the term "working-class," and it sounds adequate enough for me.

Next time, come here with some better argument than "you ignorant Yank," please.

For those of you interested in the Lennon – Emerson conversation.

31 years later Gloria Emerson was referred to the meeting in an interview for "Feed" magazine........

FEED: There's a rather famous, rather bitter exchange between you and John Lennon, captured in the documentary Imagine [released in 1988].

Emerson: If he really wanted to stop the war in Vietnam, all he had to do was tell the U.S. Army he wanted to go there to entertain the troops. Many entertainers did. And it would have thrown the army into the most extraordinary panic. I think he could have stopped the war if he had gone.

FEED: He had that much power?

Emerson: He had that much power. But I didn't hear a lot of the Beatles in Vietnam. I mostly heard the Supremes and Jimi Hendrix -- and Diana Ross, of course. But I'm sorry I spoke harshly to him. We had had a long exchange, and he was very unhappy to be there, as was I. It was at a studio in London.

FEED: You were interviewing him?

Emerson: No! What was I doing there? Someone conned me into coming. [I'd be] the last person in the world to interview John Lennon, who didn't want to speak. So why did he come? No conversation was possible. And he made a scathing remark about writers, and I said, "You are the only writer here." But can you imagine if the Beatles had come to Vietnam to sing to the American troops? I think it would have frozen everything!

I've fixed two factual errors in the Lennon piece: The Emerson-Lennon meeting did not occur at the New York Times office, as I originally said. And Strom Thurmond was indeed from South Carolina, not Mississippi. (I suppose I was channeling his good buddy Trent Lott.)

God love ya, Andrew O'Hehir. You do a noble service by writing about great films that deserve more attention. But working "Please, Hammer, don't hurt him!" into the review of Haven totally made my day, and now I find myself wishing you would cover more stinkers.

...(or more to the point, Ono's) were the very essence of radical chic, flashy but superficial. Once political activism became unfashionable, they were left behind.

Andrew--

"Clinging to the bottom" is stretching it a bit. He had a nice, big house with a frickin' name--Mendips, I think. He was about as working class as I am.

It's true he claimed to be working class--except when he didn't, and acknowledged these claims to be the suburban tough-guy fantasy they were. (He also admitted to being scared of genuinely working class guys, including Ringo.)

As for the Emerson argument, I remember seeing it when I was a twelve year old Lennon fanatic and being extremely troubled. Her accusations made so much sense. Could my hero be a phony?

Well, yeah, but it doesn't matter, because he was brilliant, and because he was self-aware enough to occasionally cut through his own bullshit. All the self-aggrandizing messianic bullshit and overrated songs (I'm looking at you, "Imagine") in the world can't erase "I Am the Walrus."

Is there any footage of the debate floating around on the net?

Eh.... excuse me, but folks like John weren't a dime a dozen even back then. Even the other Beatles were comparitive lightweights in the public speaking department. Stewart and Colbert are his natural successors (and, to a lesser extent, I'd add in Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken).

To say there's nobody left seems to me to imply that there were a bunch at some time. The last time there were a bunch of people who spoke truth to power was around 1776! John was great, but he was no Ben Franklin, John Locke, John Swift, or Bertrand Russel.

This has been discussed ad nauseum in numerous biographies of The Beatles, but John Lennon was the least "working-class" of The Beatles. Only Ringo Starr, who grew up in an impoverished area of Liverpool, was deemed as working-class by Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison. Harrison's household was a bit nicer, as was McCartney's, but it was Lennon's upbringing by his strict Aunt Mimi that was truly middle-class in regards to the comforts of home.

You can check out this link to Lennon's childhood home at the National Trust website:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-mendips/w-mendips-house.htm

Not me. When I first saw that interview, I can't remember where (surely it was over a decade ago), I was thrilled. What a stupid, stupid pair they were, John and Yoko. Oh yes, I know. The "intellectual" Beatle. Maybe he had a large bookshelf. He wasn't so wise. Drives me nuts that he wasted his time in bed for peace. And, no, it saved not one person from the Vietnam meatgrinder.