Lennon Born: The Beatle Who Changed Music Forever

John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940, during a German air raid. His mother Julia, a free-spirited and musically inclined woman, taught him his first chords on a banjo. His father Alfred, a merchant seaman, abandoned the family when John was five, and Julia placed him in the care of her sister Mary, known as Aunt Mimi, who raised him in a tidy semi-detached house in Woolton. Mimi was strict, skeptical of popular music, and reportedly told him regularly that "the guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living at it." After the Beatles became the most successful band in history, he put a plaque on her house bearing that quote. Julia was killed by a car driven by an off-duty police officer in 1958, when John was seventeen. The loss marked him permanently and surfaced in songs throughout his career, from Julia to Mother to My Mummy's Dead. He was twenty when the Beatles found their sound in the clubs of Hamburg's Reeperbahn, playing eight-hour sets in windowless venues for audiences of drunks and sailors. He was twenty-two when they broke through in Britain. He was twenty-four when they conquered America. He was thirty when the band broke up. He spent his final decade living in the Dakota building in New York City, raising his son Sean, recording Double Fantasy, and trying to find the privacy that fame had taken from him at twenty-two. He had ten years left after the Beatles. He was shot and killed outside the Dakota on December 8, 1980. He was forty years old.