Beatles Sadness Month. by Paul Myers
It started when I was a little kid growing up in Toronto. My birthday is early in November, and ever since I could talk I would ask for a Beatles album for my birthday and another one at Christmas.
Every year.
In time, I began to associate the Holiday Season with The Beatles. Christmas was a happy season in my youth, filled with warm memories, musical discoveries, snow in the air, and a loving family. But over the last couple of decades, December has become Beatles Sadness Month, and when the late autumn air begins to cool, a familiar chill also runs through my heart.
Technically, Beatles Sadness Month begins on November 29th, with the observance of George Harrison’s death from cancer in 2001, although some may argue that the Fab bunting should really go up as early as October 9th, John Lennon’s birthday. The culmination of BSM is of course December 8th, that night of sirens, tears and candle light vigils marking the assassination of John Lennon in 1980. There follows a two-week period of Beatles YouTube clip posts, reissues, and wistful remembrances of a more innocent time in my young life. The anniversary of George’s death triggers additional melancholy for me, ever since I read about the various indignities George suffered during his final days
In 1997, Harrison was diagnosed with throat cancer, but after a course of radiotherapy he appeared to have beaten it. But by May 2001, he was back at the Mayo Clinic to remove a cancerous growth on one of his lungs. Then, in July that year, he underwent more radiotherapy in Switzerland to treat a brain tumor. And there was the sad saga that is often referred to as “The Dr. Lederman affair.” After the lung cancer had metastasized to his brain, George had flown to Staten Island University Hospital where an oncologist named Dr. Gilbert Lederman treated him. But according to reports I’ve read, Lederman was later found to be leaking Harrison’s confidential medical information to the press. It gets worse. Allegedly, Dr. Lederman was a fan, and insisted on singing Beatle songs to a depleted George, who meekly insisted that he stop. It got worse. After this Misery-style forced serenading, Dr. Lederman allegedly guided Harrison’s hand to get him to “autograph” his guitar, even though George insisted he didn’t have the energy to sign. As the story goes, Lederman was later sued by Harrison’s family, and the suit was settled out of court under the condition that the signed guitar be disposed of.
In his final days, Harrison was flown to a mansion in the Hollywood Hills (believed to have once been rented by Paul McCartney) where he died on November 29 from metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Ganges River. One year to the day after his death, an all-star cast of his friends staged The Concert For George at London’s Royal Albert Hall, including surviving Beatles Ringo and Paul, Eric Clapton, Jeff Lynne, Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, and Dhani. Paul played a solemn rendition of George’s “Something” on the ukulele, an instrument much beloved to the Quiet One, who famously handed ukes to all who came into his orbit.
But of course Beatles Sadness Month peaks on December 8, which I choose as a moment to observe the more positive legacy of John Lennon, who was a complicated, complex, and imperfect messenger of love, and a searcher who devoted much of final years on Earth trying to overcome his own years of toxic masculinity and to be a better father to Sean than he had to Julian. By all accounts, he seemed to be making progress at this when a confused and violent loner (whose name I no longer speak) ambushed Lennon on the steps of his own home and took his life with a readily available handgun. Then the vigils began on a chilly night in 1980.
And so it is that December has been Beatles Sadness Month for me ever since.
So button up your overcoats, the cold winds are blowing in, December 8th is once again upon us, and we are deep into Beatles Sadness Month.
