John Lennon: Rock & Roll Hero

In the end, it's Lennon's vision that links his foolish moves to his great ones. That vision also connects the beginning of his music to its truncated end, tying the Beatles' 1963 scorched-earth rendition of Barrett Strong's Motown hit, ''Money,'' to his own definitive 1971 solo ballad, ''Imagine.''

In ''Money,'' Lennon sang, ''Your lovin' gives me a thrill/But your lovin' don't pay my bills,'' conveying not the rage and irony of the Motown original, but, in their place, dashed expectations and grief that life comes down to something so tawdry as cash. In ''Imagine,'' he wished himself right out of a world in which money counts at all. The song is far from the platitude that posthumous hagiographers try to make it; instead, it offers hard-won emotional truth. Lennon doesn't simply clobber his listeners with a series of sentimental instructions (''Imagine there's no heaven...no country...no possessions''); he gently asks us to go beyond dreaming, to make an effort, at least, to transform ourselves and the world. The meaning of the song sneaks up on us, much the way that, in Lennon's musical arrangement, strings unobtrusively glide into place beneath his plunked piano. ''You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one,'' he says, so unpretentiously that it reminds us all that the greatest singing is often a kind of prayer.

John Lennon never got to take his vision any further. We were cheated out of a real conclusion, out of the ever-changing music John could have continued to make into old age. Maybe he would even have found a way out of the dilemma ''Money'' describes; maybe he'd have gone beyond ''Imagine'' and transported a new, more brilliant and tangible political dream from his head to ours. But he still has his guaranteed place in our hearts. Lennon didn't open broader possibilities for rock stars only; he did it for everybody who heard him. That is why we mourn him still — and, probably, why we always will.