The Walrus and the Elephants: John Lennon's Years of Revolution

James A. Mitchell

Dis 2013 · Seven Stories Press

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Nineteen-seventy-one was the year John Lennon left London and pop stardom for a life in New York City as a solo artist, record producer and activist looking to help end the war in Vietnam. He settled in Greenwich Village and quickly came to be seen by the leaders of the faltering anti-war movement as someone who was capable of reinvigorating it. The government was acutely aware of Lennon’s power as well, seeing him as a viable threat to Nixon’s reelection hopes, initiating extradition proceedings against him.
           
Lennon’s second solo album, Imagine, appeared in 1971, followed the following year by Sometime in New York City. Meanwhile, John and Yoko are searching for her daughter, a primary reason they came to America in the first place. And John is struggling to embrace feminism.
           
The Walrus and the Elephants tells a double-barreled story of music and politics, how the personal is political and the political is personal, of upheavals in one life amid the larger cultural upheavals of an era.

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JAMES A. MITCHELL is the author of But for the Grace: Profiles in Peace from a Nation at War, the story of an orphanage in Sri Lanka’s war-torn northeast; the rock biography It Was All Right: Mitch Ryder’s Life in Music; and the tale of a rural newspaper, Applegate: Freedom of the Press in a Small Town). A reporter and editor for more than thirty years in New York, Michigan, and as a U.S. Army soldier-journalist, Mitchell has written on a wide range of subjects for newspapers and magazines including Entertainment Weekly, The Humanist, Video Business, and Starlog. In South Asia, Mitchell produced video features for CNN’s iReports. He lives in Southeast Michigan and works for a non-profit organization that supports the Grace Care Center for Children in Sri Lanka. Mitchell makes frequent appearances before community and civic groups regarding Sri Lanka, and has appeared on radio and TV shows to discuss Detroit rock and roll.