After stumbling through a haze of drugs and alcohol in the 1970s, a sober Lennon returned to wife Yoko Ono, finally succeeded in starting a family with her, and lived the quiet life of a "househusband" from 1975 to 1980. Fatherhood the first time around had eluded the essentially fatherless Lennon. Removed from Beatlemania hysteria, Lennon had been for son Sean what he hadn't been for son Julian: a dad.
His musical comeback owed as much to the comeback of his personal life as it had to his renewed focus on rock 'n' roll to the exclusion of politics and drugs. Politics, Lennon concluded, had "almost ruined" his music. "It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I'm a poet -- even if it does go ba-deeble, eedle, eedle, it, de-deedle, deedle, it." That politicized John Lennon -- holding bed-ins for peace, singing for marijuana offender John Sinclair, featuring activists Bobby Seale, Ralph Nader, and Jerry Rubin on The Mike Douglas Show during a guest-hosting stint -- coincided with the chemicalized John Lennon. The stringy-haired beardo rhapsodizing about imagining no religion was John Lennon. But so too was the leather-clad child of the fifties belting out a stripped-down cover of "Stand By Me."
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/12/08/imagine-a-less-political-lenno
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