John Lennon’s revolution

By Edward Achorn

John Lennon was an artist — specifically, a great rock ‘n’ roll musician and singer — and not a nuanced political thinker. Critics, then and now, might be inclined to tell him to shut up and sing.

But he was a brilliant and witty lyricist who wanted to speak out. One of the things I always liked about him and his fellow Beatles was that they advocated through their beautiful art values I admire: love, peace, freedom, laughter and treating each other as equals. (I had the poster above, from his “Imagine” album, on my bedroom wall as a teenager.)

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Astrid Kirchherr and the Beatles

By Edward Achorn

A beautiful woman died in Hamburg on Wednesday at the age of 81, a few days short of her 82nd birthday. I will always love her from afar.

Astrid Kirchherr will be remembered as the artist who crafted perhaps the most striking photographs of the Beatles ever taken — when they were unknowns, working all night, every night, in a seedy club on the Reeperbahn, in what George Harrison called “the naughtiest city in the world.” It was there the Beatles honed their craft.

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