Despite efforts to remove it or have it covered over, it is now a major tourist attraction and regular stop on guided tours of the Czech capital. Meanwhile further afield, there was similar beatification going on: within days of his death, too, a mural appeared on a wall in a hidden side-street in Prague, which has been added to and embellished over the years to become a shrine. Radio stations played nothing but Lennon and Beatles songs for days, and record stores sold out of the Lennon-Ono album Double Fantasy. Hundreds of people held a silent tribute on the steps of Washington DC's Lincoln Memorial. Naturally, the Dakota building became a focal point for fans in the days after the shooting, transformed into a sea of flowers and grief-stricken notes. "I always loved what Paul said in the 80s: 'Since his death he's become Martin Luther Lennon.'" “Soon after Lennon's death – within hours, really – he was portrayed in this really sanctimonious, sanitised way that doesn't do justice to his personality, his sense of humour, or his fellow Beatles,” says Rob Sheffield, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine and the author of the 2017 book Dreaming The Beatles. And the re-imagining of John Lennon began almost as soon as his life ended.
But more real doesn't necessarily mean more true.
With portrayals of him that have cast him as everything from unemployed layabout to Labour Party leader, wise old fisherman to actual psychedelic godhead, Lennon's life has been romanticised, rehashed and rewritten since his death, to the point where the myth is often more real than the man. And John Lennon has indeed achieved a kind of deific immortality – thanks in part to the appropriation of his persona in works of fiction and drama.
Myths are for figures even greater than that gods.
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