JOHN LENNON tried on all sorts of personalities during the 40 years of his life, so it's no surprise we're still sorting them out. By " dhinckley@nydailynews. .according with nydailynews.com
An unusually mild December New York evening during which the biggest event was expected to be the lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree - that Lennon was shot to death as he entered the Dakota. He was a fascinating figure then. He remains so. But are we any closer to figuring out what to make of him, or his music? With the passage of time and the wash of sorrow over his murder, "Some people see Lennon today as St. John," says WFUV and Sirius Satellite Radio deejay Vin Scelsa. "I'm not sure he'd be pleased by that.
" On the other hand, the years immediately before and after his death often saw him portrayed at the opposite extreme: as a vain, self-absorbed and yet depressed man who had lost his musical muse and made up a fairy tale about being a househusband to his and Yoko Ono's son, Sean. "Most of the scandals have disappeared," says Ken Michaels, who hosts the Beatles show "Every Little Thing" on XM Satellite Radio. "John was as close as any celebrity could come to being an open book. There's almost nothing you can say about him that he didn't say about himself. When [his first wife] Cynthia writes a book saying he could be violent, we already knew that.
" Before the opening of the musical "Lennon" on Broadway earlier this year, Ono said the goal of the show was to use his solo music to explore his life. "He wasn't an angel," she said. "He had demons, and he tried to fight them."
"Lennon" folded quickly, through no fault of the music. Most reviewers suggested the premise was just too ambitious. What may have changed from the early 1980s, when the late Albert Goldman was writing his sneering biography of Lennon, is that most discussions of Lennon today turn back to his music - what he made and what he never had the chance to make. "There would have been more," says Meg Griffin, a longtime New York deejay now on Sirius. "And that we never got to hear it is a tragedy, because we needed John Lennon's truth through the Reagan years.
" In some ways, the music world has not yet come to a consensus on Lennon's solo career. "A lot of the solo sides are great," says Michaels. "But almost no one plays them, so most listeners only know the two or three, like 'Imagine,' that are in rotation at classic-rock stations. It's frustrating.
" This fall, Dolly Parton filmed a video in Central Park for a new version of "Imagine," whose "Imagine . . . no religion" lyric would seem to make it an unlikely Red State anthem. Parton isn't simply ignoring that line, a technique some singers use when they treat "This Land Is Your Land" as an uncritical ode to America. She says she thinks Lennon's real meaning is a greater truth: "If we could just stop pointing fingers as to who's not going to heaven, who's definitely going to hell, whose religion is better than whose . . . we could at least know a little heaven on Earth. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could love each other, share the world and live in peace?
" The larger, unanswerable question about John Lennon, of course, is whether the man himself, who would have turned 65 two months ago, would have shed a few more of his younger selves as time went on. Bill King, editor of the respected magazine Beatlefan, for one, believes that, however Lennon evolved, he would have held to certain basic values. "I think he'd be pretty appalled by the Patriot Act mentality today," says King. "And I'm sure he would be opposing the current war. "I figure if he were alive today, he'd be just as controversial.
