Watching the new documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, with page after page of redacted FBI files on the former Beatle blowing toward the center of the screen, my mind drifted to a scene I’d caught a couple of days before in American Hardcore, a new documentary about the ultra-violent strain of punk rock born the same year Lennon died, 1980.

As Black Flag singer Henry Rollins was saying, “Punk rockers love to hate Ronald Reagan worldwide,” hardcore album cover after hardcore album cover featuring the Gipper in escalating forms of humiliation blew toward the center of the screen. And that’s when it hit me: goddamn, The U.S. vs. John Lennon and American Hardcore have a lot in common.

Rock musicians are at the center of both documentaries. Both were independently produced and picked up by studios (Sony Pictures Classics for American Hardcore, Lionsgate—the studio that rescued the Disney-abandoned Fahrenheit 9/11—for The U.S. vs. John Lennon). Both were enthusiastically received by film-festival audiences and will have already played in Los Angeles by the time you read this. And both open in Orange County next Friday. The one thing you can count on about local theatrical bookings is you can’t count on local theatrical bookings, but as this was going to press American Hardcore and The U.S. vs. John Lennon were slated to share the marquee at Regal/Edwards University Town 6 in Irvine, beginning Sept. 29.

Neither film has a narrator, instead relying on music, archival footage and talking heads who survived each era to push their respective stories forward. The seeds for both come from books, academic/journalist Jon Wiener’s Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (1999, University of California Press) and rock-promoter-turned-journalist Steven Blush’s American Hardcore: A Tribal History (2001, Feral House).

These are Orange County stories as well—Hardcore because hardcore punk arguably originated here (followers were labeled “HB’s” after Huntington Beach), OC is Reagan country, and hardcore’s heyday ran concurrently with the Gipper’s evil reign. As for Lennon, Nixon is Orange County’s favorite disgraced son; we’ve got his library and birthplace up there in Yorba Linda to prove it. And those FBI documents flying at the screen might never have seen the light of day—let alone the dark of theater—were it not for Wiener’s dogged pursuit. The KPFK radio host, Nation contributing editor and history professor who specializes in the Reconstruction-era South and the turbulent 1960s can take a short walk from his cluttered office at UC Irvine to the University Town 6 and see his mug in The U.S. vs. John Lennon and his name in the end credits as “historical consultant.”

But most important are the nefarious undercurrents gurgling beneath each picture. One is about an unjustly paranoid, amoral Republican administration’s reaction to an internationally recognized radical rock & roller. The other is about justly paranoid radical punkers’ reaction to an internationally recognized amoral Republican administration.

Sadly, given this generation’s far more criminal and universally despised Republican administration, both films have something else in common: they make you nostalgic for the good ol’ days.


“I believe time wounds all heels.”

Jon Wiener first asked to see what the government had on John Lennon in 1981. Backed by the ACLU, a law firm working pro bono, the Freedom of Information Act and the U.S. Constitution, he’s won the release of hundreds of pages of secret FBI files—in fact, nearly all of them. When I interviewed Wiener six years ago (“Bigger Than the Beatles,” March 23, 2000), all that was left were 10 pages from the Bureau, which is under a 2004 federal court order to hand them over. Surprise: we now live in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 Patriot Act America, and Jon Wiener can pound linoleum as far as the feds are concerned. The case is headed for appeal.

It’s all quite silly, really, because what has been released shows John Lennon was guilty of nothing. He was followed, his phones were tapped and his concerts were infiltrated by agents who busily scribbled the lyrics of his Vietnam War protest songs.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which roughly chronicles the years 1966-1976, highlights the former moptop’s evolution into peacenik and then (nonviolent) revolutionary. This was during the most fractious period in American history since the Civil War, and with Nixon in office determined to “win the peace” (and clean house), a major clash between his “Silent Majority” and a perceived pop culture radical was probably inevitable.

Lennon first appeared on Nixon’s radar when the peace movement picked up “Give Peace a Chance” as its anthem. The same paranoia that ultimately brought Nixon down was in play when, with his 1972 re-election campaign drawing near, 18-year-olds won the right to vote. It was assumed millions of those teens were Lennon fans, and now the government was receiving reports that he was befriending anti-war activists.

One such friend, Abbie Hoffman, boasts in the film, “We’re a military threat.” In Nixon’s conspiratorial view, peaceniks and revolutionaries were working together to bring the country down. When FBI spies learned that another Lennon activist friend, Jerry Rubin, was bragging about snagging the Beatle for an anti-war rock tour that would follow the GOP campaign from city to city, the government threat level went to red—and the British citizen was now, unknowingly, an enemy of the U.S.

It was Thurmond who devised the plot to silence Lennon. The cracker U.S. senator from South Carolina sent Attorney General John Mitchell a letter advising Lennon be deported as a counter-strategy to the anti-war tour. The government released the spooks. Documents show the bureau’s reports on Lennon went all the way up to Nixon’s right-hand man, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman.