Imagine......

Liverpool, NYC remember Lennon

(Reuters) -- Liverpool and New York prepared to honor pop icon John Lennon on Thursday with floral and musical tributes and a candle lit vigil close to where he was shot dead 25 years ago.

In a ceremony in the center of the northern English city where Lennon was born and raised, fans and officials will create a shrine beneath a statue of the legendary Beatle, gunned down in New York by a fan in the presence of his wife Yoko Ono.

Later in the day, the city holds a memorial service for the man who created some of the best-known tunes in pop and is considered one of the most influential songwriters of all time.

In New York, hundreds of mourners are expected to gather at the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park and light candles at 10:50 p.m. ET (0350 GMT Friday), the time Lennon was shot.

Friends in Liverpool remembered Lennon with fondness, but also felt he distanced himself from them after meeting Ono, the woman who many fans blame for breaking up the Beatles in 1970.

"You couldn't approach John at the end, and looking back it was from the moment ... he met Yoko Ono," said former friend and fellow musician Billy Kinsley, who knew Beatles Lennon and Paul McCartney in the 1960s.

"It was sad. He was my hero from when I was a 15-year-old kid, and he was always approachable, always said hello, and had a little chat. But after he met Yoko, that went out the window completely."

His assessment of Lennon and the Beatles as musicians, however, has never changed.

"It really did make a big impression on me seeing the Beatles on that first night at the Cavern, because it just changed my outlook," he told Reuters in a makeshift recording studio in his garden, recalling the night in February 1962.

"I thought 'My God, I have just seen the best thing that I could ever see', and since then it's been downhill because I've never seen anything as good as the Beatles."

Kinsley will perform "Beautiful Boy", which Lennon dedicated to his second son Sean on his "Double Fantasy" album, at a memorial service in Liverpool later on Thursday.

In New York, Ayarton Dos Santos will be at the "Imagine" mosaic, named after one of the Lennon's most famous songs, just as he has been nearly every day for the last 13 years to arrange petals, acorns, apples and bagels into a peace sign.

"It's all about peace, love and happiness. It's for brother John," Dos Santos, 41, said.

"You come here, you feel his spirit. His spirit is so alive in here," he added.

Yet the man who brought a generation such pleasure with seminal tracks like "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Give Peace and Chance" and "Imagine," also caused pain to those who loved him.

Both his first wife Cynthia and their son Julian recently voiced their sense of rejection when Lennon left them for Ono.

Cynthia told Reuters earlier this year that she and Julian were "airbrushed" from the Beatles' story and that Ono made it clear she did not want her in New York after Lennon's death.

In a statement on his Web site, Julian added: "I have always had very mixed feelings about Dad. He was the father I loved who let me down in so many ways ... it's painful to think that his early death robbed me of the chance for us to know each other better."

Ono's spokesman Elliot Mintz said he had received more than 500 requests for interviews with Lennon's Japanese-born wife.

"It's just too painful for her to discuss," he said.

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Court battle over John Lennon FBI files rages on

By Sue Zeidler / Reuters

LOS ANGELES - Twenty-five years after John Lennon was murdered, a court battle to release the last 10 pages of secret FBI files on the former Beatle still rages on, with no end in sight.

The FBI assembled about 300 pages of files on the singer-turned-activist in 1971 and 1972 as part of President Richard Nixon's effort to deport and silence Lennon as a critic of the Vietnam War, according to historian Jon Wiener, who has led the court battle to release the files.

"After years of litigation, the FBI has released all the pages except for 10, which it is withholding using a national security claim," said Wiener, a history professor at the University of California-Irvine.

"At a time when we are confronted by life and death issues of terrorism, the FBI is trivializing national security in the name of political expediency," he said.

Wiener and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California first filed the Freedom of Information lawsuit in 1983 to gain access to the secret files on Lennon.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court before the FBI settled in 1997, agreeing to release the files except for the last 10 pages.

In September 2004, a U.S. District Court judge in California ordered the FBI to release the last 10 pages, but in the latest twist, the FBI on October 20 of this year filed a notice of appeal of that ruling with the court.

Under the Freedom of Information rules, if information is received from a foreign country, that information would be exempted from release to the public," said FBI spokesman Bill Carter on Wednesday.

Lennon was assassinated by a deranged fan on December 8, 1980, as he walked into his Manhattan apartment house.

Wiener, who wrote "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files," a book that recounts his struggle to the get the Lennon files released, said none of the released documents have anything to do with criminal violations.

"They all document Lennon's political activities as a war opponent," he said.

As for the contents of the withheld pages, Wiener said the public was not even allowed to know the name of the country that provided the pages. He speculates that it is likely Britain since a former employee of Britain's MI5 intelligence agency, David Shayler, has said he saw Lennon file at MI5.

"He said it contained reports on Lennon's contacts with the British New Left and anti-war organizations." said Wiener.

Shayler in 2002 was convicted of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act and jailed for six months. "He saw himself as a whistleblower who wanted to expose MI5 excessive surveillance," said Wiener.