John Lennon a Homeric hero? A Hector? Why not? You really think Agamemnon was anything more than a muscleman? And who do you want, anyway? Picasso and Miles and Joyce are demigods, touched by the daemon -- it's hard to relate. Lennon was just a bloke from Liverpool who knew a bunch of barre chords, started out playing skiffle and Carl Perkins tunes and in a few years, with three friends, took pop music further than anyone has ever taken it before or since.

Think about this. In 1962, the Beatles were a very promising little rock 'n' roll band who had begun to develop a uniquely melodic sound, but they were still recording fluffy novelty-pop tracks like "Besame Mucho." Four years later, they went beyond Stockhausen. In 1966 they laid down a track on the epochal "Revolver," "Tomorrow Never Knows," that with its howling din of backwards-recorded guitars, droning tamboura, electronically doctored vocals, still-enigmatic tape loops and vortex-staring lyrics, is an artistic leap forward as prodigious as Georg Büchner's demented 1836 play "Wozzeck" or Miles' "Kind of Blue." And then the next year, with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," Lennon and the Beatles stormed the beachhead they had established, creating a work that to this day remains the most satisfying fusion of traditional rock songwriting and avant-garde exploration ever recorded.

That ought to be enough to make Lennon a hero. Even if he did later embrace Janovian screaming.

Lennon's -- and the Beatles' -- secret, the quality that gives him the air of someone at once utterly innocent and almost diabolically wise, was that he made it up as he went along. He never stopped to ask himself if he knew what he was doing; he never looked down. This brazen, self-propelling self-confidence, later to turn into explicit self-invention, inspires a visceral respect, verging on a sense of fealty, that feels anachronistic, a throwback to the primordial days when age -- whether accompanied by wisdom or not -- yielded in all things to hard, beautiful, heedless, destructive youth.

Watching Lennon in "A Hard Day's Night" or listening to him sing on, say, "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" -- that precise, at times almost precious enunciation, with an edge like a jagged blade lurking beneath -- one feels the snap of a dangerous assurance. The impression, always, is of sheer force, tapped directly from the source. Of course, we know that beneath his smart-alecky cockiness Lennon was tormented by the demons of his unhappy childhood, but he hid them, harnessing them to his work.

But youthful arrogance alone is not enough to make Lennon heroic. Indeed, that arrogance bespeaks a side of Lennon that is far from attractive: He was a terrible father to his first son, Julian, and his bombastic proclamations and political posturings grew tiresome. Nor does his status as an icon of the '60s suffice. It's hard to say that he triumphed over that era's dead-ends and blandishments; rather, he was an exemplar of everything good and bad about that time. Nor, even, does his martyrdom -- although the bullets that ended Lennon's life ensured that he will forever loom like a ghost over the unsettled legacy of an ambiguous age.

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