John Lennon's 70th Birthday

It's an ode to John Lennon -- Google style. On his 70th birthday, Google doodle has a very special John Lennon video doodle with the famous Beatles song Imagine playing on Google's homepage logo. It is also, in our knowledge, the very first video Google doodle to replace Google's corporate logo on Google's homepage worldwide.

Courtesy of Yoko Ono Lennon/Bag One Arts, Inc.
Source: http://www.google.com/logos/2010/lennon10-hp.gif

Here is another one:

Source: http://www.google.com/logos/2010/lennon10-res.gif

YouTube logo:

Source: http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/doodles/lennon-vfl0oZe3g.png

Just log on to Google.com and click on the play button to play a 32-second audio clip from John Lennon's Imagine song on today's Google doodle on Google's homepage.



John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who achieved worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles. Lennon and Paul McCartney formed one of the most successful songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager, his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group began to undergo the disintegration that led to their break-up at the end of that decade, Lennon launched a solo career that would span the next, punctuated by critically acclaimed albums, including John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine".

Lennon revealed a rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, his writing, his drawings, on film, and in interviews, and he became controversial through his work as a peace activist. He moved to New York City in 1971, where his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a lengthy attempt by Richard Nixon's administration to deport him. His songs were adapted as anthems by the anti-war movement. He took a sabbatical from the music business in 1975 to devote time to his family but reemerged in 1980 with a comeback album, Double Fantasy, but was murdered three weeks after its release.

Lennon's solo album sales in the United States exceed 14 million units, and as performer, writer, or co-writer he is responsible for 27 number one singles on the US Hot 100 chart.a In 2002, a BBC poll on the 100 Greatest Britons voted him eighth, and in 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth greatest singer of all time. He was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. [Read more on Wikipedia]

Lennon rehearsing "Give Peace a Chance" in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1969