When Bowie Met Lennon

"It's really hard to remember when I actually met John."

Substack won’t let me embed video in posts. So I'll have to share this link to a tweet which has the video in question. (I love this platform, by the way. But I’d love it more if I could embed video….)

It’s an interview with David Bowie in which he’s asked about his friendship with John Lennon. As always, Bowie is thoughtful and interesting. But note what he says as he tries to recall when they first met.

It’s really hard to remember when I actually met John. It must have been somewhere in middle 74-ish. Is my guess. I expect there is a book that can tell me.

In those years, Bowie was a young rock star. But John Lennon was John Freaking Lennon. If anything is going to stick in memory, it’s the first time you meet John Freaking Lennon. And yet, Bowie couldn’t remember the hour and day. He couldn’t remember the month. The best he could do is guess that it happened some time within a roughly half-year range.

There was nothing wrong with Bowie’s memory. Try to recall when you first met anyone and unless there are specific memories with specific contextual clues that provide the answer — “I saw her give the finger to a cop when we were both in Times Square, waiting for the countdown to the new millennium” — you are unlikely to do better than Bowie did.

Memory is a tool to help us survive and thrive, a tool shaped by evolutionary pressures. Forgetting is essential to the functioning of that tool. So is remembering. A key way the brain decides what to forget and what to remember is use: If the memory is one you often drag back into the spotlight of consciousness, it is likely important in some way, so it’s a memory that should be kept; memories that are never revisited soon fade.

If we imagine that something funny or surprising or otherwise interesting happened when Bowie first met Lennon, and Bowie had often recalled that story, alone or with others, we can be sure that Bowie would remember the story and it would provide contextual clues he could use to narrow down the range of when that meeting must have been. But he clearly hasn’t rehearsed that story. He’s forgotten the moment entirely. And doesn’t know when it was.

But “I expect there’s a book that can tell me,” he adds with a wry smile.

Right again. Biographers (and obsessive fans) examine the comings and goings of major stars with the skill and attention to detail of pathologists. They know even the finest details. And their knowledge is likely to be more accurate than what even the memory of the people involved can come up with because they work with more than the quicksilver of human memory. They use the documents and videos and the incidental bits and pieces that legal dramas call “circumstantial evidence.” (To be precise, circumstantial evidence can also include evidence drawn from memory that is not direct observation of the fact in question, like a witness saying she observed people running away after what sounded like a gunshot. Here, I simply mean evidence not drawn from a human memory.)

Oddly, however, those legal dramas routinely portray direct eye-witness testimony as the gold standard of evidence even though it is drawn solely from perception and memory. “I saw the defendant fire the gun at the victim” is conclusive. Lock him up. In contrast, circumstantial evidence is portrayed as flimsy. “It’s only circumstantial evidence” is one of the great cliches of TV shows with lawyers.

This is exactly backward: Eye-witness recollection is iffy. But a photo — let’s imagine — of David Bowie and John Lennon at a cafe in Greenwich Village with a newspaper on the table bearing a headline that ran on November 17, 1973? That is hard evidence. It’s not perfect. No evidence is. it doesn’t conclusively prove this is when they first met. But it gives us something strong to work with. Unlike Bowie’s foggy guess that he met Lennon in “middle 74-ish.”

I experienced the unreliability of memory last year, when I interviewed two well-known people, separately, about a famous story that happened in 1969. Both are smart and sharp, then and today. Both were intimately involved in the story from beginning to end. Both worked side by side throughout the story. But the story they told, while generally identical, differed on many details, some of which were trivial, but some of which were important, for my purposes at least. Neither had any reason to be anything less than honest. Both were telling the truth exactly as they remember it. But there was a substantial gap. Which is precisely what should be expected of any such recollections.

After all, people routinely look at the same events and, in that moment, perceive the reality differently. Let time pass and some of one person’s memories may fade while the other’s remain. And memories not only fade. They evolve. Each time a memory is surfaced and examined then put back into storage, it can be subtly altered by current feelings and circumstances. As a result, returning to a memory frequently can help to preserve it, but what is preserved is likely to change over time. Add all this up, and it is highly likely that any one person’s memory of events long ago is at best a rough approximation of what actually occurred, and if you ask two eye witnesses, you will get two rough approximations that contradict each other in ways large and small.

Memory is useful. But it’s not terribly reliable.

I’m sure this is not a revelation to you. People who pay close attention to people soon learn that human memory is deeply fallible. And yet, that’s not how most people treat memory, especially their own memory. Legal dramas commonly portray eye-witness testimony as the gold standard of evidence, while belittling other evidence, because that’s how most people think and act. And far too often, so do legal systems, both civil and criminal.

What got me thinking about this, in fact, was watching news the other day about a criminal prosecution of a defendant for something he allegedly did late one night in 1989. There was nothing corroborating that the act even took place, much less that the defendant was responsible. And yet the complainant was certain the act happened and certain the defendant was responsible. The defendant was certain he did not do it or certain he wasn’t even in the same building where it allegedly happened. The judge concluded with certainty that the act did happen — but that it was not clear that the defendant was responsible. The defendant was acquitted.

Why were all these people so certain? The only possible answer is that they — all of them — proceeded as if memory is far more reliable than it is.

The nub of the problem is that if we were as skeptical of memory as the science warrants, we would find that we are much less able to establish facts. That may not matter when it comes to something like, “Mr. Bowie, when did you first meet John Lennon?” But in so much else, it matters enormously. That includes criminal justice. And even our fundamental sense of self.

Identity is a story we tell ourselves, a story cobbled together from memory. We are what we remember. If we trust memory less, doubt may shadow our very sense of self. Few will be comfortable risking that.

We can see this in autobiographies, which are most often unfiltered memories combined with occasional reminiscences of friendly witnesses. The result is a clear, coherent, satisfying story — a story whose accuracy is suspect. Or should be.

One of the few exceptions I know of is In Retrospect, the autobiography of Robert McNamara, the man best known for escalating the war in Vietnam when he was Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. McNamara did not write from memory. Instead, he approached research for the book much as if he were a biographer researching Robert McNamara. As a result, he often turned up evidence that contradicted his views and cast him in an increasingly ill light. The book has its critics. Some argue McNamara was still far from fully truthful. But I have never read an autobiography by a major official that did less to exonerate the subject of the book or more to condemn him.

Few of us are responsible for foolishly escalating wars that kill vast numbers of people. But the principle is the same for all of us: If we were to look at ourselves using the evidence the way a good historian or biographer would, we are likely to see things quite differently than if we work primarily with personal memory. At a minimum, the story we come up with will be less coherent. And incoherence is deeply unsettling.

It’s so much easier to rely on memory even when we know it is an atrocious witness.