Today in history: 1980- John Lennon murdered in New York
Thanks to Michele Catalano for reminding me of the significance of today....
It was a cold December evening. I was sitting along in my dorm room at Macaleter College in St. Paul, MN. The lights were dimmed, the radio was playing, I was sitting in my recliner reading, and I was stoned (I DID inhale back then...). Yes, it goes without saying that I remember almost every detail about where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news, 22 years ago today.
What was odd about my reaction was that I had never been much of a Beatles fan. I remember that, as a kid, we'd had an old reel-to-reel tape machine, and that we often played "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" on it. I was a naive young boy growing up in a very small town in the middle of Nowhere in northern Minnesota. I thought that if that is what taking drugs did to you, I wanted nothing to do with it. It was one of the strangest things I'd thought I'd ever heard. Of course, this was in the family that spent most of our time listening to tapes of organs from Chicago roller skating rinks. No one ever accused us of being "hip".
The thing I remember most about December 8, 1980, was the shock and disbelief, as if I was unable to process what I had just heard. Even though I was not a huge fan of the Beatles, I clearly understood that something significant had been broken and would never again be whole. All the King's horses and all the King's men would never able to put the Beatles back together again.
John Lennon was, in my estimation, outside of being a very talented musician, not a particularly notable human being. Self-absorbed, unfocused, and spectacularly immature at times, he was still 1/4 of one of the largest cultural upheavals of the 20th century. If not for being part of the Beatles, Lennon probably would have spent most of his adulthood on the dole in Liverpool. Fate obviously had other plans, and we live in a much different world because of it.
It's entirely possible that, if even Lennon had not been murdered, we never would have seen the Beatles reunited. We'll never know; December 8, 1980 eliminated that possibility forever. Even though I wouldn't really become a Beatles fan for another 15 years or so, a part of my childhood died that night. Twenty years later, I can still feel the sadness. For some odd reason, I have the urge to find my tape of Don McLean's "American Pie". I know the song is about the death of Buddy Holly, but it seems oddly appropriate today:
So, bye, bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levy
But the levy was dry
Them good ol' boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singing "This'll be the day that I die".....
