December 8, 1980. I was 14. I was laying on the couch in our living room, alone, waiting for — or watching — a rerun of Johnny Carson (I can’t remember which). I was thinking about how bored I was.<\/p>\n
And an announcer broke into whatever was on to say that John Lennon had been shot and killed.<\/p>\n
I lay there and cried and cried. There was no CNN, no 24 hour news and, for the general public, no Internet, so I had to just lay there and cry and wait for more news. My brother came in and I told him what happened. I don’t remember him saying anything – just looking shocked and walking out of the room.<\/p>\n
I was a HUGE Beatles fan — still am. Geesh, how can you not be?! I couldn’t afford to buy all their albums (I had just two), so I did my best to hit “record” on my cassette tape player whenever a Beatles song came on, and I can’t believe I didn’t wear those tapes out with playing them again and again. Their songs were the first I played on my guitar. I didn’t just know their mainstream songs by heart; I knew the Beatles Christmas records for their fan club by heart<\/span>. And I was big fan of all the post-Beatles music by the various members as well. More than that, there’s no question that “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)<\/a>” and Imagine<\/a> influenced the person I am now.<\/p>\n Over the next weeks, following his murder, I watched every John Lennon-related news story I could find on TV, listened to every John Lennon retrospective I could find on the radio, and read every news story I could find about what had happened. I probably spoke less words in that first week after his murder than I had since I first started blabbling as a baby. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have anything to say. Everyone had been so abuzz about John Lennon releasing a new album at long, long last, and while reviews were mixed, everyone I heard on the radio had been excited about it — and about what might come next. But now, nothing was going to come next.<\/p>\n My parents hated<\/span> the Beatles, and my Mom had made disparaging comments here and there about them being communists, anti-American and drug users. She had never liked me sitting in my room for hours on end, listening to so much Beatles music (or my Star Wars<\/span> story albums). Now I was spending even more time doing it. I wasn’t close to my parents, and we never discussed anything personal. I don’t know how many days it was after John Lennon had died, but my Mom came into my room, sat on my bed, and said, “When James Dean died, I felt like the world was ending. I felt like all us teenagers had lost our representative, our voice. It felt a lot like this.” And the she got up and walked out of the room. She never made a disparaging remark about the Beatles in front of me ever again.<\/p>\n Over the years, I found out John Lennon could be a huge wanker, a snarling, mean person that was not at all full of love and peace every moment. He could be downright cruel. It was good to learn. Between that and the not-so-great things I learned about another hero of mine, Martin Luther King, Jr., I learned never to think a man could be perfect, to never think of a man as God-like. There are no saints, not really. There are just men — and women — who have moments of being extraordinary.<\/p>\n