Wednesday, 08 December 2010
Today marks the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. Though the radio stations make a point of reminding everyone, I don’t need the reminder. It’s a day, like so many others, that I simply remember.
What makes Lennon’s tragedy stand out to me – besides the obvious facts of any murder being a tragedy and the fact that the world lost a great musician – is that I actually remember when it happened.
…Kind of.
He was murdered in New York City, just outside his home during Monday evening. Most Americans, therefore, first heard about the shooting while watching football. Here’s Howard Cosell’s announcement during Monday Night Football: CLICK THIS!
And though I lived in a house of non-stop TV viewing, we did not have the football game on. In fact (and here’s a great thing about my parents), we never had the football game on. I went to bed that night without knowing what happened.
But the next day, kids were talking about it on the bus. When I got to my Kindergarten class, some kids seemed really sad about it. I knew only the name “John Lennon” – I would’ve been hard pressed to have named any of his songs or to have named his former band. Still, when we sat in a circle on the floor around the teacher, she explained what had happened, and she told us how much she liked Lennon’s music.
I wasn’t yet alive when Nixon resigned, and I was too young to understand when the King of Rock and Roll died, but I remember where I was was during other big events; when the Challenger blew up, when OJ Simpson was found not guilty, when Muslims flew planes into buildings, when the Indian Ocean Tsunami struck. Nevertheless, I will always remember Lennon’s death as the first world event that I felt a part of. In time, I came to learn of his songs, and I finally learned which band he had been in, and his death seems all the more tragic in retrospect.
Here’s the music video to my favorite John Lennon song, in which he answers the criticism that the five years he took off from creating music to be with his son were a waste of time. Lennon had the money and desire to stay home with his new son, something he did for five years. I had the desire, but not the money…so I didn’t do that. But now that my Kindergartener son is 5 and a half years old, he and I have lived together longer than John and Sean did. Man, that’s sad. Anyways, here’s the video:
That song was created at a time when Lennon was getting back to work, when he promised he would be “Starting Over” and that he wanted his wife to “Grow Old Along with” him.
In February 1982, while accepting the Grammy for Best Album of the Year, which she co-wrote and performed with her late husband, Yoko Ono said she and John “were proud and happy to be part of the human race; to make good music for the Earth and for the universe.” Well said.