I Heard the News Today

I was 15 years old on that wretched day in December 1980, and I had been a rabid Beatles fan for about two years. I already wrote about my Beatles obsession in August, but in December 1980 it was so potent that I listened to nothing else. When I chose to listen to music, I chose to listen to The Beatles. I was in the process of getting all the albums and was chiefly focusing on the group's work; of their solo albums, I think I had only purchased a McCartney/Wings greatest hits album by then, and although John's new record had recently been released, I wasn't in any particular hurry to buy it. (Hey, I was still on an allowance back then.)

On the night of December 8th I either went to bed early, or simply didn't have the TV on that night, or something. I was a Sophomore in high school and although school started at 7:30, I liked to get there at 7:00 in order to hang out with friends. So on that night, I did not hear the news, and slept the sleep of angels.

Except that the next morning, Mom woke me up early. Here's where memory kicks in, sharp and clear. I remember that it was dark out, I remember her calling for me through the closed door, I remember looking at my clock and seeing that it was about fifteen minutes before my alarm was supposed to go off, I remember the usual morning confusion being amplified because suddenly I was getting more morning than usual. But you see, my alarm was a radio alarm, and she didn't want me to hear the news over the radio.

I slumped my way into the living room as Mom leaned over the stereo, which rested on a wooden plank laid over white concrete blocks. The needle slipped into the groove of the last track on the Hey Jude compilation--"Ballad of John and Yoko." Only then did Mom begin to tell me why she had awoken me so early. And just as she told me that John had been shot, and that John was dead, that was when the song reached this particular line, John's voice saying to me:

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me.

Oh, the burdens of having a dramatic parent. No wonder I remember every second of this, eh? I mean the news itself was bad enough, but the delivery, yikes.

The rest of the day does not remain in memory. I can recall finding a friend in the school's library, a fellow Beatles fan who felt just as hollow, just as mystified as I did. I can remember standing next to that same stereo in the living room a few days later as the minute of silence that Yoko had asked for was observed by radio stations around the country. I can remember going into the store with everyone else and buying Double Fantasy, taking it home and being more than a little puzzled by Yoko's songs but refusing to join in on all that "Yoko destroyed the Beatles" nonsense. And I can remember being in New York several years later, walking around the city on my own and realizing that I was close to the Dakota. I walked past, saw the entrance to the building, the gilded guard's tower, the small crowd of people who still lingered there, playing music and sharing stories.

But time passes, and the news doesn't have the sting it once did, and really, I never met the man so it's hard to get so worked up any more. (The irony does not escape me that the other day I waxed ironic about a real emergency happening to someone I actually know, whereas my tone today is mournful and sad about this man I never knew.) So really, what matters to me is John's music, and I have that in spades: every one of his songs on records, on CDs, on the computer, on my iPod. The John Lennon who really matters is, at least in my own personal universe, beyond life and death, an unvanquished truth. Mark David Chapman is still in jail and John's still singing to me, practically every day. It's not perfect, but it's enough.