John Lennon’s murder still haunts me after all these years. Every Dec. 8, the day of his death, I still see in my mind’s eye a cracked coffee cup.
In 1980 I was a student in London, along with other students on the British Studies Program. We lived in a refurbished old hotel in Maida Vale, a residential district in west London.
One early December morning, I was in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee before the long walk to school. I grabbed a used coffee cup, a green-and-white ceramic cup with a slight line crack in it. As I washed out the cup, a fellow student, Rob Danforth of Illinois, walked over to me.
“Dennis, sorry to tell you this, but John Lennon’s dead.”
“What?!” I said, almost dropping the cup.
“Somebody shot him in New York.”
The news was so devastating I just couldn’t believe it; that is, I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it.
On the way to school, as I passed a news shop, a large framed news poster near the sidewalk practically screamed a headline: JOHN LENNON SHOT DEAD. Stark black letters on white. On a blue band across the bottom were the words “Evening Standard,” a newspaper name.
In that split second, it sank in – that Lennon was, in fact, dead. In school, I felt depressed, distracted, numb – knowing there would never ever be a Beatles reunion as so many of us had hoped for so long.
After school, I stopped at that news shop. Its manager was kind enough to give me that Lennon poster, which has hung framed on walls of all my residences ever since. It’s a reminder of the shock of that day.
I heard my first Beatles song one February day in 1964. I was in my home’s South St. Cloud living room, reading Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield” while trying to tune out the radio my brother had turned on. KDWB, Channel 63, Minneapolis. All of a sudden, I put the book down as I heard the beginning of a song that struck me like a bolt of happy lightning. It was brimming with a driven energy, its chord changes were strange but wonderful, the vocal harmonies ecstatic. The song’s name was “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” The radio deejay said it was by a new English band called the Beetles (I didn’t know until days later it was the Beatles, not the Beetles.).
Every time a new Beatles album was released, I’d rush down to MusicLand in St. Cloud to buy it. My brother, Michael, I and our friends would spend hours, days, weeks listening to it over and over as one or both of our parents would often shout up the stairs: “Turn that noise DOWN!”
Noise?! Duh! Little do they know?!
Throughout the years, that astonishing band released a succession of masterful mind-blowing albums: Rubber Soul, Revolver, the White Album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Abbey Road . . . (In London, like many tourists, I had my photo taken while walking across the striped crosswalk in front of the Abbey Road Studios building, a crosswalk made so famous on the front cover of the Abbey Road album.)
I have my own definition of what makes a song truly great, and almost every Beatles song lives up to that definition – a song that sounds as if it were “meant to be,” like an oak tree, a butterfly, a mountain. A bad or lackluster song sounds like it was made up, inadequate, cobbled together, incomplete.
For years some people have ribbed me about being stuck in the 1960s. Well, I say it’s not a bad place to be stuck – musically anyway – with the likes of so many great singers-songwriters-bands, especially the Beatles. Sad to say, Lennon died at age 40. Glad to say, Lennon-McCartney Beatles’ songs and many Lennon solo songs will live forever.
