"There are places you'll remember all your life...."
Apologies to those under about 35 years old, but do you remember what you were doing 30 years ago when you heard the news of John Lennon's death? In the UK it happened overnight, so I first heard it when I put on the radio when I woke up. No 24 hour news channels here then - not even Breakfast TV, so I changed from my normal music station to a news channel to hear more. I still remember that bedroom well, only connected with this event. I was utterly shocked - it seemed so unreal.
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cut short.
little did we know what the next 30 years would bring and how little we had learned....
She is not a huge music fan, but obviously you didn't need to be a music fan to be touched by that particular death, and for some reason the thought that this particular doctor might have been involved kind of gives her a weird sort of closure on the whole situation.
Craig
Still in shock, still wondering how music (and the world) might be different had Mr. Chapman not been there that day.
Now hearing that Elvis had died is very different. I know exactly where I was (in my car at an intersection, waiting on the light. even remember the intersection), that my kids were with me, and that we had just gotten haircuts. I really wasn't an Elvis fan back then, but it hit me hard because he came on the scene when I was 16, making him my contemporary, and he was just too young to die. It truly was a shock.
Maybe it has more to do with what the person meant to you.
I lived at my parents house at the time and was shocked. I was a huge Beatles fan since 1962 and was thoroughly pissed off because my parents would'nt allow me to go to the Beatles concert the same year.
Anyways, That day was the beginning of a very turbulent time in my life. The very same day arround midnight I found myself in a stuation where a group of policemen searched the house for 3 hours. They found a small quantity of soft drugs and I was subsequently sentenced to 4 weeks in solitary confinement. They let me out after 3 weeks because the case was'nt as big as they thought.
- All I did was beeing a part of a group of happy and careless hippies.
I firmly believe that John Lennon had the potential to change the world or at least how we human beeings go about it.
I was just reading recently, and had forgotten about, Chapman's obsession with Todd Rundgren (via Wikipedia):
So weird, he's obsessed with Todd so he shoots John...Just because John happened to be in the neighborhood, I suppose.
Rundgren was quite critical of the beatles, John in particular. From a 1973 interview: "John Lennon ain't no revolutionary. He's a f
idiot, man. Shouting about revolution and acting like an a__. It just makes people feel uncomfortable. "All he really wants to do is get attention for himself, and if revolution gets him that attention, he'll get attention through revolution. Hitting a waitress in the Troubador. What kind of revolution is that? "He's an important figure, sure. But so was Richard Nixon. Nixon was just like another generation's John Lennon. Someone who represented all sorts of ideals, but was out for himself underneath it all."
Source, with a copy of John's Letter to Todd.
curiosity led to investigation and i took to leafing thru his albums. now, i could list each one. hell i could probably just have you type a google search "beatles recordings" and you'd hit it on the head. but to take the edge off the boredom i'll give you a summary: wayne had every beatles recording as well as every singles beatles recording AND NOTHING ELSE. well hell - he had ONE other recording: klaatu - a beatles sound-alike band.
true to life.
wayne had very little luck. was not particularly bright and could be confused for the character in dick tracy with no face.
i know i know - you are all thinking "omg! wayne must have been devastated!!!" - which he undoubtedly was but i'd have no way of confirming it since john was killed in my sophomore year. wayne - the first in his family to attend college - didn't cut the grades and quit school after our first year.
but, the effect of living with such a singularly focused, un-faced dimwit had its toll. i couldn't muster an ounce of interest in the beatles for a good 20 years. time has softened my stance and i'm far and away a lennon fan. still no interest in anything mccartney.
geez. was rundgren any less-defined by his own very own rant???
I remember that Klaatu album! The rumor at the time, doubtless propagated by the label, was that it was an unannounced Beatles reunion record.
I was in high school, and developing my own taste for the Beatles, when I first realized that this was actually a thing that happened in my own life time. Elvis too. I just had always thought of them as people who had always been dead.
68, you should check out Paul's first two solo albums. They're the bee's knees.
Like some of you, it's a little strange for me to realize that it happened in my lifetime. I was 4, but to me there were never more than 3 living Beatles.
I had nodded off and was awakened with the news.
I thought it was a pretty bad joke or a weird dream.
If only...
Went to Chicago's Grant park that weekend to gather with- I don't know how many thousand others to grieve together.
At the time John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page and to a lesser degree Bob Dylan were like gods to me, and I considered them all father figures since taking up the guitar and bass at age 13. John Lennon stood above the rest of them, because he was the leader of the Beatles -a band that I loved since I was about 3. In fact my earlier memories are mainly Beatle related.
By age 4, I had actually convinced myself I was one of the Beatles, and donned on a makeshift Beatle wig:
Every so often I still wake up thinking "oh shit, John Lennon's dead and some asshole killed him", and I'm in a sort of a funk for the rest of the day. Interesting enough, I often have the song Remember from the Plastic Ono Band ringing in my head on those mornings.