Well, I was 26 when Lennon died. I was working for the newspaper in my home town in far west Texas and had gone to bed early that night. I didn't know about the shooting until about three the next morning when I went in to work and began clearing the night's newsfeeds off the teletype.
The sheer unexpectedness of it is what I remember most. The floor seemed to sway under me for a moment, though I wasn't actually in danger of fainting. I felt more than a little sick (although that was probably due as much to the hangover I usually woke with in those days.)
I was not a Lennon acolyte. I looked at his "philosophy" as so much warm and fuzzy moonshine and I scorned much of his loopy behavior in public with Yoko. But I loved the music. The Beatles had entered my world when I was in elementary school and their sound was, if not imprinted in my DNA, at least an inextricable part of the world in which I came of age and would, in a sense, always live. I had recently read his fascinating interview in Playboy magazine and so he was much on my mind, especially his song-by-song account of the Beatle catalog. I was, frankly, astonished at how hard his death hit me.
That morning, of course, I had no leisure to meditate on it. I ripped the copy and edited it for our front page and went on with the dozens of tasks incumbent on anyone who puts out a daily paper. I wrote a small localized sidebar, printing reactions from our radio station's program director, music teachers, etc. By the time I had leisure to organize my own thoughts, the publisher of our sister paper in a neighboring town had editorialized about the event. He was of my parents' generation and, while not exactly dancing on John's grave, had struck an infuriating I-told-you-so tone as he blamed the country's drug problem on the influence of the Beatles. He was right, to an extent, but it ticked me off at the time and I wrote an impassioned response in my weekly column. I can't remember now what I said; nothing too profound, you may be sure. (No, I don't have copies anymore of his piece or mine.)
Today, I still enjoy his music. His voice moves me in the visceral way that only the greatest singers can...Sinatra, Caruso, Hank Williams, Ella Fitzgerald.
(I wish more people could celebrate his genius without trying to diminish Paul McCartney, who was the more skillful composer of the two.) Lennon was a true original. We shall not see his like again.
