I have been thinking about John Lennon. A Facebook post from a friend reminded me that today would have been his 82nd birthday. I had memorized his birth date (October 9, 1940) in the Beatlemania days, but, as is often the case lately, I had lost track of today’s date. After seeing my friend's post, I went to my computer and found a YouTube of John singing Imagine. Tears came to my eyes. Was I really tearing up at my age over a 50-year-old song?
Well, yes.
A while back, AARP magazine published an article entitled, "The Night John Lennon Died." Seriously -- AARP? Well, why not? He would now be decades past the age to join AARP (50) were he still alive. And Paul McCartney has been on the cover, after all.
I well remember the evening of December 8, 1980. I was lying on my couch reading, when I was interrupted by the ringing of my phone. It was a friend calling to say she had turned on the radio, and they were playing nothing but Beatles music.
John Lennon was dead. Gunned down in front of his home in New York.
I was stunned. And not just stunned by the news, but by my very visceral response. I was gutted. Why was this hitting me so hard? I had, after all, just turned 31. I had long since outgrown Beatlemania--hadn't I?
Well, yes, but there are persons who have such an effect on young lives that the effect reverberates through the years.
Here's the thing. And I don't expect those of you under, say, 65 to fully understand. John Lennon was not only my first crush -- he and The Beatles were the backdrop to my youth in a way that was only possible in a world where we were all listening to the same radio stations, a world that predated Spotify and Apple Music and other such sites that have sent us scurrying into our own music silos.
And, yes, it's terrific to have music on demand, but I am so glad that I experienced the collective experience that the Beatles brought to my generation.
Because The Beatles changed everything. Not just music, but the sensibility of my peers.
Here's how it started for me. One day, soon after my fourteenth birthday, my best friend called me to share a new song. Picture this: She is holding her radio up to her phone (tethered as all phones were in those days to a wall) so that I can listen to I Wanna Hold Your Hand on my similarly tethered phone.
I was electrified. I simply lack words to describe how different this song was from anything we had heard before. It was all raw energy and joy -- nothing like the smoothly produced rock we were accustomed to.
Who were these Beatles? My friends and I spent the next year obsessing, as only 14-year-olds can, over this group and the music they were releasing. And, course, we had to choose our favorite Beatle. There were lots of Paul girls and some who liked George, the quiet one. I even had a friend who was mad for Ringo. But it was always John for me.
It wasn't just that I thought him sexy before I was entirely sure what that meant. (And, yes, it was possible to be that innocent at 14 in 1964). John was original. John was charismatic. John was clever. John was funny. Not haha funny. But sardonic. Sarcastic. Silly. His wit was lightning quick. He was John.
After a little time passed, I knew what it meant that he was sexy. And he was still charismatic. More serious and troubled at times, but the humor was still there.
And the music was changing too. Like I said, I Wanna Hold Your Hand changed everything. But they didn't stop there. They kept producing new sounds. Their time of being together and famous was only about six years, but what they did musically in that time is staggering. Their progression from I Wanna Hold Your Hand to A Hard Days' Night to Sgt. Pepper's to The White Album to Abbey Road to Let It Be in such a short time was breathtaking. (And these are just some of their albums.) And more impressive than the output was the endless originality. They never stopped changing and innovating.
It was Elvis who first shook up the post-war generation, but it was The Beatles who were the pied pipers of the sixties, leading us further away from the staid, grey Eisenhower years and accompanying us through the turmoil of those chaotic years of assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam.
Who is doing this for today's teenagers as we once again navigate chaos and fear? Who could do it?
And who would John be today? How would he have grown? Where would his wit and intelligence have taken him? What music might he have produced to help us through this time?
I wish I could have spent one hour in conversation with him.
I wish he were with us still.
