Remembering John Lennon

He Will Always Be Remembered. Will He Ever Be Understood?

December 8th, 1980.  30 years ago today.  John Lennon was murdered by a nutcase fan, while walking home across Central Park.  To tell the truth, I don’t think it changed his musical legacy much.  He was one of the greats of all time just based on his time in the Beatles and had a reasonable body of work on his own.

If he had not been killed, there are a couple of different directions his career might have taken.  He might have continued making music and never achieving his former glory.  Paul McCartney is still making music.  The Rolling Stones are still making music.  It’s not a bad life.  Or, he may have faded into obscurity.  He’d be 70 now, and you know what?  That’s also not a bad thing.

I’m not one of those who says it’s better to burn out than to fade away or live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.  Death is bad.  Life is good.  All that other stuff is rationalization.

So, it’s a tragedy that John was killed.  A net negative in the universe of human history and culture which nothing can make up for.  I remember when the Beatles first came to America.  Their reputation preceded them and the Ed Sullivan show that night was a highly anticipated, major cultural event in our family.  I was 9, which means my sister Jan was 13 and Rebecca was either 14 or 15.  The feeling in the air was electric.

Now, as I said, I was only 9 so my perception may have been skewed but it seems to me that modern pop music was invented right there and then.  I suspect that in the ’50s you might have started a conversation about music and somebody might have said “I don’t really care about music.  I’m more interested in cars/football/guns, whatever” and they wouldn’t have immediately become a social pariah.  After the Beatles, you had to know who the top bands were, what was cool and what was not.  A situation which continues to this day.  That’s how important the Beatles were.

One other thought on John Lennon, on his song “Imagine.”  My brother Dennis, the musician in the family, often points out that while people idolize the song, they don’t really pay attention to the words.  “Imagine there’s no countries.”  That means that we should live as if all people on the earth are one, as if the national borders between us don’t matter.  We love the song, but we don’t really live like that.

John Lennon’s been dead for 30 years.  The rest of the human race still has a long way to go to live up to him.