John Lennon vs. Me

This time of year always reminds me of the night a squad car carrying John Lennon's body sped past me on the streets of New York City. On December 8th of 1980, I was eight years old and in the city with my family for a holiday-related dinner with relatives. We were out late—much later than my parents ever kept me out back home, but I'm sure they'd been drinking and having a grand old time. The relatives we'd dined with were somewhat wealthy, and in fact we had eaten dinner at Tavern on the Green, then regarded as one of the city's more exclusive (albeit touristy) restaurants.

I had only a dim awareness of who the Beatles were back then. In 1980, I was far more interested in reenacting scenes from Star Wars with my friends than I was in any kind of music. But the Beatles' legacy was forever burned into my consciousness after my father jerked me away from the street as that squad car came screaming past, the bloody head of its famous occupant slumped against the rear passenger window. The Dakota apartment building where Lennon was murdered is only a few blocks from Tavern on the Green's old location near Central Park West, and sometime shortly before 11 PM, we were walking back to the garage where my father's car was parked. But when we crossed 72nd Street and observed the chaos left in the aftermath of the shooting, someone—a tear-streaked woman, by my father's recollection—told us what had happened. We left the city and drove home to the dark suburbs of New Jersey without speaking, probably listening to the news on the radio.

In spite of the weirdness of having been only blocks away when one of history's most famous murders went down, I never got into the Beatles the way most other kids seem to, and I often wonder why that is. Until I got older and started getting an allowance, the only Beatles record in the house was Let It Be, which belonged to one of my older siblings. Perhaps Lennon's death coupled with the eulogistic tone of that album's eponymous track is what set my associations with the band on such a weird path so early on. When you're a little kid, a song's lyrics are often the first thing that hits you, and lines like "in my hour of darkness / she is standing right in front of me / speaking words of wisdom / let it be" certainly influenced the childhood anxieties I experienced in bed at night. Long after my parents had ordered the lights switched out, the images conjured by that type of poetry were a lot to wrap my head around. It's funny to think about it again thirty years later—by anyone's estimation, a long time has passed since then. It's also quite peculiar for a band that broke up two years before I was born to in some way serve as a milemarker by which to observe my own aging. Maybe that's what people mean when they call Lennon's music "timeless". Maybe it's why that term has always bothered me so much.

Comments

[Zora]

Fascinating story. I remember hearing the news Lennon was shot too--even way out in NM. My mom came wailing down the stairs, and we put an ornament of him on our tree. But ours was a hippie house, and we had "Sgt Pepper" and "Rubber Soul" on cassette, much more kid-friendly albums. In fact, they feel exactly written for kids.

But only as an adult have I bothered thinking about the words--I think people are either lyrics-attuned or not. I'm just not--I can cheerfully sing along with catchy melodies without ever realizing what I'm saying. (Thanks a freakin' lot, Beck.) It does seem like a small failing...

(BTW, thanks for the FF! recipe shoutout way back. I think it came when I was on deadline, and I kind of lost the thread.)

[r:m:b]

@Zora, I totally agree on your point re: being lyric-attuned or not. As I sort of hinted at in the above post, I think I was much more conscious of song lyrics when I was a little kid. Outside of Mother Goose, pop songs were really the first kind of poetry I was ever exposed to, and I think that accounts for my realization — however primitive it may have been — that people sang in a language different than the one they used in normal conversation. Not that it has any business being discussed in a Lennon-related post, but I recall being deeply troubled by Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman to Me" when I was little because of the lyric: "she can carelessly cut you and laugh while you're bleeding", which I took literally! -mike

[Zora]

Whoa. There is something there, some major difference, and who knew Billy Joel could illustrate it so well? For me, by contrast, it honestly took my 9th grade English teacher making us analyze a song "as if it were a poem" for me to even pay attention to anything more than the chorus of a song. And when my song (something from Paul Simon's "Graceland") had a lot of "baby" lines, my teacher had to point out to me that perhaps Simon _wasn't_ just singing to his girlfriend, and maybe he was singing to an actual baby--or at least I should consider that. Maybe I noticed that "different language" thing, but just assumed if I knew a few phrases, that was fine. (Hrmmm...kind of like my foreign language studies today.)

I think what makes the Beatles so instantly appealing is that the words just mean what they mean. And when they don't make any sense...they're just not supposed to. Plus they enunciate really well, so you can hear exactly what they're saying. It's some of the most literal pop music you can get. Sort of related, a guy I know transcribes pop music for orchestras, and he just had to do a huge batch of Beatles songs. "I hoped it would make me like the Beatles more, and really find something more complex there," he said. "But no. Still boring."