(Originally published March 2, 2009)
1980, Age 8. “Nowhere Man,” by The Beatles, from Rubber Soul.
John Lennon was the first person I was close to who died. My grandfather died two years before Lennon, but I was only six and I didn’t really know him. He lived two hours away and we weren’t close and he had never really confided in me the way John had.
It was the 9th of December, a day I’ll always remember . . . I was sitting at our kitchen table before school and Good Morning America was just starting to come on. My mom, who had already been up for an hour at this point and realizing what the opening story was going to be, turned to me and hurriedly said, “John Lennon was shot last night.” Then I heard the voice of David Hartman, the morning show’s host, say, “John Lennon is . . . uuhh . . . dead.”
It may seem strange to some that an 8-year-old boy should care so much about the death of John Lennon, but I was a huge fan of The Beatles. True, they had broken up two years before I was born, but I could still sing every word to almost every major hit they had. I knew who George Martin was, who Yoko Ono was, who Brian Epstein and Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe were. I knew about The Quarrymen and The Silver Beetles and Hamburg and the Cavern Club and “Paul is dead” and Maharesh Maharishi Yogi and Apple. I learned to be an obsessive music fan at an early age.
When I got to school the first thing I did, of course, was go see the Risucci brothers. Michael was John, Chris was George and I was Paul. We never could find an acceptable Ringo, as Daniels Elementary strangely seemed to have only three Beatles-obsessed 3rd graders in attendance. Naturally, Michael was the most upset. Mr. Durrett, our gym teacher, belittled our grief. It was only the first of many times that I would be mocked by a dumb jock.
The Risuccis were twins. They had moved to Daniels, WV, from Platsburgh, NY, a city I had never heard of and that sounded as foreign to me as Cairo or Bangkok. I never knew why they had moved there with their mother. Their mom was divorced, which in itself was an anomaly in our little community. Coupled with their thick New York accents and their obvious “ethnicity,” the family stood out like a sore thumb. Right away I dug them. They had moved in during our 2nd grade year.
I can’t remember how I learned that they were Beatles lovers, too, nor do I remember if they ever told me how they had come to worship the Fab Four. They liked other music, too. For our 2nd grade talent show in 1979, the year that “Le Freak” and “Do You Think I’m Sexy” topped the charts, they sang “Love Potion Number 9.” I also can’t remember how each of us came to be assigned our Beatle alter ego. During my first year of junior high some years later, several fellow students commented that I looked somewhat like Julian Lennon (he of “Hey Jude” fame), so I don’t think it was that any of us bore particular resemblance to our corresponding Beatle. Certainly the Risuccis didn’t. I think it had something to do with our perceived levels of coolness. John was obviously the hippest Beatle, so it made some sense that Mike would be Lennon. Paul was perceived as the least cool in some way, a more family-friendly Beatle, so I guess it made sense that I would assume that role.
We talked about the group every day at school. We talked about the meanings of particularly obscure lyrics, argued with fellow students about the monumental importance of the band and discussed Beatles’ minutia with a fascination that bordered on clinical obsession. I remember one discussion where we debated the smoking habits of each of the members. Michael concluded that John probably smoked 3-5 packs a day, George 2-3 and Paul a mere single pack a day, confirming Paul’s lower ranking in the hierarchy of hipsters (poor Ringo . . . he didn’t even figure into these discussions).
My own love of the band had come about in a rather curious fashion. After school each day I watched television reruns on WTBS out of Atlanta. I watched Space Giants; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Brady Bunch. I also watched The Monkees, one of the finest television shows ever produced. Noting my enthusiasm for the show, one of my older brothers asked if I liked The Beatles. I had never heard them, I said. I was teased for my ridiculous lack of sophistication and judgment. I was six years old.
By the time I had begun 2nd grade I was being paraded in front of relatives to sing “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” complete with hand claps. I knew that Paul McCartney shared a birthday with my older brother Dusty (June 18th), one day after mine. I knew all about their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and how they took America by storm. I had also deduced that their popularity was somehow responsible for the long bowl-cuts worn by my classmates and me, while my brothers, 13 and 15 years my seniors, had been forced to sport crew cuts through elementary school. When our music teacher, Mr. Greenwald, had the class sing “Octopus’ Garden,” the Risucci twins and I were the only ones who knew every word. We were the only ones who knew any of the words.
When John Lennon died I became obsessed with learning all the details of his murder (or “assassination” as it was dubbed in the media). The night following the murder, there was virtually nothing else on TV, and I sat and watched news program after news program about it with my sister and my babysitter. I sat riveted as I learned about Mark David Chapman and his copy of Catcher in the Rye. The days following would reveal how this man was obsessed with Lennon and how he had stalked him, how he even had an Asian wife just like John. I bought up Beatles’ tribute magazines and my mania deepened.
My father thought John Lennon was a “dope head.” That was at least part of the reason for my love of The Beatles. My parents did not like The Beatles. They were just slightly too old to have been fans the first time around and their tastes tended toward Nat King Cole or Patsy Cline. The Beatles were somehow mine. Though both of my brothers liked them just fine, they were more interested in their collections of Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Santana albums than The Beatles. When I listened to those songs, it was as if they were written for me. This was my first experience with this phenomenon, though not my last. From The Beatles I learned what falling in love would feel like when it happened to me. I learned that all I needed was love. I learned about the pain left when love was gone. I learned about loneliness. The Beatles gave me the emotional archetypes and vocabulary I would need for my adolescent years.
I never outgrew The Beatles, per se, though my obsessions moved on. Junior high school would bring a fixation with Prince and his Minneapolis mob. By the time high school rolled around, my tastes tended toward jazz and I was memorizing the solos on John Coltrane’s Blue Train album the way I had once learned the lyrics to “I Am the Walrus.” When I was in college I learned that everyone my age now loved The Beatles and were as likely to own Revolver as they were Under the Table and Dreaming. Their classic status among a generation too young to know them the first time was sealed by the media’s portrayal of John Lennon as the archetypical outsider. Freshman sported t-shirts that simply said, “Imagine” and hung posters in their dorm rooms of John in his own “I Love NY” sleeveless tee.
I guess it was around this time that John Lennon’s legacy began to trouble me. He had been canonized by the popular culture before he had even been murdered. His death only seemed to heighten the mythology: his status was elevated to rock-and-roll martyr. John Lennon was quoted by some the way others might quote the Bible or Nietzsche. Years earlier John had opined that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and though there had been a general uproar at the time, he had not been disproved in the intervening years. Now he had his own Judas Iscariot/Pontius Pilate rolled into one in the person of Mark David Chapman.
In the years since his death I had read the occasional article about Chapman on the anniversaries of Lennon’s murder. I had also continued listening to The Beatles and managed to read Catcher in the Rye a few times. I had visited New York and seen the Dakota, the apartment building where John was shot.
The problem is that the Lennon of legend is different than the Lennon of fact. That this should be so is no longer surprising to me, but it was a revelation when I was 19 or 20. The same man who sang, “Imagine no possessions,” lived at one of the most expensive addresses in Manhattan. He sang about peace but a closer examination of his life showed that he was a very angry and sometimes intolerant person. He was neither messiah nor prophet. He was just a rock-and-roll singer and songwriter, albeit a really talented one.
Something no one ever seems to mention in the discussion of the murder is that Mark David Chapman was right. Yes, he was a deranged murderer, but he was pretty much spot on in his assessment of Lennon. I’m sure that opinion is none too popular among Beatle fans, but it seems unavoidable to me. Certainly John Lennon is not the only example, but perhaps the most obvious one. He was the family man who had abandoned his first wife and child. He was the working-class radical (“Viva la Revolución!” he once read into the camera) with servants and limousines. Too late Chapman realized his idol had feet of clay.
Lennon himself may have recognized this tendency toward sanctimony. One of the Beatles’ lyrics I had memorized at a young age John had penned about himself:
1980, Age 8. “Nowhere Man,” by The Beatles, from Rubber Soul.
John Lennon was the first person I was close to who died. My grandfather died two years before Lennon, but I was only six and I didn’t really know him. He lived two hours away and we weren’t close and he had never really confided in me the way John had.
It was the 9th of December, a day I’ll always remember . . . I was sitting at our kitchen table before school and Good Morning America was just starting to come on. My mom, who had already been up for an hour at this point and realizing what the opening story was going to be, turned to me and hurriedly said, “John Lennon was shot last night.” Then I heard the voice of David Hartman, the morning show’s host, say, “John Lennon is . . . uuhh . . . dead.”
It may seem strange to some that an 8-year-old boy should care so much about the death of John Lennon, but I was a huge fan of The Beatles. True, they had broken up two years before I was born, but I could still sing every word to almost every major hit they had. I knew who George Martin was, who Yoko Ono was, who Brian Epstein and Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe were. I knew about The Quarrymen and The Silver Beetles and Hamburg and the Cavern Club and “Paul is dead” and Maharesh Maharishi Yogi and Apple. I learned to be an obsessive music fan at an early age.
When I got to school the first thing I did, of course, was go see the Risucci brothers. Michael was John, Chris was George and I was Paul. We never could find an acceptable Ringo, as Daniels Elementary strangely seemed to have only three Beatles-obsessed 3rd graders in attendance. Naturally, Michael was the most upset. Mr. Durrett, our gym teacher, belittled our grief. It was only the first of many times that I would be mocked by a dumb jock.
The Risuccis were twins. They had moved to Daniels, WV, from Platsburgh, NY, a city I had never heard of and that sounded as foreign to me as Cairo or Bangkok. I never knew why they had moved there with their mother. Their mom was divorced, which in itself was an anomaly in our little community. Coupled with their thick New York accents and their obvious “ethnicity,” the family stood out like a sore thumb. Right away I dug them. They had moved in during our 2nd grade year.
I can’t remember how I learned that they were Beatles lovers, too, nor do I remember if they ever told me how they had come to worship the Fab Four. They liked other music, too. For our 2nd grade talent show in 1979, the year that “Le Freak” and “Do You Think I’m Sexy” topped the charts, they sang “Love Potion Number 9.” I also can’t remember how each of us came to be assigned our Beatle alter ego. During my first year of junior high some years later, several fellow students commented that I looked somewhat like Julian Lennon (he of “Hey Jude” fame), so I don’t think it was that any of us bore particular resemblance to our corresponding Beatle. Certainly the Risuccis didn’t. I think it had something to do with our perceived levels of coolness. John was obviously the hippest Beatle, so it made some sense that Mike would be Lennon. Paul was perceived as the least cool in some way, a more family-friendly Beatle, so I guess it made sense that I would assume that role.
We talked about the group every day at school. We talked about the meanings of particularly obscure lyrics, argued with fellow students about the monumental importance of the band and discussed Beatles’ minutia with a fascination that bordered on clinical obsession. I remember one discussion where we debated the smoking habits of each of the members. Michael concluded that John probably smoked 3-5 packs a day, George 2-3 and Paul a mere single pack a day, confirming Paul’s lower ranking in the hierarchy of hipsters (poor Ringo . . . he didn’t even figure into these discussions).
My own love of the band had come about in a rather curious fashion. After school each day I watched television reruns on WTBS out of Atlanta. I watched Space Giants; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; and The Brady Bunch. I also watched The Monkees, one of the finest television shows ever produced. Noting my enthusiasm for the show, one of my older brothers asked if I liked The Beatles. I had never heard them, I said. I was teased for my ridiculous lack of sophistication and judgment. I was six years old.
By the time I had begun 2nd grade I was being paraded in front of relatives to sing “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” complete with hand claps. I knew that Paul McCartney shared a birthday with my older brother Dusty (June 18th), one day after mine. I knew all about their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and how they took America by storm. I had also deduced that their popularity was somehow responsible for the long bowl-cuts worn by my classmates and me, while my brothers, 13 and 15 years my seniors, had been forced to sport crew cuts through elementary school. When our music teacher, Mr. Greenwald, had the class sing “Octopus’ Garden,” the Risucci twins and I were the only ones who knew every word. We were the only ones who knew any of the words.
When John Lennon died I became obsessed with learning all the details of his murder (or “assassination” as it was dubbed in the media). The night following the murder, there was virtually nothing else on TV, and I sat and watched news program after news program about it with my sister and my babysitter. I sat riveted as I learned about Mark David Chapman and his copy of Catcher in the Rye. The days following would reveal how this man was obsessed with Lennon and how he had stalked him, how he even had an Asian wife just like John. I bought up Beatles’ tribute magazines and my mania deepened.
My father thought John Lennon was a “dope head.” That was at least part of the reason for my love of The Beatles. My parents did not like The Beatles. They were just slightly too old to have been fans the first time around and their tastes tended toward Nat King Cole or Patsy Cline. The Beatles were somehow mine. Though both of my brothers liked them just fine, they were more interested in their collections of Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Santana albums than The Beatles. When I listened to those songs, it was as if they were written for me. This was my first experience with this phenomenon, though not my last. From The Beatles I learned what falling in love would feel like when it happened to me. I learned that all I needed was love. I learned about the pain left when love was gone. I learned about loneliness. The Beatles gave me the emotional archetypes and vocabulary I would need for my adolescent years.
I never outgrew The Beatles, per se, though my obsessions moved on. Junior high school would bring a fixation with Prince and his Minneapolis mob. By the time high school rolled around, my tastes tended toward jazz and I was memorizing the solos on John Coltrane’s Blue Train album the way I had once learned the lyrics to “I Am the Walrus.” When I was in college I learned that everyone my age now loved The Beatles and were as likely to own Revolver as they were Under the Table and Dreaming. Their classic status among a generation too young to know them the first time was sealed by the media’s portrayal of John Lennon as the archetypical outsider. Freshman sported t-shirts that simply said, “Imagine” and hung posters in their dorm rooms of John in his own “I Love NY” sleeveless tee.
I guess it was around this time that John Lennon’s legacy began to trouble me. He had been canonized by the popular culture before he had even been murdered. His death only seemed to heighten the mythology: his status was elevated to rock-and-roll martyr. John Lennon was quoted by some the way others might quote the Bible or Nietzsche. Years earlier John had opined that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ and though there had been a general uproar at the time, he had not been disproved in the intervening years. Now he had his own Judas Iscariot/Pontius Pilate rolled into one in the person of Mark David Chapman.
In the years since his death I had read the occasional article about Chapman on the anniversaries of Lennon’s murder. I had also continued listening to The Beatles and managed to read Catcher in the Rye a few times. I had visited New York and seen the Dakota, the apartment building where John was shot.
The problem is that the Lennon of legend is different than the Lennon of fact. That this should be so is no longer surprising to me, but it was a revelation when I was 19 or 20. The same man who sang, “Imagine no possessions,” lived at one of the most expensive addresses in Manhattan. He sang about peace but a closer examination of his life showed that he was a very angry and sometimes intolerant person. He was neither messiah nor prophet. He was just a rock-and-roll singer and songwriter, albeit a really talented one.
Something no one ever seems to mention in the discussion of the murder is that Mark David Chapman was right. Yes, he was a deranged murderer, but he was pretty much spot on in his assessment of Lennon. I’m sure that opinion is none too popular among Beatle fans, but it seems unavoidable to me. Certainly John Lennon is not the only example, but perhaps the most obvious one. He was the family man who had abandoned his first wife and child. He was the working-class radical (“Viva la Revolución!” he once read into the camera) with servants and limousines. Too late Chapman realized his idol had feet of clay.
Lennon himself may have recognized this tendency toward sanctimony. One of the Beatles’ lyrics I had memorized at a young age John had penned about himself:
Grandiose hypocrisy is something we have come to tolerate, perhaps even expect, in these people who live lives larger than ours. We keep our mouths shut as the pop star whose biggest hit celebrated his eternal love for his girl is found cheating on her. We turn a blind eye as rock-and-rollers from around the globe burn enormous quantities of jet fuel to converge on a benefit concert to raise awareness of global warming. We fail to note the irony of gangsta rappers protesting war when their albums celebrate a life of violence against those who have disrespected them. We treat pop stars as oracles but require their ethics to rise no higher than used car salesmen. If Holden Caulfield had been traipsing through Manhattan on a winter’s day in 1980, he may well have lumped John Lennon in with his list of “phonies.” Salinger’s “catcher” wants the role of protecting children. Instead, Chapman shattered my naiveté, and that of the Risucci twins, with five hollow-point bullets from a .38. He is closer to Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” than Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”:
“He’s a real Nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”
“Doesn’t have a point of view, Knows not where he’s going to . . .”Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
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