Soon it will be the anniversary of Lennon\u2019s murder, that national psychic car crash of 1980. I remember the night like a concussion. One of the zillions of poor bastards watching Monday Night Football, not because I cared about the sport, but my father had it on. Then the news flash crawled across the bottom of the screen, an electronic omen. I had never seen that happen on that show, not once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John Lennon had been shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember staring at the screen and wondering, is he more important to the world than I realized if they\u2019re interrupting the holy broadcast of Monday Night Football? Important to me, sure. I had everything, the whole sacred archive. But the zillions like my father, sweating over point spreads? Lennon was not their hero. Yet here it was, a digital banner announcing catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was a crazed fan. I owned that ridiculous Japanese import, The Wedding Album, thirty minutes of John and Yoko screaming each other\u2019s names like experimental mating calls. The other side, kissing into a microphone. Performance art. Teenage money thrown into a bonfire. And yet I loved them for it, loved him for believing art could be anything two people decided to do with a tape machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I even tracked down that book You Are All Sanpaku, the macrobiotic scripture they swore by. My first thoughts, before the announcers confirmed he was dead, was he would be fine because Macrobiotics would save him. Rice and seaweed would keep the bullets out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Strange the thoughts that survive inside a person. Decades later they still rattle around in the skull, like spent casings at a crime scene never quite cleaned up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I get a twisted thrill watching Paul use footage of Lennon and belt out \u201cI\u2019ve Got A Feeling\u201d with the ghost of the man before zillions of spectators. Necromancy in 4K. Beautiful, reckless, sorcery. Paul tours into his eighties, dragging the bass across continents, a defiant old warhorse refusing to acknowledge death a legitimate concept. Dylan too, wandering the earth, a cryptic blues shaman, lost the map and never wanted it back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Play until the machinery fails. Go out onstage or go out tuning the guitar for the next one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who knows what Lennon would have done in these forty five missing years. Reinvented himself twelve times. Imploded spectacularly. Made an album using dishwasher noises for the rhythm section. Formed a band with Pussy Riot. Maybe gone into space with William Shatner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whatever, I know with certainty I would have eaten it up. I would have looked forward to every bizarre chapter, every unexpected swerve, every punch to the cultural gut. He was the kind of bastard who could shock one into thinking differently without even trying. And we were robbed of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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