30 Years And One Hour Ago

I can't exactly remember the weather that night, what we had for dinner or who was playing on Monday Night Football. My parents were recently divorced, and I was living with my father. We made a tradition out of watching MNF together after dinner.

And so it was on this fateful Monday that me and the old man made dinner and cleaned up and settled in to watch one of the most boring games ever staged in the history of the NFL. It was so boring that I retreated to my room early in the second half, and turned the radio on, something I had never done before.

Then the reports started coming in. In those days television was slower than radio. There was no CNN, no net, no nothing. If you wanted live news, you listened to the radio, and for much of the world, the radio is still it.

With my dial tuned to CFOX fm99 (The Fox Rocks!), the news began to trickle in. "We are getting reports that John Lennon has been shot in New York City".

At first, I thought that Lennon was some out of control rock star, given that he had been involved in many antics during his time in Los Angeles, and that his political beliefs had left him marginalised. I imagined him being grazed by a bullet at a cocktail party hosted by Andy Warhol and attended by Phil Spector.

As I lay in my room trying to comprehend, my father was a few feet away, watching this...



And I was hearing fragments of this on the radio.....



As I walked out of my room, I was shocked to see that my father was ashen. I said "did you hear?" He said "yeah, they just announced it".

John Lennon was just a man, but the idealism expressed through his music represents the highest aspirations of the human condition, and that is why we love him. He challenged humanity to be better, and was willing to admit that he didn't always practice what he preached.

And three decades on, I still miss the shit disturbing SOB.



http://www.goyestoeverything.com