When John Lennon died, I wasn’t a huge fan of his. I was young at the time, and it was before I had realized I was a musician and didn’t really understand much of anything about music.
But I did understand something about people. Standing at that bus stop, getting ready for school, the older kids who were usually brash, often funny, sometimes obnoxious and generally full of themselves, were really subdued.
I think that may have actually been the moment when I started to understand something profound and crucial about music: that it’s not just about playing notes and making sounds, but it can have genuine impact and influence on peoples’ lives. It may have very well been the beginnings of my interest in music as a craft and a model for change.
I think I could write for hours about this if I let myself. A friend of mine recently got diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which is fatal. It’s gotten me thinking lately about life, death, and what we leave behind. Some of you know there have been times in my life that have been really rough. There are times in there where I suspect that music was the one thing that was keeping me going: just something I could grab on to that I could understand and believe in, even when the rest of the world seemed to be failing me,
But mostly, I just want to say to John Lennon, whom I didn’t get while he was alive, you’ve had a profound and lasting effect on me, but I wish I had learned it a different way.
indeed
nicely put
I was 29 when he died and the loss was devastating
no doubt, he would be pleased that something positive came from his otherwise senseless death
making music and making change – these are high callings
John Lennon’s senseless murder by a deranged fan brought the sixties generation, my generation to its it. If I had to pick an exact end for those revolutionary times, dec 8th 1980 was it. All the peacemakers — Kennedies, king, then Lennon — had been gunned down. We in that generation had so many heartbreaks, with the slaughter in Vietnam and the south, then Nixon, expanding the war into Cambodia, and then Lennon’s murder. I was 25 then and just remember how I felt like something had been pulled away from me. I still have been unable to fit in with these later generations and think of all that we fought for, all that we had and lost in Lennon, the last of the prophets of the revolution.