bobdylan5

I remember exactly where I was when John Lennon was shot...I was in the bedroom of my cheap off-campus apartment (Bowling Green State University) working out a song on my acoustic guitar. The song was called Xanadu (bad title, I should have changed the title--damn it's still called Xanadu) I was trying to write like Neil Young ala "Sugar Mountain." The first verse went "All the people of Xanadu came in state/To the temple where everyday they prayed/They fell down on their knees and they started to cry/The end of the world in Xanadu seemed in sight." I had gotten this far with the song when my roomate John, a bespectacled biology major with a head of wild red hair, burst into the room. "John Lennon has just been shot," he said. I looked up at him, waiting for the punch line. It had to be a joke right? He couldn't be serious. John Lennon was 40 years old. There was no way he could be dead. He had been the leader of the BEATLES for chrissakes. That, in my mind, was about as close to immortality as one person was about to get. They couldn't touch John--could they? I looked up at my roomate. I could tell by the dazed look in his gray eyes that he was telling the truth. Still I refused to believe it. I think I even asked him what the punch line was. "It's no joke," he said. His face was very red. I thought he was going to cry. "I wish it was...not true," he said. "Some psycho shot him outside the Dakota. It's on the news." So, I followed my roomate into the living room where our shitty black-and-white portable was. Sure enough, there was the imposing facade of the Dakota. And then they flashed a face--a bland, slightly sardonic face that I and the rest of the world would soon come to recognize as the assassin of John Lennon. And then they showed John, getting off that airplane at Kennedy International, at the start of Beatlemania. And I slumped down on our ragged futon, feeling numb and shaky, suddenly old. The next few days passed like there was some national emergency in progress--a flood of Biblical proprtions, an atomic bomb blast--and the powers that be had forgotten to tell us where to go. I sat on the futon, my guitar in my lap, watching the crowds as they sang "Imagine," and "Give Peace a Chance", clutching candles outside of the Dakota. If I could have gotten away from school, I would have probably gone there too...