30 Years Ago

I remember exactly where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been murdered.

I had been helping a band set up for a Monday night gig at William's Pub in the Uptown area of Minneapolis. It was a blues band; they didn't know any Beatles songs so they played a Chuck Berry tune to honor John instead. The few people who were in the back room where the band played drifted out slowly. Nobody had anything to say. It was too awful, stupid and pointless.

And so we lost a guiding light, a complex and sometimes confusing figure, but someone who always let you know what he felt. Many of us still feel his loss. A greater loss was the loss felt by a little boy who lost his father and a woman who lost her man; a family torn apart for nothing.



Photo: Yoko Ono