South Brunswick Post Managing Editor Hank Kalet was in college, a freshman at Penn State, when he heard that John Lennon was shot. To him, Lennon was more than just a rock musician, more than a member of one of the most influential musical groups in history.
By: Hank Kalet
I was in college, a freshman at Penn State, when I heard that John Lennon was shot.
I was washing up, getting ready for bed, when someone rushed into the rest room.
"John Lennon’s dead," he said. "He was shot."
I was stunned, stood looking in the mirror. John Lennon was dead. It was hard to comprehend.
John Lennon was more than just a rock musician, more than a member of one of the most influential musical groups in history. He was an icon. I remember hearing from a friend how the news affected the New York-New Jersey area, how hundreds called into the radio, to WNEW, to share their grief.
It would be easy to read his death in larger cultural terms, to paint Lennon’s death as the final act in a societal play that opened early in the 1960s, a narrative of hope extinguished. Like the two Kennedys, like Martin Luther King Jr., Lennon embodied hope, a positive energy for change that can be viewed as one strand of the decade’s cultural milieu the striving for peace and equality, for personal freedom.
This is mythmaking, of course. Lennon as world cultural icon is a well-told story, one that I need not rehash here. My concerns, as I contemplate the 20th anniversary of his death in what would have been his 60th year, are more personal.
John Lennon was a significant influence on me, on the way I think, on the way I write, on my politics. The Beatles created the notion of music for me, were the first whose songs cracked my consciousness.
I was only 7 when the band announced its breakup, so I have little memory of them as a functioning band. And yet, there are small flashes the Beatles performing "All You Need Is Love" on TV, "A Day in a Life" and later "Hey Jude" and "Let It Be" wafting up through the heating ducts of our apartment in Queens.
My interest in the Beatles grew after we moved to New Jersey and I started to buy their albums, first the hits collections ("62-66" and "67-70," "Rock and Roll Music," then others) and then the American albums. The more I listened, the more I needed to listen, the more I hoped to get past the seemingly simple melodies and arrangements and the more I found myself intrigued by their harmonies, by their expanding wall of sound.
And the more I was drawn to rock and roll. The Beatles led me to the Rolling Stones and the Who and then back to American music, to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and REM, to Punk Rock. I began reading the songwriting credits on their cover tunes, started listening to Chuck Berry, to Carl Perkins and Motown.
From there, I turned to the blues, to John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, and to jazz and so on.
I learned to play the guitar and the harmonica (both badly) and I began to explore the arts. This is where the Beatles and Lennon in particular had their greatest influence.
I became focused on words and drawing, in reading the band’s lyrics (and particularly those songs sung by John Lennon), in writing my own songs based on the Beatles.
I started to hear the political language in his songs, started to investigate the conditions that led him to write songs like "Revolution" and "Working Class Hero," "Happy X-mas/War is Over" and "Instant Karma." And I was intrigued by his activism, by his willingness to speak out sharply against the Vietnam War, against racism, against police brutality even in the face of possible deportation.
And his lyrics were poetry to me. Their early lyrics were simple, rooted in pop music and rock-a-billy, but later, as they dabbled in drugs and Eastern mysticism, began exploring literature, their lyrics changed, became more surreal, almost Dadaist in their approach. And I reached beyond pop music to poetry, to Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and to English Romantics like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake, and my attempts at songwriting became a need to write my own poetry.
And now, 20 years after his death, I remain a poet, I remain committed to exploring musical history and investigating new bands and musical styles I know little about, and I remain committed to a politics of people, a politics that emphasizes equality and democracy.
John Lennon was a seminal figure in my own intellectual development as he was for millions of others. He was more than a pop musician and songwriter.
Which is why the anniversary of his death continues to bring people together, continues to resonate, continues to remind us not just of what we lost when Mark David Chapman gunned him down outside of his New York apartment on Dec. 8, 1980, but of what he gave us.
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