I have this memory of being in the car really early on a Summer morning when I was five or so. We are driving around Montreal, there for Expo 67 or Man and His World, and it is the day a Bealtes album was released and the car radio is just playing the lp straight though. I also remember the day that the Bealtes broke up a few years later in 1970, Mom remarking that it made the TV news. But 25 years ago this morning when I heard that Lennon was shot it was the morning of my Grade 12 English exam and we were playing lockerball waiting to be let in the room to write. Lockerball was just volleyball with a scrunched up ball of paper hit back and forth over the rock of lockers, one on one. You couldn’t see where the other guy was going to hit it. Like a good game of hack or bumball, it was one of those games that was only played in one place for a few weeks by a few people and then it passed.
Lennon was in a revival. We had copies of Double Fantasy and picture sleeve 45s of “Starting Over” and all had braced ourselves a few times on false alarms that the Beatles were going to play Saturday Night Live even though we also listened to the Talking Heads and the other new music. We grinded away at their songs on guitar in friends basements and argued by the resevior on Friday night who was more the most useless Beatle over whatever bad red Hungarian wine someone had been able to get. I had sold all my X-men comics one day on a trip to Halifax to buy German pressings of Beatles releases. I still have them. Lennon dying seemed to start a spate of shootings or maybe was the height of them. I heard Reagan was shot when I jumped in the car after soccer practice and the Pope was shot around then, too. But Lennon died and when I was 17 it was really bad, cursing by the lockers before the exam began.