Where was I when John Lennon died? After 10 on a Monday night? "Monday Night Football" that night was the Patriots and the Dolphins, two teams I never much cared for. Can't recall what else was on TV back in 1980. It was cold as hell that night, and a Monday to boot, so I probably wasn't shooting pool at Holiday Lanes. I sure as hell wasn't playing "Double Fantasy". After going "havesies" with my brother on the album a few weeks earlier, I had recognized it as a true "havesie" album--half good Lennon stuff, half howling Yoko shite. And the Lennon stuff got kind of sappy in ways that made McCartney sound like Ozzy in places, although I recognized "Starting Over" and "Watching the Wheels" as immediate classics.

Jesus pray for me, but I might have been masturbating. When I was a kid, in a house with seven other people, sharing a bedroom with two older brothers, monkey-spanking time was at a premium. I may very well have been jacking off with a copy of Playboy, or focusing in on the random instances of nudity in National Lampoon. Both of my brothers were away at college, so I was in a wanker's paradise with the bedroom to myself, and an acute sense of hearing should anyone saunter up the stairs, in which case I could do the patented "throw bed sheets over unzipped pants and pretend I'm reading a magazine" move that I had down pat. John would have been proud of me, save for that line in "I Found Out": "Some of you sit there with your cock in your hands/Don't get you nowhere, don't make you a man." Well, John, sorry, but neither does writing songs about it.

I went to bed that night, a winter's night like any other in Pennsylvania, with my homework all done, ready for school the next day. I didn't need an alarm clock when I was a kid. I got up the same time every day naturally--and this is about the only way I feel old now. But it was my habit every morning to wake up, sit up, slap on the headphones from the stereo next to my bed, and just sit there and listen to music, either WZZO out of Allentown, or WMMR or WYSP out of Philadelphia, the rock stations.

So I sat there in the darkness, the only light coming from the stereo's radio face, and heard this snippet of a news report: ". . . and we understand that Ringo Starr will be flying into New York later on today, and that Paul McCartney may be doing the same." Cut to commercial.

Holy shit, I thought, The Beatles are getting back together! You have to understand--I was in love with The Beatles, still the best band ever, and at that time one of my brothers and I had cobbled together a collection of most of their albums, barring some of the earlier stuff that seemed fairly well taken care of on the "Red Album" greatest hits compilation. I can't tell you how elated I was during that commercial break. I started jumping up and down on my bed. Hooray! The best band in the world is getting back together!

And then the DJ came back on air. John Lennon had been shot to death last night in New York City. I went numb. Didn't cry. Just didn't feel anything. Got dressed, went to the bus stop--not every kid was into The Beatles, so it wasn't like a mass wake. Got to school, met other stone-faced friends with similar dazed reactions--even a few of the younger teachers were the same way.

But what I recall most is life just going on. Especially with my Chemistry teacher, Mr. Welker, who could give a shit that John Lennon had just died, and said as much, minus the profanity. He made a point of announcing this to our Chemistry class, knowing full well that it would piss some of us, perhaps taking a perverse pleasure in this. He was a strange guy, with a permanently orange tan and a cromagnon-like forehead, but in the end, he was one of the best teachers I ever had--a strict disciplinarian who made sure you either learned in his class or got the hell out.

And that was that. In the following weeks, I witnessed the ghoulish specter of bullshit Lennon fans making a run on his albums, to the point where local record stores couldn't keep up. A friend of my sister's offered to buy "Double Fantasy" for double the price from my brother and me. We refused, even though neither of us liked the album. Rolling Stone put out its last issue worth owning, the one with John naked on the cover clinging to Yoko. And life went on.

But you know what? All these "where was I when Lennon was shot" stories, of which I've heard/read dozens, end up sounding like one thing: the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby"--one of Paul's best songs. All the lonely people--darning their fucking socks in the night and collecting rice where a wedding has been. Basically, we're all trying to say we weren't doing much of anything, just going about life, much like Lennon himself was doing in his down years, wiping the baby's ass, baking bread, getting stoned. No one was robbing a bank or finding a cure for cancer.

And then this cataclysmic event occurred, and generations were changed forever, for the worse, as the world grew that much colder, and we were left scared and alone without one of our guiding lights.

Bull . . . shit. I didn't know it then, but I know it now. And I resent a normal human being and a great musician having all that extraneous nonsense foisted on him. Refer back to Mr. Welker's take on Lennon's death--a definite lack of interest mixed with a sort of snide "I told you so" cynicism. At the time, I wanted to kill him. But now that I'm older, I can see where he was coming from, which was an entirely different generation not sold on The Beatles and/or rock music in general. He also told us that he felt pretty awful when Glen Miller died, but that life went on. We all laughed--Glen fucking Miller. Big band music. Our parents music. Ugh.

Of course, I've come to realize that Glen Miller was just as important in shaping the world of music as John Lennon was and just as much a genius, and that our parents, like us, listened to some good shit in their time. And that we weren't wrong to poke fun at them, as a lot of their music was sentimental tripe. But, guess what? The same could be said for my generation. And it goes double for the music kids are listening to now, only you can add on pointless, annoying angst falsely positioned as an antidote to the cloying sentimentality.

It's a sick baby boomer game being played here where youth is amplified, as it was in the 60's, to mean everything cool and cutting edge in society, and that to either not acknowledge it or pay it some sort of respect is to be considered out of touch, as the media has taken years to forge such a burning worship of youth culture. This ethic has been inextricably tied to the recording industry so that music is no longer just music--it's a statement of cultural purpose. We can thank the 60's for that. And if your tastes aren't aligned with the top of the charts, then fuck you, what you listen to is worthless and irrelevant, and you're either old and/or clueless. This is ironic as the only way music reaches this level is when clueless people by the millions, usually impressionable kids or adult dinguses who cut their teeth on Michael Bolton albums, are aggressively sold their tastes by massive record companies.

This kind of cynical economic brow-beating is the death of youth, i.e., the spirit of youth should be the desire to try new things, and the music industry now is such that its corporate interests far out-strip even the most minute inclinations towards experimentation or true rebellion. And I'm afraid this murder has been an ongoing project, one that started before the Beatles, even before Elvis, most likely going back to how Frank Sinatra was sold to screaming teenage girls in the early 1940's.

What does all this have to do with John Lennon's death? The Beatles were one of the few bands who deserved their hype, who didn't have to be sold, but, of course, were anyway, and still are now. Every year, some new Beatles or Lennon material is marketed to the public right about now, as it can perfectly capitalize on the window of opportunity set up by the anniversary of Lennon's death neatly coinciding with the Christmas shopping season. First, it was The Beatles Anthology series--now it's a collection of their number-one singles and reissues of "Double Fantasy" and "Plastic Ono Band".

I feel like I've been sold the legacy of John Lennon just as coldly as I've been sold a Beatles reissue on schedule every December. And it doesn't help that millions of people are going along with it, acting as if his murder was only yesterday, and we all should be moping around every December 8th with broken hearts and afraid to even state Mark David Chapman's name for some odd reason. Generational denial? This kind of prolonged, self-inflicted agony isn't that far removed from the same kind of warped icon worship that, coupled with serious mental illness, lead Chapman to pick up a gun in the first place. This didn't kill Lennon--a man with a gun did, whether he was sane or not. But Chapman wouldn't have done it had he not had this sickly pop icon culture drilled into his psyche, the same kind that has flourished not just in spite of Lennon's death, but most likely because of it. And lest we forget that Lennon righteously railed against this kind of empty, useless idolatry (the Plastic Ono Band album is one long and beautiful rip against this) and lived in New York because he could walk the streets without being over-exposed to it.

It helps to get perspective by looking at the big pop music deaths of the 90's: Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur and Big E. Smalls. I sincerely hope some people reading this are shrugging right now and saying, "Who cares?" But if you were one of those kids holding candles in Seattle or throwing yourself on a hearse as it passed in Brooklyn, you cared. Even if you weren't physically there, their deaths might have sent a similar cultural jolt through your senses that Lennon fans had earlier felt. They didn't mean that much to me--honestly, in the cases of Shakur and Smalls, absolutely nothing. Cobain's death pissed me off, as he killed himself with a wife and kid, which didn't sit too well with me. After spending much of the 80's listening to alternative music that was just as raw and adventurous as anything Nirvana topped the charts with, I wasn't too sold on the idea that I had to mourn his passing in that big generational way set up by Elvis and Lennon. And I could see that the same kind of sick star machine that contributed to Lennon's death played an even more direct role in his, as he in effect became his own deranged fan who went too far.

I recall sitting in a pizza parlor in downtown Manhattan the day of Smalls' funeral, listening to a few kids at the table next to me talking about his death. And they were devastated. The radio station on the parlor's PA was tuned to a Top 40 station playing nothing but his music and fielding phone calls from distraught fans. This was real--and I didn't feel a damn thing, as I was no fan of his music and was not tagging along with hiphop culture after toying with it for a few years in the mid-80's and realizing by 1990 that it bored the hell out of me.

Had I become Mr. Welker?! Not really. I felt no urge to rub these kids' noses in their grief. I understood from my own experience that they would not be open to even the most minor criticism at this point. Over-reacting is one of the calling cards of youth, and I saw it as their privilege to get worked up over this kind of death and felt strangely touched by it. But these three deaths helped put the passing of John Lennon in a better context.

And that is to say not everyone loves who you love, whether we're talking icons you relate to or simply someone in your life. I've seen plenty of death and destruction in my time, and will be seeing a lot more before I check out. Friends and relatives getting diseases or dying, marriages falling apart, relationships crumbling, etc. It all adds up in some sense. The real pain I've felt over loved ones suffering is far greater than anything I've felt for a cultural icon, regardless of how intensely I identified with that person's work. And the realization has sunk in that grieving for a cultural icon is a strange form of self pity, that this person's passing makes one focus on whatever part of one's soul felt touched by that person's work, and that deep, very private place is somehow hurt or broken by this passing. With musicians, their deaths are always tied into youth, so the mourners can pull a double whammy--mourn their fallen star and their faded youth in one sweet, all-encompassing funeral (in Lennon's case, one that occurs every December).

All these years later, that just makes me feel hollow. It doesn't ring true. I'm tired of living in a culture where people are either having youth-worship shoved in their faces 24-7, or spending all their time looking back like Don Henley in "The Boys of Summer". This is what happens every time a pop star dies, this completely illegitimate generational navel-gazing. You have to feel something, one way or the other. You're either with us or against us--and, frankly, we prefer against as we need some horrible enemy, the ever-present them, to convince ourselves how wonderful, true and right we are.

Fuck this shit. I am certain John Lennon would have agreed with me. The kind of monstrous pressure and false sincerity that he so cleanly refuted over and over with his music is now the norm. It still kills stars--whether by their own hand (Cobain), or in the service of the myth (Smalls and Shakur--but that list is long). What would I recommend Lennon fans do on December 8? A lot of things. Go see a new band. Fuck. Call your parents. Watch a football game. Catch a movie. Buy a dog. Read LeisureSuit.net. Go out and get hammered with a group of friends. Whatever. Just go on living. The same way you were 20 years ago on December 8. Sit around mourning his passing? Life's too short for that shit, even if some nutcase doesn't gun you down halfway through it.