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Boston, Massachusetts The John F. Kennedy assassination, the John Lennon assassination. You never forget where you were when you heard about the two Johns. I heard about JFK from my second grade teacher in class. We were sent home in November 1963. But in December 1980, I was writing rock criticism for the Boston Globe and had just left an Iggy Pop concert at the Paradise Theater. It was Iggy on the comeback trail – wild, raw, ferocious. I went with a few friends to their nearby apartment, to wind down and listen to some late-night music on the radio. Then, the news came crackling through, life changed, and that Iggy review was never written. Shot. Lennon? Why? I called my colleague at the Globe, Steve Morse. Through shock and tears, we discussed what we knew we had to do: Put the sorrow and anger aside and dig deep into our memory bank of the Beatles' and Lennon's solo music. Then, go to the Globe and cobble together a Page 1 appreciation for the next day's paper, and get it done in about an hour. We divvied up his career, managed somehow to make some sense of it, and staggered to our homes early in the morning. I had dinner with Steve recently and Lennon's killing came up. "I still remember the incredible emotions of that night," he said. "In many ways, we lost our youth. I can still feel the tears, but a job had to be done, and, ultimately, it was an honor to write a joint appreciation of the man."  Lennon's time to give peace a chance ended 26 years ago. That was pretty much how I felt, too. Steve and I had both had seen the new documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon," and that period – when Beatlemania had vanished and Lennon had begun his ascent into anti-war activism as a songwriter and as a person – was made vivid again. And the government's attempts to yank his visa and deport him – with the furtive work of the FBI and the INS – made you ashamed all over again. Lennon was clearly targeted because of his anti-war, anti-Nixon sentiments, and, moreover, his power to stir the people. I wonder what people who weren't around then will make of this. He had always been quick with a quip. In the film, longtime Lennon friend Elliot Mintz opined that "when he met Yoko, he found the rest of his voice." When John and Yoko got married in 1969 at the Rock of Gibraltar and then staged their Amsterdam "bed-in" honeymoon, I thought it was a crazy stunt. Watching this again through the tunnel of time in the movie, I thought perhaps Lennon was just being canny, figuring that since the media was going to surround them anyway, why not try to impart a message of peace? As to the repetitive, lilting – but persuasive – anti-war song Give Peace a Chance, he said, "Happiness is a good vibe … In essence, we're selling it like soap. … Hundreds of millions will hear Give Peace a Chance, like I Wanna Hold Your Hand." There are some who will never forgive Lennon for his abandonment of Beatle-dom and his embrace of Yoko and left-wing politics. But whatever innocence the Beatles supposedly brought to America after the Kennedy assassination was gone by the late ‘60s as the Vietnam War raged and protest mounted. To Lennon, not speaking his piece wasn't an option. "You have to be politically aware," he said in the film. To dodge that aspect – as a songwriter – would be to take a pass on reality and miss the tempo of his times. Those first two "real" solo records, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imagine (1971) were stunners – and troubling to many Beatles fans. The song God put a nail in the Beatles' coffin. The first album was a primal scream, a mostly unadorned, mid-tempo work steeped in bitterness and disillusionment. Lennon was shedding idealism (beliefs in God and Beatles), expressing anger and, yet, exhibiting love and faith in Yoko. If the Beatles were his old rock, Yoko was his new rock. Let the world know! The second album had some anger (directed at Paul McCartney, at hypocrisy, at war), and more love aimed at Yoko. It boasted the famous title song – a paean to equality and the dream of a world without possessions. It's that latter song that may have gotten him killed. Late in 1980, Esquire published a caustic piece about Lennon the landowner, and painted him as a very rich man flummoxing the public with his utopian dream of non-ownership. Mark David Chapman read the piece, and there is the belief that it triggered Chapman's sense of betrayal. I remember being angered by the piece, too, and wondered how accurate it was. But Lennon was a man of many contradictions – don't forget he temporarily left Yoko for Mai Pang, he lived a debauched life in LA, partying it up with Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson, and he made that wretched "Sometime in New York City/Live Jam" record. The search for love and peace were constants in his life, but the man tried ample philosophical approaches, to say nothing of ample drugs – pot, LSD, heroin.
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