John Lennon—Where were you when you heard of his death, what were you doing? →[More:]I've not seen anything about the anniversary (12/8) here on this site, nor on the mother-ship. I knew he was shot in early December but the day slid by me, but link following link tonight I just came across a post about it online, someone else writing about what it was for them to hear about it, who told them, etc and etc. And I thought maybe that'd be a good topic here; I've not posted but once here but I've been reading more lately, trying to get a bit of a sense about it here. So…

I was on my way out to Gilley's with probably my best friend at the time, who'd never been to Gilley's, which I felt criminal. Frank is almost certainly the biggest Beatles fan I've ever known, which made it more interesting of course.

So we're on our way out there and it's Beatles music plastered all over the radio, which Frank noticed but hey, co-incidence or whatever. Plus anytime a song ends I'm on the lookout for another station, I can't stand commercials so we wouldn't have gotten a chance to hear when it was talked about, which it absolutely had to have been, ad nauseam.

And so then we get into Gilley's and the band—probably it was the house band, I don't remember it being any big name—the band is playing friggin' Beatles songs, at friggin' Gilley's. WTfriggin'F?

And of course it wasn't long before we found out WTfriggin'F. Something else. It would have been a pretty big deal to me anyways but being with Frank magnified it, just one hell of a lot. We were sortof shocked, rocked, jangly, we talked a long time that night.

And I remember the next morning, driving that green Buick Skylark to the jobsite I was working that day—it was a chill, rainy morning in Houston, I'm on I10, the radio on, listening to it all, thinking about it all, wondering about it all, it's portent, the huge sadnesses of it, the huge loss. John Lennon was weak, and broken, and strong as stone, courageous, unbelievably creative, unreal stylish, obnoxious behind the scenes, brittle, brilliant, a junkie, one of the coolest people to walk this ball of dirt and water during my lifetime, one of the best, and one of the most influential.

It was/is a huge flashbulb memory moment to me, one of the largest in my life. (Cuban missal crisis, JFK's assassination, Beatles on Ed Sullivan, race riots (Detroit in particular, for whatever reason), MLK's assassination, Bobby's assassination, Reagan getting shot, 9/11, plus tons of others of course but more personal and likely not needed here.)

tl;dr—What were you doing when you heard John Lennon was shot?