Dec. 8, 2020
On this night forty years ago, I was huddled in the kitchen of a house I shared with my friend Cheri Knight. It was a spacious split-level rambler built in the late 1950s or early 60s, surrounded by tall trees and dense salal bushes on a rural back road in Olympia, about a 20-minute walk from the college we both attended.
The house was seriously shabby, fallen into neglect from years as a rental to hippy college students. The previous tenant was a friend of Cheri’s who passed the house on to us after his girlfriend, a juggler, had left him. He couldn’t stay, there were just too many painful memories. Such as the huge mural he’d painted in the basement of him and his ex-, dressed in flowing white robes with garlands in their hair, staring blissfully into each other’s eyes, surrounded by benevolent forest creatures and possibly some elves or other mythical beings.
When we moved into the house it seemed like a great idea. It was summer then. The doors and windows were flung open to the sweet forest air. We had no immediate neighbors and we could play music without disturbing anyone. For a few months it was rather idyllic. Then came winter.
The house had no functioning heat. We couldn’t use the ancient wood stove in the living room because it leaked smoke and we would have asphyxiated. Our bedrooms were walk-in refrigerators. There were actual mushrooms growing out of the bathroom walls. We coped by hanging thick blankets over the doors of the kitchen, where an electric space heater under the kitchen table was our only source of warmth. This was where virtually all of our waking activity took place.
And so on the evening of December 8, 1980 I was huddled there at the table, possibly working on the score for The Webster Cycles. This involved combing through a massive old Webster’s dictionary and harvesting a list of all the words that contained only the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, and G – a tedious task in that pre-digital era, but all for the sake of art. I was listening to KAOS-fm, the college radio station where Cheri and I both worked. I don’t recall who was on the air or what kind of music they were playing. I just remember that suddenly it all stopped and the DJ announced that John Lennon had been murdered. And there was now an unexpectedly large, gaping hole in the world.
I had honestly never contemplated the possibility of life without John Lennon. In fact, by that point in my life I rarely contemplated John Lennon at all. As a kid I was as much a Beatles fan as anyone, but I didn’t really follow his solo career much beyond the ubiquitous radio hits. I think the only post-Beatles albums of his I ever had were Plastic Ono Band and Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions, which hardly qualify as representative titles in his ouvre. I’ve never even heard most of his other solo albums in their entirety. By the time I was 20 I was more interested in John Cage and Morton Feldman, Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, the Slits and the Pop Group, Delta 5 and Young Marble Giants. John Lennon was pretty much off my radar, even though Double Fantasy had just been released a few weeks earlier. It seemed utterly irrelevant to me then.
So it feels cheeky of me to give Lennon the One Song treatment now. Based on what? Certainly not my intimate knowledge and devoted affection for his solo work. And I wouldn’t even begin to try with his Beatles-era stuff; there’s just too much of it that is great to pare it down to ten songs let alone one. I am clearly ignorant and totally unqualified for this undertaking. And yet…
If I had tried to do this a month ago, it probably would have been a choice between two very different contenders: the Dylan-esque political ballad Working Class Hero and the junky fever dream Cold Turkey. But a couple of weeks ago I heard this song for the first time on the car radio (thanks DJ Riz Rollins) and it blew me away. I wasn’t even sure it was Lennon at first, but I loved it instantly and for now it’s my new go-to favorite Lennon solo song. No doubt there are many other deep catalog gems of which I remain shamefully unaware. I’m prepared to be educated and astonished. Hit me in the comments.