Murder at the Dakota

“I Want to Hold Your Hand”

It was cold, but I was sitting in the backseat of an old Chevy, while somewhere in the trunk my shotgun was lying stowed away with four or five others. I was out north of town with some other high school guys, about to start hunting rabbits, when the DJ on WOKY-Milwaukee, announced he was about to play something so new and amazing that no one should miss it.

“The Beatles,” the DJ said. “They’re Brits, and everybody is talking about their music.”

Something like that.

I was 15, I think. What did I know about music that late December afternoon? Nothing, really, but somehow that snowy Wisconsin Saturday is fixed in my memory by a DJ’s constant trumpeting and a new pop song from floppy-haired crazies, a song whose lyrics I still know by heart.

“And I Love Her”

That summer, just as sexually stupefied as most 15-year-old males, I went with my parents to a cottage on Shawano Lake. Somewhere down the beach, at night, from some cottage I don’t believe I ever saw, “And I Love Her,” along with a lilting medley of other sweet nocturnal emissions from A Hard Day’s Night would sally up the lakeshore and outdo any inspiration my parents’ old hymns could muster. Fanny Brice stood no chance against Lennon/McCartney. I don’t have any memory of the girls who played that album hour after hour that week, but they sauntered saucily through my adolescent imagination.

Even today, the word “Schwano” still prompts “If I Fell” to play from the juke box in my mind, just about all I remember from that family vacation.

Of course, my parents never knew.

“Strawberry Fields Forever”

By the time I went off to college in 1966, Hard Days Night went along, as did Rubber Soul, Revolver and just about anything else I could get my hands on. By then, good Christian parents knew what was happening because what the Beatles did beside sing had become news, enriching the imaginations of a Sixties-era kids like me with their excesses. They were almost contraband withun the eyes of the administration of the college I attended. If you played them, you kept the volume down because they definitely, in a Sixties’ sense, revolutionary.

The world as I knew it was coming apart at the seams. Without a doubt, they were, in fact, far more dangerous than the old pietists even understood.

At an art exhibit at a Christian college in Chicago, I heard “Strawberry Fields” played as part of some artsy student thing—aloud!—over and over again, and my mind got blown, not by the music, but by the fact that this Christian college tolerated something mine never would, a fact which made no sense really, except to sweep more sand into the line that once was cut deep between my own parents’ sense of the City of God on one hand, and the City of Man—Vanity Fair—on the other. I stood there in that art exhibit listening to other cuts from Sgt. Pepper and knew for a fact that nobody really knew what the heck they were doing. Let “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” reign because what is good and pure and righteous is now, by official proclamation, completely up for grabs.

I felt freed--in an existential sense--fearfully.

"Why Don't We Do It in the Road?"

“Rocky Raccoon," "Back in the U. S.S. R," and “Obla-di, Obla-da” didn’t press my buttons the way some of those earlier hits had, but I bought "the white album" anyway and played it incessantly, if for no other reasons the sorrow of a gently weeping guitar and a call for revolution.

The Beatles were far beyond me then, in 1968, the year almost everything changed. People were marching in Alabama, cities were burning, too many guys my age were coming back from Southeast Asia in body bags, and we had this creep for a President, a man who seemed clueless, Tricky Dick. The Beatles were beyond me, cutting a swath I wanted badly to be part of, a kid with the sweetest Christian parents.

I was conflicted but I'd turned my back on old-fashioned righteousness. We'd come into a whole new world.

Postscript

Last year I taught a class at a Christian college in Georgia, where, students told me, if you climbed up in the tower that is the very symbol of the college, rumor had it you could still find, somewhere in the rafters, the carved initials of Mark David Chapman, who, 30 years ago yesterday, gunned down John Lennon in front of the Dakota building in NYC, where Lennon and his partner Yoko Ono lived with their son.

Somehow, Chapman’s having been a student in a Christian college in my own tradition is a fact that sticks with me, even though I know his pathology is wider far than his own deep dalliance with faith. He was obsessed with Catcher in the Rye, was the carrying the novel when he shot Lennon four times in the back, had scribbled into its pages that the novel itself was his statement. He was deranged, a pitiable soul at once obsessed with Lennon and incensed with him for daring to compare the Beatles’ popularity with God almighty’s.

And yet, something about all this fits. To me, the Beatles never were nor ever could be simply entertainment. In a way that parallels the lives of literally millions of people my age, it’s fair to say that I grew up with them, and that the old pietists—like the old pieties—weren’t necessarily wrong about what Fab Four represented. In a way, I can't help thinking that Chapman was their own demented hero, carrying out an act so devoutly to be wished.

The Beatles weren’t acting alone throughout that whole era, they may not have even the most powerful agents of change, but in my life at least they were not only everything my parents feared--and more; they were also everything that WOKY DJ ever thought they’d be when he trumpeted them like he did, December of 1962--this hot new rock group from Liverpool, England, who was going to be something we’d never forget.

About that, he was absolutely right.