Life: Double Fantasy

I remember the night my Dad told me John Lennon was dead. I was seven. It was hard to understand that the man I heard on the stereo at night was now gone. Would the records not work anymore? We put on Double Fantasy and listened.

My Dad is, well, guarded in many respects. But the news knifed right through his walls somehow and we sat and cried with each other as the music played on.

These days, music is an a la carte soundtrack to my daily life, but I’m not terrible vested in much of what goes through my ears. True, some things I am fond of, but not vested in. It’s not quite a part of my ritual; our relationship is mostly casual. A little of this. Bored now. Look for something new.

But back then, music was more than zeroes and ones on a hard drive. It was something physical I held in my hands. A tape I threaded through the reel-to-reel or a spiraled disc I ever so carefully laid a diamond needle onto. There was a ritual to it. I would put a cleaning solution onto a velvet-like brush, clean the record as it spun, then use a delicate comb to clean the needle. Then I would lift the arm gently with the pad of my extended index finger, lowering it slowly until I heard the speakers spring to life. I suppose in a way, it was the difference between homemade and store bought. One is easier and makes a lot of sense, but somehow it doesn’t have the same heart. One is for anybody; one is just for you.

We listened to music a lot those days. My parents had broken up and I would bounce between the two over the next few years. But my Dad and I always had that music. Clapton some nights, but more often than not it was The Beatles and John Lennon. Segovia on the reel-to-reel at bedtime, a show he’d taped off the local NPR affiliate. That particular track still resonates today, sending me to a quiet, warm, sleepy spot in my mind. Ah, but that Double Fantasy LP with John and Yoko was something different. It was like a musical way for my Dad to shut out the entire universe of noise and let me know I was loved, that I was his son and that my father loved me. There was such a blissful, childlike surety in those moments, when everything was okay in the world.

So, it was quite the inexplicable interruption upon our musical fortress when one of the strongest walls of our aural retreat lay bleeding on the sidewalk in a New York street. On this night, twenty-seven years ago.