When John Met Claudio

Yoko, John (L) and Carl Claudio (R), summer '71

Forty years ago today, John Lennon was killed. The next morning, 19-year-old college-sophomore-me had a radio show to do, and all the other Boston stations were playing "Give Peace a Chance" and "All You Need is Love" and "Imagine."

Well, I felt darker than that. I played "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and "Run for Your Life" and "Help!"

Forty years later, I see Above Us Only Sky on Netflix, the Yoko-driven documentary about the making of the "Imagine" record at an English country house in the summer of 1971.

The proceedings are shaggy and fun, George Harrison dropping by, Phil Spector at the helm, and then suddenly this unkempt, clearly troubled Vietnam Vet named Claudio shows up and insists on meeting Lennon because he believes Lennon wrote all his songs for Claudio.

The encounter is - amazingly - on film, and Lennon patiently hears Claudio out and tries to reason with him - "How could I know you?" - and that he, like Bob Dylan, just writes things hoping people will relate.

The encounter ends - even more amazingly - with Lennon telling Claudio he looks hungry and bringing him into the house for a meal.

And when the album Imagine is released it includes the song "I don't wanna be a soldier mama/I don't wanna die." I read up on (Carl) Claudio (here) and he worked on farms and a Ford auto plant and when it closed he bought himself an ultra-light airplane, flew it too low and slow and the plane stalled, landed in a tree and tore his aorta from his heart. Dec. 22, 1981 - dead at 33.

In light of what happened a year earlier, when another obsessed fan came with the same kind of delusional narcissistic energy and took John away from every one else -- the Claudio scene was so moving and chilling and I don't even know what.

John, we miss ya.

Oh, Yoko. (Of Bowie and Photoshop)

We're all devastated today by the death of David Bowie.  Social media is full of sadness from those of us who survived adolescence learning from Bowie that it's not just okay to be different, it's actually more interesting.  As I commented elsewhere, There are only a handful of artists so iconic we take their eternal presence in our lives for granted. So when they die we are truly shocked they were mortal. 

So many artists chimed in with loving memories and feelings, like Annie Lennox, who sang at Freddie Mercury's memorial with him. (awesome rehearsal clip is here) 

Like a gazillion other people, I feel stunned by the news that David Bowie has departed this earth. At the loss of...
Posted by Annie Lennox on Monday, January 11, 2016

Singer Amy Rigby posted plaintively about her husband, Wreckless Eric, 

"I can't bear going upstairs to tell Eric about Bowie...I just can't. If I don't tell him I can pretend it's not true."

And then there's Yoko Ono. 

I am sure she meant well. 

But Yoko posted her own feelings today about Bowie's death -- well, it was all about David and John Lennon's relationship:

 "As John and I had very few friends we felt David was as close as family." 

and she declared he'd been like a second father to Sean.

She chose to illustrate her post with this photo: 

Cool, right? 

Except a friend of mine had just posted the original photo, which seems to have been from the Grammys, and seems to have looked like this:

Let's give her the benefit of the doubt.

All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Keys

Nobody told me there'd be days like these, especially the night before Christmas Eve. It's a tale of keys lost and found that Rube Goldberg could not have charted.

Parker Spitzer was airing a pre-taped greatest hits -- including the excellent stocking stuffer of Gene Simmons on his visit to the Anne Frank house --  so I had a rare day off. My girlfriend was in Colorado with her folks, my kids were out of town with their mom.  So it was Errand Day.

Escape from "A Wonderful Life"

Each Christmas, the chestnuts are taken out of mothballs to pull at our heartstrings and pocketbooks. Linus shames the cynics with his Biblical message, Bing and Bowie cryogenically reanimate their intergenerational pa-rum-pa-pum-pum, and Scrooge and George Bailey rediscover the meaning of life.

Well, I have a slightly different tradition.

"Hello, I'm John"

Simon and.....

A lot of people are down on the Internet these days, for many good reasons. (Myself included, in this space.)

I have weaned myself from online Scrabble, at least, but when I see my 13-year-old daughter enmeshed in building her new Facebook page, in my head I start to hear the song "Cat's in the Cradle."

Tonight, however, after a long workweek, I came home to one of those wonderful free-association web experiences that led me to an amazing video, which, while hardly obscure -- it's closing in on a million views -- I had never seen before.

And which, more than all the produced tributes to John Lennon around the occasion of his birthday a few weeks ago, bracingly reminded me of the one-of-a-kind way he wore his icon-hood, like a shaggy bathrobe.

"Well.....How Did I Get Here?"

Although I left the staff of Rolling Stone around 1991 and have only done a few pieces for them since then, the tag "Rolling Stone writer" still follows me like a tin can on a "Just Married" car. Which is fine with me. It was probably the most sustained fun I ever had at a job, though, as with so many things in youth, I didn't realize it at the time.

As Talking Heads -- my first cover subjects -- hauntingly sang, "You may ask yourself -- how did I get here?" How did my level of pop-culture fandom, consumerism, and opinionating rise above the normal American level and become a profession? Simplified answer: childhood trauma.

I still remember the moment I became aware of pop music as something I needed to know more about.