The Kentucky Kernel was a powerful, even transformative experience for me. Two years as a staffer there set my course in life. Though I would only be a full-time journalist for brief stretches thereafter in my working life (I became a technologist, and then a social scientist), I nonetheless wrote for every publication that would have me as a freelancer. The Kernel lit that fire in me.
I did brief stints at the Kernel as editorial editor and associate editor, but most of my two years there were spent as an entertainment writer, alongside arts editor Cary Willis. Cary was a great editor to work for (as was his predecessor, Tom Clark); he gave me a free hand in my area (theater and cinema), was respectful of my craft, and even gave me a say in page layout, when I had strong ideas. He handled most of the music writing, but indulged me whenever there was some album or artist I felt like writing about.
I picked up a lot from Cary. I had never fully understood punk until I read what he wrote about it; The Clash and the Ramones had barely been names to me at all until I heard them through his ears. He convinced me that Debbie Harry was a force to be reckoned with; that Springsteen was, indeed, the new Woody Guthrie. And he was up on everything that I already loved. Where we overlapped huge, to my great satisfaction, was our love of David Bowie – only recently discovered, in my case.
And late in the night, on December 8, 1980, the report came over the wire that John Lennon had been murdered in New York City, gunned down by crazed fan Mark David Chapman.
Everyone at the Kernel was devastated by this news. Everyone in the world was devastated. The murder of John Lennon took its place in the do-you-remember-where-you-were-when annals of collective memory, alongside John, Bobby, and Martin. When John Lennon died, a door closed inside all of us that we didn’t even know was there. The world, as they say, would never be the same.
Lennon had, at the time, been emerging from the five-year cocoon of fatherhood, ensconced in the Dakota with his young son Sean while wife Yoko bounced around the world tending the family fortune. This emergence had led him to the studio, where he had been recording his first album in five years.
At the time of his murder, that album had just been released. Cary, of course, had reviewed it. Its first single, “(Just Like) Starting Over” - a song about renewal, situated in a Fifties vibe, had been John’s long-overdue return to the radio. His death sent it to #1 in both the US and UK.
Cary and I sat in the office the next day and had a long talk about both the album and John. I very much appreciated that despite Cary’s obvious contemporary leanings, he was as in tune with John Lennon and the Beatles, if not more, than I was. His somber reflections were heartfelt; I was comforted by that.
The album itself was a mixed bag, with way too much Yoko and not near enough of the resuscitated John. “Woman”, the easy, earnest paean to commitment he’d written for her, was the album’s second single, charting at #2 in the US and #1 in the UK in the month after his death. “Watching the Wheels” followed, hitting the Top 10 in America.
At that point in music history – rock ‘n’ roll was a mere 25 years old, remember – we'd only experienced a small clutch of tragedies. There’d been the 27 Club, a decade earlier – Janis, Jimi. Brian Jones. Jim Morrison. And The Day the Music Died – Buddy Holly. Ritchie Valens. The Big Bopper. Elvis, of course. But not so many, across a quarter century, and literally thousands of musicians.
But this – we had lost a Beatle. And not just a Beatle, but the Beatle.
Double Fantasy was the first actual John Lennon album I ever owned. I eventually gathered up all the others, but before 1980, I had only snared some of his singles, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” and so on, on cassette. I would end up studying his solo work with intense scrutiny over the years – and I played it for my kids, as they were growing up.
Cary and I would both find our way to the Louisville Courier-Journal, there to both carry on as rock journalists. He remains one of my most respected peers today.
The full circle came when I took Trey, then age 7, to hear Aaron Carter at Freedom Hall. At one point in the show, a white grand piano was lowered onto the stage from above on a platform, with Carter seated there. He proceeded to play “Imagine”.
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