"It's hard to believe it's almost been 30 years since I heard Howard Cosell deliver the news on Monday Night Football that John Lennon had been killed.I was still in high school when John Lennon died so I was too young to remember the Beatles as anything more than a former band.
When the Beatles invaded America, I was less than a year old.
Three summers later, when Sgt. Peppers transformed popular music and America's culture, I was still a toddler."
But regardless of my late start, John Lennon and the Beatles still changed my life in a way that few others have. I didn't see the Fab Four introduced to America by Ed Sullivan, or endure the pain of a breakup to the strains of "Yesterday," or drop acid with my friends while listening to Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. But I did have their music, and in the end that's all that mattered.
My transformative moment with the band came on the last day of 8th Grade when my friends and I rode our bikes home from school in Upstate New York. When we reached the mall, we dropped our bikes and ran into the record store. One friend bought the latest Kiss album and another grabbed something by AC/DC. Instead of buying something in my decade, I settled on the Beatles' 1967-1970 "blue album." That decision would change my life.
By the end of that first weekend, I was hooked. I spent the next four or five years hunting down every Beatles album, bootleg, solo album and documentary. I'm not sure why I had so much trouble tracking down albums like Let it Be during the mid-1970s. Maybe it was because Elmira, New York record stores had limited stock or maybe it's because Capitol Records hadn't figured out yet that they could sell more albums by a band that broke up years ago than a new band exploding on the scene.
