Probably found out via Cosell but dont' recall. What I do remember is my high school biology teacher tried starting class and was too broken up to speak. He jumped up on the lab table & talked to us as peers about his life what music meant to him and how it contributed to him teaching biology. Most memorable 45 minutes of high school by a lot.
I was a freshman in high school and had been a Beatles freak for as long as I could remember. I was in bed at the time but not asleep, and I could hear my older brothers and my father watching MNF in the room below me. I heard the commotion over the news and got up to try and figure out what was going on. None of it made sense to me, and I remember going to sleep with the notion that maybe they were wrong about him being dead and that they would be able to revive him somehow by the time I woke up.
That was obviously not the case, and I was consumed by it for months thereafter. My bus stop was around a half mile from my house--crazy that that is unfathomable these days--and I passed a news store on the way. Every day for at least two weeks I bought the
NY Post,
Newsday and the
NY Daily News because I couldn't resist the tabloid fodder about everything to do with it. Pretty sure I still have most of those papers. I still remember one headline: "The Face of the Callous Killer."
I lost my mother at such a young age that I really wasn't even conscious of that loss at the time; and we had experienced the usual losses of other close relatives to illness, and a neighbor to suicide. But this one was different.
A killing.
By a
fan!?!
Who was reading
The Catcher in the Rye, my favorite book?!?
As I said, none of it made sense, and in many ways it was the end of the innocence for me because I saw the world as a much different--and darker--place. At least sometimes.
Thank God for the music though. Plenty of light in that.
Good call by Gifford.