thomasthoughts

I grew up listening to hip-hop (naturally as a New Yorker born in the mid-80′s) and whatever my parents listened to. Most of my earliest memories involve music. I always remember hearing Michael Jackson with my mother. My father as a kid in the 60′s / 70′s naturally listened to Rock / Soul / R&B of that era. I’d always known the Beatles from Q104.3 … I’d never really been into them. If any band I really got into through my father it was Pink Floyd. But I knew who the Beatles were.

In November of 2005 I was looking for a birthday present for my father. I’m at the BestBuy in Staten Island and I see this :

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And at this point I know that John Lennon was a Beatle. I know that my father liked the Beatles. And if I were to call anyone a ‘Working Class Hero’ (I’d at that point never heard the expression or the song) it would be him. But things aren’t so simple in any life and especially not in mine. My father on getting the gift says he doesn’t want it. Maybe the statement was too much. We’re a family of men, my father, my brothers and my saint of a mother. We don’t typically do very sentimental things for each other. And my father doesn’t want much – he says – ‘I want you to take care of yourself’. A true good man. Was then and still is my hero and grateful to have him.

But here I am with this John Lennon 2CD album called “Working Class Hero”. Now myself, a young working class man just starting out in the film business, always a lover of music, never a returner of anything, I decided to open this up and listen to it. I’d never listened to a full Beatles album before. I’d never listened to a John Lennon song and I’m pretty sure the only one I’d ever heard is “Imagine”.

And I listened. And I learned. And I sang along. And it’s been with me like I knew it all along. There is so much more to say. I work in a business where we are at different locations all the time, for instance last week on each day I started in 5 different places around the city. Tomorrow and tuesday of all places I will be working just up Central Park West from the Dakota where he lived and died… on the anniversary of his death.

How little I knew just buying what I thought was a gift for my father.  There are people who will tell you with certainty that I am the reincarnation of the man. I’m not saying it. I want to say tonight that I’ve been thinking about it and though I wasn’t born until 5 years later, as I put his whole life, the world, and the events together I still can’t believe it. How could someone shoot John Lennon? How could someone kill someone like me?

There is so much more to every story…

love & peace

we have to say that no one remembered ever truly dies