This week marks the 42nd anniversary of John Lennon’s murder here in New York City. I remember that evening as vividly as anything in my life. I was a kid, born too late to be a first generation Beatlemaniac, with a dream of being either a professional musician or a radio personality, sitting in front of my television on that horrible night (when I certainly should have been in bed asleep) watching Monday Night Football as Howard Cosell made the chilling announcement on the air, somewhere around 11PM.

Lennon was dead.

As a youngster who had only recently become a bona-fide Beatlemaniac, his death was a tremendous blow. To the tens of millions of people he touched with his music, his senseless killing was as devastating a loss as there could have been outside of losing a loved one. That’s precisely how I felt at the time. I had no father growing up, so rock-n-roll – particularly the Beatles – were a kind of emotional salve. I so adored the music of the Beatles that – at the risk of sounding painfully maudlin – I felt like a little piece of me died that night.

Much has come and gone over four decades. Yet, as central to my life as music was (and still is) – as tightly as it is woven (you might say tangled) so completely throughout the fabric of my very existence – I grew to realize a cold hard reality that a fatherless boy in need of role models had to understand: that musicians were not infallible heroes. I don’t know of many entertainers who are, frankly. Whatever allusions I had as a young guy about the power and relevance of one’s celebrity was entirely a concoction of my own starving mind and soul that took almost everything I had to shake. It wasn’t easy, but I long ago stopped looking at celebrities as deities on earth – which was a huge thing for me – and chose to focus on their accomplishments.

Lennon himself would scoff at the idea of himself being a martyr or a hero of some kind. And as important as music is in every one of our lives – I’ve heard it appropriately referred to as “God’s drug” – I can hardly equate genuine heroism with a killer sounding rhythm guitar track (as in Lennon’s performance on the Beatles’ “All My Loving”). As a musician, I tremendously admire Lennon’s songwriting ability (particularly with the Beatles) and his capabilities as a rhythm guitarist.

Lennon, as the peace-loving, anti-establishment, power-to-the-people-politically-active variation of himself, is inexorably woven into the popular culture. Speaking purely as a musician, it is a genuine shame that when the name John Lennon is mentioned, the images that are first conjured up are almost always of his hippie-dippie, anti-war activist, bed-in era self, ever-epoxied to the side of Yoko Ono. (Please believe that I am not writing this from a political perspective whatsoever. Elm Treason does not talk politics on any of the band’s music sites…ever. We refuse to alienate half of our audience on matters that don’t concern the music). I use the word “shame” from a purely musical angle.

Lennon wrote outstanding music throughout the entire journey of his life, no question about that. But the fact is … that Jesus-Christ looking rock idol wouldn’t have become the “Imagine” crooning counter-cultural icon he did if it were not for what he and his three mates from Merseyside accomplished during the years 1963-1968.

It is John Lennon, the songwriter, the Beatle, the man who helped transform popular music forever (with his equally genius partner, Paul McCartney) that I acknowledge here – particularly the early Lennon material.

Simply put, John Lennon either wrote or co-wrote some of the most memorable music in the history of human civilization. His sense of melody, timing (odd as it could be at times) and his ability to create an unforgettable “hook” has rarely been duplicated – save for his partner of many years, Sir Paul McCartney. During the early Beatle years, so many of the songs that are now considered pop music standards and classics came from John Lennon.

Long before there was the experimental, socially conscious, primal scream version of John Lennon with wire-rims and scraggly center-parted hippie hair, there was the brilliant mop-topped songsmith John Lennon – the one that will forever have his name uttered by human lips long after almost every other human being that has ever existed on this planet is forever forgotten. The music and melodies he and Paul wrote were as influential on the artists that succeeded them as any that have ever existed. John, Paul, George and Ringo – to this day – are the benchmarks by which others are measured.