Thursday, June 28, 2007

The Rest of the Story

From The Clothes Have No Emperor, a history of the Reagan era by Paul Slansky:

12/10/1980 Radio commentator Paul Harvey scoffs at the renewed calls for gun control in the wake of John Lennon's murder. "Well, now, wait a minute," he says. "Death has claimed a lot of rock musicians prematurely, and none with guns. Keith Moon and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix OD'd on drugs, and Elivs Presely and Brian Jones and John Bonham... Plane crashes killed Jim Croce and Otis Redding and Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Ronnie Van Zant. In fact, Lennon at 40 lived much longer than most of those." So, it turns out that he was really kind of lucky.