The End

"and in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make"

42 years ago on this date, music history was made on a London rooftop. It was January 30th, 1969 when the most popular, influential, and arguably greatest band in the history of music on this planet set up their instruments and cameras to record their swan song.

It is highly unlikely that anyone on that roof on that cold day realized what they were experiencing exactly, which would be the final 'live' performance by The Beatles.

For the legendary quartet that would be forever linked by their musical genius together, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, this was the culmination of a grueling month of work. Throughout January of 1969 the band had worked zealously on the studio recordings for "Let It Be", the album that would ultimately become their final release as a working band.

The concept for "Let It Be" was that it would be all new material which would be performed in front of a 'live' audience at the same time as it was being recorded, a process that had never been attempted previously in contemporary music. But turning this vision of Paul's into a reality proved far more difficult in practice than in theory.

The Beatles were trying to work their way through the stresses and strains that their celebrity, their personal lives and relationships, and simply a decade of working, living, and travelling together had created. These pressures would soon split the band forever, and trying to find a location to shoot this particular project highlighted their problems.

1980: Not A Kid Anymore

All this year at my Facebook page, which you can view from the link in the sidebar here at my website by joining up yourself and 'friend'-ing me, I am taking a daily trip back in time to the 1980's.

Each month I am highlighting a different year chronologically, and this month have been featuring the music, tv, movies, and important events of the first year of the decade: 1980.

In 1980 the world changed, both in my own individual life and the world at large, in some of the most important and influential ways it ever would. Just one year earlier, as 1979 dawned, I was a 17-year old high school senior living in an apartment in South Philly with my dad and brother. Little did I know how much a life could change in less than a year.

I had been dating a girl, Anne Jacobs, ever since meeting her down at the Jersey shore in Wildwood, New Jersey during the late summer of 1976. We overcame the fact that I lived in South Philly without a car and she lived out in the Delaware County suburb of Prospect Park to become high school sweethearts.

Anne was a year behind me in school, and so while I was finishing up my senior year and preparing to graduate from St. John Neumann high school in South Philadelphia during the first half of 1979, she was still just a junior at Archbishop Prendergast high school out in Drexel Hill, Delaware County.

It was at some point in the late spring of '79 that we began to realize something big might be up. There were increasingly unmistakable signs to us that Anne had become pregnant, and by the early summer we knew it was true. We told our parents at the end of that summer, and I put my LaSalle University plans aside to go out and find a job.

The 1980's

My life has pretty much been able to be compartmentalized into and defined by each of the decades in which I have lived. The 1960's were my childhood at home on American Street in South Philly being raised by my parents.

The 1970's were defined by my own adolescence and high school days, as well as my mom's illness and my parents divorce.

The 1990's were my early policing days, and highlighted by meeting and getting married to my wife. This past decade by our life in Somerton, my becoming a grandparent, becoming a police supervisor, and attending and graduating college.

The decade of the 1980's were my 20's, highlighted by my becoming a young parent, my first marriage, my days in the banking industry, and my joining a softball team that would lead me to the best friends of my adult life.

The decade began with a life-changing event, the birth of my first daughter on February 2nd, 1980 and ended with another when I took the written exam to become a Philadelphia police officer in December of 1989.

Those who know me or have followed this website over the years know that those 1980's were not just another world for me as far as my family life and my career, but they also found me a completely different person politically and culturally than I am now.

As I've stated here before, I spent the 80's and early 90's as a political liberal Democrat who voted for Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and yes, even Michael Dukakis during the decade's various presidential races.

Rock & Roll Heaven: Kurt Cobain

The tragic, untimely loss of young superstar talent in the rock-n-roll world has often been associated with the hippie-era, flower child period of the late 1960's and early 1970'2.

But the passing years have shown that it is not times that are to blame, but the choices these individuals made within a culture and lifestyle that often encourages those choices.

The perfect case in point came over three decades after the deaths of Janis and Jimi, with the death of garage band, grunge-rock legend Kurt Cobain. On April 5th, 1994, Kurt Cobain, lead singer of the popular band 'Nirvana', killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head at his home in Seattle.

Cobain had chronic suicidal tendencies that manifested themselves many times over the years, and increasingly in the months leading to his death. These incidents, and indeed his final demise, likely grew out of a bout with classic, severe depression made worse by the abuse of alcohol and drugs, particularly heroin.

He was just 27 years old. Sound familiar? The more things change in the rock world, the more they stay the same.

Rock & Roll Heaven: Janis Joplin

It is hard to believe that it has been nearly four decades now. On Saturday, October 3rd, 1970 Janis Joplin had stopped at Sunset Sound Studios in L.A. to listen to the instrumental for a song that she would be recording the following day. She failed to show up on Sunday for that recording.

The producers became upset and sent a roadie to the Landmark Motor Hotel where Janis had been residing since the end of August. He found her custom-painted psychedelic Porsche in the parking lot, and proceeded to her room. No doubt he was likely thinking that the hard partying 27-year old was sleeping off a Saturday night hangover or high.

On entering her room, however, he was stunned to find her dead on the floor where she had collapsed after an overdose of heroin during a night in which she had also been drinking alone.

A small, private funeral service was attended by her immediate family, and Janis was cremated with her ashes scattered by plane into the Pacific Ocean and along California's Stinson Beach.

Just three days earlier, on October 1st, she had made what she never realized would be her final recording, a birthday greeting of the song "Happy Trails" for John Lennon. Lennon's birthday was October 9th, and the recording did not reach his home until after Joplin's death. It was like receiving a gift from the grave, the haunting voice of a ghost.

But the tragedy of Janis Joplin's death is not that she died so young, with so much talent, and with so much still to offer the world.