Given the topic title saying “hit… hard”, and how Owen died, it kind squicks me out a little, but yeah definitely thought of him first. Then Eddy and Benoit.
Eddy was really hard on me because he’d exorcised his demons, gotten clean, and as a result had gotten not just to the top of his game, but the top of the whole industry period. Then his past transgressions just caught up with him and bang, gone in a flash.
Benoit just because of how tragic and bizarre the whole thing was, from the Bibles by the bodies, to the texts about the dogs to Chavo, to the way it turned out he had a brain the equivalent of an elderly alzheimers sufferer. And it hit in a slow news cycle and thus made the mainstream media in a way most stuff in the biz doesn’t unless it involves someone like Hogan.
Me too,I’m a huge Cardinals fan, and I remember not just listening to him in the '40s, but seeing him at the ballpark with a fishing net scooping up foul balls that rolled up the screen to the booth. I learned to like Skip Caray, too, and I miss him on Atlanta broadcasts.
Same for me. I was 14, and my aunts had turned me on to The Beatles, and I was teaching myself to play guitar by playing along with Beatles records. The very first song I ever performed in public, singing and playing guitar, was You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, one of John’s songs.
His death was my “I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard” moment. I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom, doing homework with the radio on, when the music was interrupted by the announcement.
Shannon Hoon - I was musically unaware for most of the late 80s and early 90s, and Blind Melon was one of the first bands I got into once I started to pay attention again. They were on a Muchmusic special in 1995 and Shannon’s daughter had recently been born, while my daughter had been born a year before. He seemed set on getting and staying clean for the sake of his kid. He had this “I wanna live for her” vibe that to me seemed parallel to my beating depression, and then poof he’s dead.
John Bonham’s death and the end of Led Zeppelin hit me pretty hard, though I can’t say why, except that at age 16 Led Zeppelin seemed like something that had always been there and always would be.
I was shocked by Lennon’s death–I wasn’t a fan of the Beatles but when I heard he’d been killed I was shaken–my 16 year old mind was thinking “Who the hell shoots a Beatle? You just don’t shoot Beatles!” (My sister was a Beatles fan and took his death hard. For days afterwards she was wearing black and couldn’t remember the details of basic things she had to do. It still upset her as an adult–she tried to give a report on Lennon’s assassination to a college class but broke down crying.)
Kurt Kobain’s death hit me at just the right time. Nirvana had been a revelation to me, and his death occurred just a few months before my high school graduation, which is an emotionally fertile time anyway. It really rocked me.
Also, John Lennon, not because of what happened, as I was too young to really appreciate it. But my parents’ reaction…
I try to imagine what it will be like when some of the celebrities whose work has really touched me…Neil Gaiman, Tori Amos, Mike Patton…when they pass. Hard to consider.
One most of you won’t ever have heard of, but was part of the fabric of British life for decades, because of her uncanny ear for the way we talk and think, and her ability to turn it into humour without malice. And because her death was so unexpected, and she was younger than me, dammit:
I love the Travis McGee novels with their bleak, cynical assessment of mid-century American values. I applied to the faculty at my grad school to write my AmLit dissertation on JDM, but the committee refused me on the grounds that he was a mere pulp fiction writer. Fucking snobs.
Plus, my folks spent winters on Siesta Key in Sarasota. Their house was just two blocks from where JDM lived. I always sort of hoped to be introduced to him as our family knew lots of people who knew him. I say “sort of” because while I did yearn to meet him, I also feared making a fool of myself by over-excitedly spewing semi-coherent fanbabble at him. So it’s probably for the best that I never got to shake his hand.
But I still wish he had lived long enough to give us a couple more Trav and Meyer novels.
River Phoenix - We were about the same age and I grew up watching him in some of my favorite movies. I felt more of a kinship to him than I did to many of his contemporary young actors. He was choosing interesting roles and I expected to see great things from him as he grew older.
Chris Farley - I was in college when he was killing it on SNL and when Tommy Boy came out, so I was perhaps at the prime age to appreciate his style of comedy. My friends and I would quote lines from his stuff all the time.
Sherri Lewis. I can’t even begin to tell you. Watched her when I was young. The Duckling and I watched Charley Horse Music Pizza every morning. She started to lose interest in early morning kid’s shows. And I said, so you’re not going to watch Sherri Lewis with me anymore. And she smiled. And then Sherri was gone. And I can’t believe how hard I took it.
Marilyn Monroe , I really liked her acting and it was so tragic the way she dies
Robin Williams, I was just thinking about him today and thought that gave us so much joy and yet he wasn’t able to have it himself .
JKF and Robert Kennedy and Dr. King
Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Robin Williams, they all made me laugh. Jerry Nelson aka Count von Count aka The Count taught me how to learn. I hadn’t imagined he was even mortal and I would never have called it ahead of time but it really stung. I called my little sister to reminisce and she had just heard and was upset too.
Also, for me, Chris Benoit was a real gut shot, both because I was a fan and also how the information came out. First it appeared that he had simply died, then reports that his family had all been killed, and for a time it looked like it was a home invasion or something like that. It appeared that he was a victim of horrible violence along with his family.
And then we found out the truth.
Over the course of a few hours, an absolute emotional tidal shift.