Queen’s “The Game” was the first adult music album I bought with my own money; hard earned from my morning paper-route when I was 11 years old. It was mid December 1980 when I bought it, and two very significant events occurred that winter that shaped the future trajectory of my life. John Lennon had been assassinated in early December, and his senseless murder seemed to challenge everything I knew about the world. It struck me quite hard as a young Beatles fan, and it left an indelible mark on my psyche that I still acknowledge today. It also served as a catalyst to me becoming a voracious consumer of rock music – listening to the radio any chance I could get.
The second event was equally born of tragedy. Sometime in late December, just before school break, we were paid a visit at our elementary school by two RCMP Officers. They showed my class a photo of a young girl our age that had gone missing while riding her bike that November. They wanted to know if we knew her, or knew anything about what might have happened to her. Her name was Christine Weller and she was last seen 6 blocks from my house. To the kids in my class she looked familiar – but she went to a different school and we knew nothing about her beyond thinking she looked kinda cute in the photo. We were knuckleheads. How could we have known at the time that she’d been abducted and murdered by a monster? Christine’s body was found about a week later on Christmas Day. She had been the first of Canadian serial killer Clifford Olson’s 11 known victims to be killed during his rein of unimaginable terror.
I spent untold hours listening to Queen’s “The Game” during the subsequent year (1981). As the winter rolled over into spring, I poured over the album’s liner notes and lyrics looking for secrets. I sought the mysteries of the adult world in the album’s poetics. My parents, estranged from rock music themselves, could no longer provide all the answers to my questions. And while I got lost listening to “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Dragon Attack”, Clifford Olson, who lived about 200 meters from the border of my paper route, would pluck 10 more young souls off the streets of the Greater Vancouver area and commit unfathomable atrocities to their personhood before finally being captured at the end of that summer.
My love of music and my entry into young adulthood was marked in time by these two events. There’s no specific connection between them other than the manifestation of the burden of knowing that I suddenly carried. I was gifted “Double Fantasy” that Christmas and have written about that specific experience quite extensively, but this is the first time I’ve connected John Lennon’s death to the event of growing up in the stalking grounds of a predatory child killer. In a way, Olson managed to end all our childhoods. Life is strange that way. I’m still looking for those answers.
