I wrote this song 42 years ago, Dec. 8th, 1980, in a cabin up Nine Mile back when Nine Mile was still out there, a good hour away from Missoula when the weather was good, another continent when it was bad.
I never sang or recorded it. I figured it was such a bummer song that no one at my relatively un-serious gigs (gig-lets, gig-gles) would want to hear it, but I've always liked it.
A friend of mine, Addison Double, wrote one at the same time, too, in Missoula, and I remember coming into town soon after the tragedy and sharing our musical heartaches in that old house on Stoddard Street just below what's now the Toole Street bridge spanning the railroad tracks. Stoddard was a dead-end then, only the White Pine and Sash mill yard across what passed for a street and no Toole St. bridge to hop you across the tracks to the happening part of town.
I remember Burlington Northern making trains in the hump yard just south of the house. There'd be a tremendous chugging of the diesel engine as it pushed the linked mix-matched cars heading to different parts of the country backwards and up the "hump" where, once every car was ready to roll down the the other side of the hump it would be uncoupled (maybe they already were) and you'd hear big steel wheels rolling on big steel rails for a few seconds as the loose car picked up speed and was channeled by the yard crew at the fork in the tracks that sent it to its proper train and then "BOOM!!" when the car hit the train on the make. Like a cannon. You'd sit straight up in bed out of a dead sleep. That was the old North Side. I loved it.
I imagine Addison and I swapping our Lennon tunes on a dark winter night (no streetlights then) to the sound of booming trains, or cannons, whichever your imagination preferred.
After so many years I don't remember all the words to Addison's songs, only the chorus:
"You can kill the singer
But you cannot kill the song
Unless you can kill everyone
Who wants to sing along."
I'll record my song soon and post it here, but in the meantime, here's to peace.
Mark David Chapman, You've Done a Terrible Thing
by Bill LaCroix
The news is out, it’s in all the papers
The killer stalks, and he’ll never get caught.
If you ever turned your back on a shadow
You might get shot, you just might get shot.
I used to listen to his songs when I was a kid
And I never got caught, and I liked them a lot.
I’d sit in my room and play them for hours
He helped shape my thought, yeah he helped shape my thought.
Chorus 1:
Then Mark David Chapman, he bought him a handgun
For two hundred bucks, for two hundred bucks.
He hid in the shadows and on Lennon’s back
He tried his luck, he tried his luck.
Guitar break
Chorus 2:
He was famous as Christ, sometimes he was careless
But you know that he tried, yeah you know that he tried.
He wrote some good songs about this world’s unfairness
And that’s how he died, y’know that’s how he died.
As the news of his death was splashed in the papers
I read the same message I heard in his songs.
It said look at this thing that’s happenin’ to people
Something’s wrong, yeah something’s wrong.
All those lonely people
Where do they all belong?
