I don't have a great story about where I was or what I was doing when I heard John Lennon had been murdered.

I think I just heard it on the morning news the next day. The news didn't shatter me, but it did leave me shocked and profoundly bewildered.

Here is why Mark David Chapman said he did it, according to a BBC story about some taped interviews he recorded:

"There was a successful man who kind of had the world on a chain, so to speak, and there I was, not even a link of that chain, just a person who had no personality.

"And something in me just broke."

There were reasons other than that to shoot Lennon, if one had a homicidal bent. By the accounts I've read, he could be quite a caustic, temperamental prick.

A fellow named Stanley Reynolds, writing in The Guardian, said this about the Lennon he knew in Liverpool:

He was hard and cruel and uncompromising and this was reflected in his life-style and in his songs he wrote. It is very ironic to think today that it was John Lennon who wrote a song called Happiness is a Warm Gun. ...

When I first met Lennon at the Cavern Club in the early Sixties I was right away struck by his intelligence. The second or third time I met him I realised that he was extremely intelligent, that, in fact, I was standing there in my three piece suit with collar and tie talking to a black leather clad lad who was that mysterious thing, a genius. He demonstrated his genius in his songs but there was also the touch of the genius in his unforgiving manner and in his humour. "What do you call that hair?" a crew-cut American reporter asked Lennon. "Arthur," Lennon said.

If John Lennon was hard and uncompromising there was also another side to him. Underneath it all he had an amazing streak of friendliness. Like a lot of his friends and acquaintances I regularly received picture postcards from John with these extra bits of drawing put on them.

Lennon was the archetypal Liverpudlian and it is the city, more than rock music or anything else, which will be mourning John today and in the years to come. He was a genuine working class artist, a genius sprung up, without rhyme or reason, out of nowhere from England's most genuine working class city.

According to a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, Lennon had this to say about his genius status, according to a BBC story:

"It's not fun being a genius," he said. "It's torture."

You could find people describe him as as violent and aggressive (odd adjectives for a peacenik) and as very sensitive and creative.

For me, I think I always appreciated Lennon's honesty and directness in interviews. For some reason, I remember this line when he was asked about the prospect of a Beatles reunion: "Would you want to go back to high school?" he retorted disdainfully.

And who could forget his observation the Beatles were more popular than Jesus? :)

To a certain extent, when evaluating an artist, one has to separate your feelings for their art and its impact on you from the actual artist as a person.

Of the ex-Beatles, Lennon left the most substantial body of solo work, and of course some of the songs he wrote with Paul McCartney will still stand out centuries from now as among the finest humanity has ever produced.

Listening to In My Life or Imagine is like watching a great prima ballerina perform, or seeing a classic painting or reading a remarkable novel: The beauty touches you and the perfection causes you to marvel.

I'm sorry he was cut down at a relatively young age (40), for it seems he had much more to say and do on this planet.

But as he wrote in The Ballad of John and Yoko:

Christ you know it ain't easy,
You know how hard it can be.
The way things are going
They're going to crucify me.

Addendum: Even a songwriting genius has to have influences, and this Guardian article talks about Lennon's musical debts and what his 1964 portable jukebox --  think of it as a 15-kilogram iPod -- had on it.