Twenty-nine years ago today, John Lennon died. I was 7 years old. A first grader. I didn't learn of his death until the following evening while my parents were watching "ABC World News Tonight." Too young to be a real fan of rock music (my favorite band at that time was KISS, because they scared the crap out of me), the event was a small blip on my radar. We had a stack of 45s in the basement that included the "Hey Jude"/"Revolution" and "Get Back"/"Don't Let Me Down" singles, but those got far less play than Ohio Express's "Yummy Yummy Yummy," The Archies' "Sugar Sugar," The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville," The Osmonds' "Yo-Yo" and Harlow Wilcox & the Oakies' "Groovy Grubworm."

That doesn't mean The Beatles weren't on my radar. I was vaguely aware of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," "She Loves You" and many high points of Beatlemania, but these were just historical items. I even knew who John, Paul, George, and Ringo were, but they had no context in my life. At that point my biggest contact with the Fab Four was probably their appearance on the cover of a 1978 issue of "Dynamite" that my older sister, Becky, ordered from the Scholastic Book Club. But in all fairness, my attention was always drawn to the strange eyeball on George Harrison's hand, not the band members themselves. I was a kid, after all.

Sometime in 1983, not long after Michael Jackson released his "Thriller" album, I became a popular music fan. But still The Beatles eluded me. Instead, I listened to Huey Lewis, Van Halen, John Cougar, The Romantics and The Police. Every Friday Becky and I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching "Friday Night Videos," and these weekly viewing parties got me just a little closer to Beatles fandom, thanks to the music video for John Lennon's "Nobody Told Me." I was barely 9 years old when the video first appeared, and it felt strange to hear a "new" song by a man who'd been dead for three years. The man in the video bore little resemblance to the mop-topped Beatle I'd seen in film clips, but the song was catchy as hell. And it had a great line I liked to imitate: "most peculiar, mama."

About the time I entered junior high in 1986, the following events occurred:

1. Becky started dating a boy who was a Beatles fan.
2. Becky became a Beatles fan.
3. I became a Beatles fan.

I can't speak to the causality of event 1 to event 2, but I know damn well that event 2 caused event 3. Well, event 1 caused event 3 also, because Greg was the coolest person I'd ever met. After all, he wore Ray-Ban Wayfarers and had a beard -- in high school! Greg also had an older brother, who was an even bigger Beatles fan and a collector. He played the drums, as did I, so I basically worshiped him.

Everything Beatles-related happened in fast-forward from that point on. I dubbed cassette copies of "Meet the Beatles!," the "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" soundtracks, and "Rubber Soul" from my dad's four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. I bought a vinyl copy of something called "Songs, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles" at the record store in the mall (a reissue of "Introducing... the Beatles," the reworked U.S. release of "Please Please Me"). At my grandparents house I discovered an original vinyl copy of the "Help!" soundtrack that they let me have. Greg's brother even invited me over to watch a double feature of "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!"

Then something strange happened. Each year for Easter, in addition to a basketful of candy, my parents always bought each of us one gift. In 1987, I asked for the White Album. I knew nothing about that record except that it had a plain white cover with "The Beatles" typed (a little crookedly) across the front. There were no photos and no track listing. The packaging had such a mysterious allure to it that I knew the music inside had to be spectacular. I imagined it would have all the popular songs I'd yet to find on the albums I'd accumulated, especially "She Loves You," which always seemed to elude my search. We spent Easter weekend at my grandparents house that year, and on Sunday morning I found that big white album cover sitting atop my basket. I ripped off the shrink wrap and opened the gatefold to find... a list of 30 songs I'd mostly never heard of accompanied by black and white photos of each member of the band in which they had long hair and, in some cases, mustaches. It was not what I expected. At all.

That afternoon, I went into my grandparents' living room and put side one of the album on the stereo then sat down on the carpet, closing my eyes. I didn't like what I heard. On some songs the guitars were distorted. On others there were no guitars at all, replaced by piano or horns or strings. Time signatures changed with no warning. And why in the bloody hell was Paul singing about having sex in the middle of the road?

Throughout that first listen, there was one song I kept waiting for: "Revolution 9." I'd spotted it in the track listing right away. I knew the song "Revolution" from the record in our basement, so I expected "Revolution 9" to be an eight minute expanded version of that song. I got a small taste at the beginning of side four with "Revolution 1," a slower, more acoustic version, so I assumed "9" would be the rocked up electric take. Throughout all eight minutes and 22 seconds of "9," I waited for that crunchy opening riff to kick in, but all I got was random noise with some bloke repeating "number nine, number nine, number nine..." over and over. I had a last flash of hope when someone said, "Take this brother, may it serve you well," and thought, "Will the song start now?" But by that point the song was nearly over. I wanted to strangle John Lennon.

Shortly after Easter, the 20th anniversary tributes to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" began. Despite my disappointment, I hadn't given up on the White Album, and its weirdness compared to the band's early material prepped me for my first listen of "Sgt. Pepper." This came when a local radio station aired the album in its entirety at midnight one night that spring. As soon as the DJ introduced it, I pressed record on my cassette player so I'd have my own copy. I wasn't sure I loved what I heard, but I knew it was important. That summer I listened to "Sgt. Pepper" and the White Album many times, and I eventually came to love those complex recordings more than the earlier albums.

PBS played a role in my Beatles addiction that year, too. I recorded two programs from their broadcasts: "It Was Twenty Years Ago Today," a new documentary about the making and impact of "Sgt. Pepper," and "The Compleat Beatles," a documentary telling the band's story from beginning to end. "Compleat" became a Saturday afternoon staple for me. Almost every week, while dad was outside mowing the grass, I'd slip the tape in the VCR and rewatch the film. Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, the movie begins:

Liverpool. 200 miles to the northwest of London. Nothing much ever came from Liverpool but soccer teams and British comedians. The city droned on wearily in post-war Britain, a nation nostalgic for its triumphant past, threadbare and tired in its present. For a boy growing up in Liverpool, the future was no brighter than that which his father faced, or his father's father. In 1956, in fact, there was little to suggest that out of this provincial seaport would come four young men and a musical revolution that would captivate and change the world.

As the year wore on, I searched for more and more Beatles music. On vinyl I bought "Beatles for Sale," "Sgt. Pepper," "The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl," and "20 Greatest Hits." On cassette I added both volumes of "Rock 'n' Roll Music." I went to flea markets looking for old vinyl copies of the albums, where I bought "Abbey Road" and "Introducing... the Beatles," as well as an original 45 of "Eight Days a Week"/"I Don't Want to Spoil the Party." I found weird rarities, too, like a 1962 live recording of the band in a Hamburg nightclub and an album of 1961 recordings by Tony Sheridan on which the Fab Four served as his backing band.

By late 1987, the White Album was my favorite Beatles recording. At night, I'd put the record on, turn out all the lights in my bedroom and sing along with the entire album. Well, not "Revolution 9." It was while listening to the White Album that I realized some of the songs were sung by George and Ringo. Up to that point I'd always mistaken both George and Ringo's voices for John's.

As a 13-year-old boy, I got a silly charge out of "Why Don't We Do It in the Road," feeling as if I was somehow misbehaving by listening to it. Perhaps Paul McCartney anticipated my titilation 20 years earlier, because he makes a faint grunt late in the song that sounds oddly like my father shouting "Tom!" from the top of the stairs outside my room. I can't tell you the number of times I shot out of my chair to turn down the stereo, fearing my father was going to hear the filthy song I was listening to at that moment.

Eventually I'd committed most of "The Compleat Beatles" to memory, so I turned to books, reading "Lennon" by Ray Coleman, "The Love You Make" by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, and "Shout" by Philip Norman. As a result, I've long said that if I'm ever a contestant on "Jeopardy," my six dream categories would be The Beatles, The Beatles, The Beatles, The Beatles, The Beatles, and The Beatles.

During my frequent visits to the local mall's record store that year, I noticed a Beatles songbook that included sheet music for about 70 songs. Even though I didn't play any instruments other than drums, I asked for the book for Christmas. It was of value to me mostly because of the inclusion of lyrics. (I was, after all, a kid who bought "Song Hits" magazine from the grocery newsstand every month.) For a few years, all I could do was page through the songs, clarifying lyrical questions. During my sophomore year of high school, however, I started to pay attention to the chord diagrams above the staff. I figured out that the diagram was an illustration of how to play the chord on a guitar. Years before I'd beg my parents to buy me a tiny, warped guitar at a neighbor's yard sale. Given the $6 price tag, they'd agreed to the purchase, even buying a book for me to teach myself how to play. I never learned, though, and the guitar sat untouched in my bedroom for years. Now I realized that I could simply imitate the fingering in those chord diagrams. Since I knew the melody, rhythm and words of almost every song in the book, it would be easy enough to know when I was playing correctly. It took many stressful months of practice, but in the end, The Beatles taught me to play guitar.

In the years since that initial burst of enthusiasm, my Beatles fandom has remained a constant. I've built up an even more complete collection of music on my iPod than I had on vinyl and cassette. In college I sang and played guitar in a rock band, and we added three different Beatles songs ("I Wanna Hold Your Hand," "Day Tripper" and "Come Together") to our repetoire. I got "Live at the BBC" for Christmas in 1994. I watched all six parts of "The Beatles Anthology" on ABC-TV in 1995 and bought each volume of the accompanying CDs the day they were released. I have the expanded documentary release on DVD. In 2000 I visited New York City for the first time, and made sure to include visits to the Dakota (where John Lennon lived) and Strawberry Fields in my itinerary. That same year, I found a copy of the Black Album, a bootleg of outtakes from the "Get Back" sessions (the sessions that produced the "Let It Be" album) and gave a copy to each of my sisters for Christmas. (Yes, my younger sister became a Beatles fan, too.) I watched VH1's "Behind the Music: John Lennon - The Last Years" and cried so much while watching it that I still haven't watched it again. I cried when George Harrison died in 2001, too.

On June 26, 2007, while living in Las Vegas, my then-girlfriend and I watched Larry King interview Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison at The Mirage casino where they attended a performance of Cirque du Soleil's "The Beatles LOVE." At the end of the CNN broadcast, the camera followed the foursome as they entered the theater and took their seats.

Less than a month later, I was scheduled to leave Las Vegas for a new job and life in Connecticut. My girlfriend and I had a farewell dinner that weekend at Mario Batali's restaurant in The Venetian casino. She told me she hoped to have a surprise for me, but she needed to run an errand during dinner to arrange it. When she got back, she had two standby tickets for "LOVE." Our seats weren't guaranteed, though, so we had to hoof it across the street to The Mirage to get in the standby queue, which was depressingly long. By showtime, we still hadn't been seated and were starting to lose hope. About five minutes after showtime, however, the usher gestured for us and the couple behind us to step up to the ticket counter to pay for our seats. She then escorted the four of us in to the last empty seats in the theater -- the same seats Paul, Ringo, Yoko and Olivia sat in a month before.

Sitting in front of the television in December 1980, I had no idea that the man whose death I'd just learn about would play such a pivotal role in my life. Tonight I'll fall asleep listening to John Lennon's music, reminding myself that we all shine on, everyone.