Le R*ck est m*rt

On the day he shot and killed John Lennon, Mark David Chapman left an eight-track tape of Rundgren’s album The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, along with other artifacts, in his New York hotel room in an orderly semicircle on the hotel dresser. « I left it as a statement, I guess, » he was quoted as saying in Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon (Jack Jones, Villard Books, 1992). Chapman had been obsessed with Rundgren and told Jones, « Right between the chambers of your heart is how Rundgren’s music is to me. I cannot overestimate the depth of what his music meant to me. »