Our TV was broken and I was listening to Monday Night Football on the radio, broadcast by announcer Jack Buck and analyst Hank Stram (I’m pretty sure the game was between New England and Miami), when CBS broke in with the announcement that John Lennon had been shot in New York City. I first thought, wow, how awful. Maybe it was a mugging or something and somebody winged him.
A few minutes later, CBS broke in again with the news that he had been shot four times. That’s when I started to get the sinking feeling. By the time a third broadcast came soon after that announcing that he had died, I was numb and it barely registered at first.
The days that followed would be filled with a mourning that I didn’t know I could feel for a non-family member. The loss of any human life is terrible, but this was shocking and a violation of a sort that was inconceivable.
I had all kinds of reactions and I did a few different things in response to Lennon’s murder; some good and some bad. One of the better things I did, I believe, was to become active in Handgun Control, Inc. The organization would become more visible months later after James Brady, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on the President some months after Lennon’s murder. Brady, along with his wife Sarah, would join Handgun Control, Inc. and take the lead in the effort to try and stem the violence caused by handguns in this country.
Despite my idealism at that time, I came to realize later that no gun legislation would have prevented Chapman from killing Lennon. Chapman bought the .38 caliber Charter Arms revolver in Hawaii under an assumed name (“John Lennon,” I believe) and transported it illegally to New York where he performed his almost unspeakable act.
Chapman's murder of Lennon ushered in a mini-wave of assassination attempts of prominent people. As I noted, John Hinckley, Jr. would shoot Reagan in March of 1981, and Mehmet Ali Agca would shoot Pope John Paul II two months after that. I would argue that Hinckley and Agca saw that the assassination of a prominent person could be used as a powerful tool to mold public opinion based on Chapman's cowardly act of barbarism and had that in mind when they did their deeds. I realize, though, that that's only my theory that probably will never be substantiated. At any rate, these are all grim milestones in the almost-never-ending quest to cheapen human life.
In a related note, I stated earlier in my post about the 1,000th person executed in this country since the reinstatement of capital punishment that, in accordance with my faith, I should oppose the death penalty. However, the fact that Chapman, Hinckley, and Agca remain alive while all of their victims have since died makes that position difficult for me.
Years after Lennon's murder, I watched Andrew Solt’s excellent documentary “Imagine,” which has just been re-released on DVD (Yoko Ono, ever the businesswoman of sorts, having timed the release to coincide with the 25th anniversary of this dark act - her opportunism aggravates me a bit, though). In a way, I found it humorous that Lennon and Ono would decide to film just about every waking moment of their lives in a fit of true artistic egotism, but I am also glad that they did because I believe that, at times, it inadvertently showed their vulnerability.
Two of the moments that stood out for me are as follows:
1) A drifter manages to show up at Lennon and Ono’s New York estate (around the time that “Imagine” the album is being recorded in 1972), and Lennon, disheveled, greets him at the front door with his entourage. The kid tells Lennon how much his music meant to him, and Lennon thanks him but tells him that it’s all subject to his own interpretation, basically. Lennon then invites the kid in for a bite to eat, which of course is filmed also.
2) Lennon and Ono read fan letters and laugh nervously when someone claiming to be a psychic tells him that he will be assassinated.
There was also the argument with Al Capp during one of the “bed-ins,” with Capp being genuinely obnoxious as far as I’m concerned, and Lennon flipping out at a New York Times critic.
I think the best thing for me to do right now is provide this link to a feature article in The Philadelphia Inquirer for more background (registration required), and I’m also going to present this column from longtime Philadelphia TV news anchorman and writer Larry Kane which appeared in the paper today also (his point about our “idols” being the product of our own perceptions is excellent):
25 years later, John Lennon still livesFor more on John Lennon, click here.
By Larry Kane
Too many modern celebrities - many of them with only marginal talent - revel as they walk the red carpet, glamour and self-indulgence written in their superficial and forced smiles.
It is really our fault. We idolize and live vicariously through the famous faces we watch. And today, on the 25th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon, I think about how different he was - how relevant he made himself to a generation of admirers, not by wanting to be adored, but by hoping he would be respected.
He is what I call the poster boy for imperfection. In life, and in his amazing afterlife (he's still all over the radio), we see him as a person whose personal decisions we would want to avoid, but whose personal convictions and search for the truth are things to admire.
Adoration never came easily to Lennon. His father abandoned him; his mother was rarely around. He grew up angry and determined to make the establishment aware of his presence by acting out in school. When that phase ended, be began burying himself in sketching, and thankfully for us, music. His band, the Quarrymen, became the Beatles. Lennon sensed early that his talent alone was not enough. His decision to invite Paul McCartney to join the band was courageous and, as it turns out, historic.
The irony of his life is that the more successful he was as an artist, the more traps he fell into as a person. Pill-popping turned to alcohol and drug abuse, which plagued him until the mid-1970s. But unlike the stars who lived in a bubble, Lennon was not afraid to share his private side in public. Almost every song he wrote was about how he was feeling at the time. "I'm a loser," he wrote at the age of 25, "and I'm not what I appear to be." When he was 30 and in love with Yoko Ono, he penned the beautiful "Imagine," a song that did not become one of the bestselling recorded hits of all time until Lennon was dead. Why? Because he dared to say, "Nothing to kill or die for/ No religion, too."
His angriest music was written in 1973, when he was fully invested in drugs. Yet, in 1980, he wrote "(Just Like) Starting Over," an affirmation that after five years as America's most famous stay-at-home dad, he was back and ready to entertain again.
His life was filled with mistakes and redemption. He was a womanizer who loved only three women - wives Cynthia Lennon and Yoko, and May Pang, the alluring and insightful secretary with whom Yoko fixed him up. He was a womanizer who became an ardent feminist in the late '70s, a pacifist who became one of the most public supporters of police and firefighters, a domestic abuser who transformed himself into a student of the frustrating social history of women.
Lennon, who could display daunting selfishness, was unselfish in his pursuits, giving his music away to other artists, to the detriment of his own career. He was also, delightfully and dangerously, one of the few people I've ever known who said in public what he thought in private, a man who spent much of his adult life thinking about other people, whether it was victims of bigotry in his native Britain or migrant laborers in California, those who had little, those of abundance who gave little.
My travels with him (and the other Beatles) were electric. My arguments with him about war and peace and his public righteousness made us both red in the face and dry in the mouth. He was especially vitriolic and profane when he told me I was an (expletive deleted) fool to leave New York to come back to broadcast in Philadelphia.
Even now, you hear the question: "Where were you on the night of Dec. 8, 1980?", just as others once asked, "Where were you the day John Kennedy was shot?"
I can still remember the words of Frank Rizzo, then Philadelphia's mayor, who had warned me during a 1975 Lennon visit to Philadelphia that Lennon should have more protection. I picked him up at 30th Street Station, where he came alone on an Amtrak train. When he met the thousands of people behind the Channel 6 studios, he stood fearless, enjoying the moment. He had come to Philadelphia to host a weekend charity broadcast. Weeks before he died, he told me he'd met more people in the flesh on that Philadelphia weekend than at any other single time in his life.
Ultimately - again, despite his frequent self-absorption - Lennon was in love with people more than with his daunting celebrity persona. Today we remember him as a man who made beautiful music. We also should remember him as a continuing challenge: to overcome our worst aspects, to learn to think less about ourselves, and more about the world and the people around us.
Update 12/9: Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Grogan's latest on this is absolutely too well done to ignore. That being said, though, one news source did manage to "blow off" everything I've mentioned in this post; the Bucks County Courier Times had absolutely nothing on any of this yesterday.
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