The clock radio woke us, and the first sound that came over it was an announcer’s voice: “We’ll have more about the murder of John Lennon after this.”posted by John Cohen at 7:59 AM on December 8, 2010 [12 favorites]
We sat bolt upright in bed. Had we heard correctly? It had come to us at the tail end of sleep, maybe he had really said some other name, or not the word “murder.”
But when the commercial was over, we learned that it was true. Then we remembered hearing an unusual storm of sirens when we’d gone to bed around midnight, sirens which we now learned had been a couple of miles north of us.
I remember the disc jockey, Scott Muni, vowing that morning that as long as he remained in the business he would open his program each day with a John Lennon song. ...
I remember getting two phone calls in the next half hour or so, one from each of my younger brothers. The middle one was a rock musician up in Albany, and we sobbed together and agreed that Lennon was the most important of all of them, and like a father to us. The youngest brother was a newspaper reporter in Binghamton, just a year out of college, and he was so upset he didn’t want to go to work that morning. I told him it was important for him to go to work: he was a journalist, he had to confront hard things. ...
Some time on the morning of December 8 I went out for my daily jog, a few circuits of Washington Square Park. Or maybe it was the next day. I think I remember that it was a chilly gray day.... And I remember how quiet and still the streets were. Few people were out walking. There were no laughing groups of young people.
All that weekend, no one could think or talk about anything else. There were moments of silence around the world. Radios and TVs were on all the time and there was little conversation. We were all waiting for signals about how next to show our grief. I got sick of the song “Imagine,” especially as quoted by the very authorities it challenged. What I imagined was poor John Lennon being reduced to that one song, treacly and nihilistic at the same time. There were so many other songs.
We went to a law students’ party, and one guy, a student’s husband, a short, plump, blond-haired young man, told us that he and his wife lived on the Upper West Side and had been out walking at the time of the murder, just a couple of blocks away, and had heard the horrible sirens, and without knowing anything about what they were for, he had suddenly begun to cry as he walked home.
I can't mourn John Lennon. I didn't know the guy. But I do know that when all is said and done, that's all he was -- a guy. The refusal of his fans to ever let him just be that was finally almost as lethal as his "assassin" (and please, let's have no more talk of this being a "political" killing, and don't call him a "rock-n-roll martyr"). Did you watch the TV specials on Tuesday night? Did you see all those people standing in the street in front of the Dakota apartment where Lennon lived singing "Hey Jude"? What do you think the real -- cynical, sneeringly sarcastic, witheringly witty and iconoclastic -- John Lennon would have said about that?--Lester Bangs (most of you probably already read this before, but hey. RIP JL.)
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posted by blucevalo at 7:28 AM on December 8, 2010 [2 favorites]