John Lennon, December 8, 1980

[drawback]

Remembering 40 years ago today.

 

RIP, John.

[Delaware Dave]

I started working in a CPA firm in 1980. I was in our satellite office that we used for tax season. We had an FM radio in the office and the announcement came over the radio; I remember the announcement about it. Wow, 40 years ago. 40 years ago I started career work and soon will be ending. Just another reminder of ..... well, let's not get into that.

[zxcvbnm098]

Definitely an event where, if you were alive and an adult, you remember where you were when you heard.

[Stokely]

You start feeling old when you realize you are currently X years (or decades) older than some of these people when they died. No matter what they feel like elders to me, yet for example: if I ran into Jim Morrison aged 27 I'd probably think "who is this punk kid"

[Baldwin Funster]

Lennon keyboard corner tie in.

By coincidence I decided to learn this yesterday.

 

[video:youtube]

[Bill H.]

I was at the guitar player's house, and the band was loading up a trailer for a gig when we heard the news on the radio.

 

I don't remember the gig, but I remember the day.

[DJkeys]

My cover band was playing in Hawaii in a club at the Sheraton Waikiki. Monday was our dark night, and the band was meeting for dinner at Orson's Seafood restaurant. I was a little early and killing time in the shopping center when the news came on the radio. When I met the band I told them and they couldn't believe it. It was my birthday. Never gonna forget that day-

 

-dj

[Geoff Grace]

Like most people, the memory of finding out about John Lennon's death is seared into my mind.

 

I saw Kathleen Sullivan announce it on CNN. She had tears in her eyes. Her reaction spoke for a generation.

 

I had a Christmas job at a record store at the time. We sold out of Double Fantasy shortly after the store opened the next day.

 

Anyone who was a baby back then would be roughly the age today that Lennon was when he died.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Biggles]

[video:youtube]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EJ72bYyEtBg

 

RIP John.

[MathOfInsects]

It is difficult for people now to conceive how towering the Beatles were as figures in the public imagination, and how impossible it seemed that one could or would ever be killed or even die at all. We were allowed to stay home from school that day, and even if we hadn't been "allowed," many of us would have had no choice. It hit me nearly as hard as it might have to have lost a close relative.

[Docbop]

I was a student at GIT (now MI) when John was killed and the whole school was in mourning and for the next week too. Lennon was always my favorite of the Beatles especially since I got to sneak into one of his recording sessions. He was the one who kept the Rock and Roll attitude in the Beatles music to me.

[Doerfler]

Definitely an event where, if you were alive and an adult, you remember where you were when you heard.

 

Howard Cosell, during MNF

[Josh Paxton]

I remember hearing, but not in the way most people who remember it do. After school my mother told me, "John Lennon died today." And I said, "Who's John Lennon?"

 

I sort of knew who the Beatles were, but it was only after that point that I learned that they were the band actually responsible for all these really cool Bee Gees and Peter Frampton songs I had recently heard in this really cool movie called "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."

[Threadslayer]

He was the one who kept the Rock and Roll attitude in the Beatles music to me.

 

That's a good observation. I'd never thought of it quite that way.

[Rusty Mike]

In my car driving home from a friend's house. Heard it on WPLJ, which was a rock station at the time. It was definitely surreal. Sat in my car in front of my house for quite a while just listening to the radio.

[area51recording]

I was still living in New Jersey. I was getting ready to move to Atlanta in January and get married. I had spent the week down there visiting my fiance and had flown into Newark Airport. My Dad picked me up, and as we were on the exit ramp out of the airport the news came over the radio. I remember it was raining.....I haven't lived there for almost 40 years, but I could go back to the exact spot on the road where we were today.....

[ProfD]

I remember hearing about it but at the time, I was an 11-year-old who was not very familiar with the Beatles.

[SamuelBLupowitz]

I was born in 1989, and I started digging into the Beatles when I was 10 or 11. John Lennon was already spoken of as a martyr by then (and while George Harrison passed, still too soon, right as my interest in the Beatles was peaking, it wasn't the same kind of shocking tragedy). I'm sure it changed the way I perceived the members of the band relative to someone who caught them in real time on the Ed Sullivan show when they flipped the world upside down... I connected with Paul McCartney in a big way early on, because he still seemed real and vital, making records, telling stories, touring... Lennon felt like a mythological being who had walked the earth in a different time.

 

It's not really fair to him to view him that way. He was a complex person, by many accounts someone who could be difficult and cruel, someone with a lot of trauma in a time when it wasn't generally accepted or encouraged for men to deal with their emotional and mental health. He was also someone who aspired to change himself and the world, and was much loved by the people close to him.

 

It's funny, these past few years, and the pandemic in particular, has made me wonder about artists we've lost, especially ones who had a lot to say about society and global events. I'd love a peek into the alternate universe where he was still around to write, speak, or sing about what we're going through. "All I want is the truth; just gimme some truth."

 

But since I didn't get to share the planet with John Lennon at any point, I'm eternally grateful for his part in the music that set me on my path and shaped me to such a great degree.

[ChiefDanG]

Definitely an event where, if you were alive and an adult, you remember where you were when you heard.

 

Howard Cosell, during MNF

 

 

Me too.

[stillearning]

Definitely an event where, if you were alive and an adult, you remember where you were when you heard.

 

Howard Cosell, during MNF

 

 

Me too.

That"s my memory also. I mainly remember the shock of hearing the news, less about specifically where I was. I was 26 and it was all we talked about for some time. Hard to believe that was 40 years ago.

[MathOfInsects]

I was born in 1989, and I started digging into the Beatles when I was 10 or 11. John Lennon was already spoken of as a martyr by then (and while George Harrison passed, still too soon, right as my interest in the Beatles was peaking, it wasn't the same kind of shocking tragedy). I'm sure it changed the way I perceived the members of the band relative to someone who caught them in real time on the Ed Sullivan show when they flipped the world upside down... I connected with Paul McCartney in a big way early on, because he still seemed real and vital, making records, telling stories, touring... Lennon felt like a mythological being who had walked the earth in a different time.

 

It's not really fair to him to view him that way. He was a complex person, by many accounts someone who could be difficult and cruel, someone with a lot of trauma in a time when it wasn't generally accepted or encouraged for men to deal with their emotional and mental health. He was also someone who aspired to change himself and the world, and was much loved by the people close to him.

 

But since I didn't get to share the planet with John Lennon at any point, I'm eternally grateful for his part in the music that set me on my path and shaped me to such a great degree.

 

I have no memory of the band existing, but was born into a world where they were megaliths, and at some point early on, like lots of people, they became my first favorite band. There were sounds they made that still define how I hear things all these years later, and I had this sense that there was something really unique about their ability to switch, song to song, from one band into another into a completely different one, and still be The Beatles.

 

Lying on the floor listening to She's So Heavy and being more than halfway sure that when that tape-cut came at the end, I and the rest of existence would cease to be, was one of my formative childhood memories, as was the mind-movie that was Side 2 of Abbey Road.

 

Later my ears brought me to the studio-rock years of Revolver and Rubber Soul. Riding on the bus to camp decoding which singer was which, was a complete activity for some of my friends and me.

 

One of those friends was an 8-year-old bootleg tape collector, a hipster ahead of his time, and he had all the various recordings that would later become Anthology and the other off-label releases, so very early on I had a sense of them as uncommonly funny and irreverent musical geniuses, because I got to hear them tossing lines back and forth in these beautiful reverberant environments and then somehow start to play something that would almost instantly transcend into A Band Playing Music. It was wondrous actually.

 

There is no denying that Lennon had mental illness and perhaps its undiagnosed state was a "good" thing insofar as he was free to kick down mailboxes and troll Paul all day, which resulted in both of them producing better material than either was capable of on their own.

 

Paul was the undeniable songster among them, but he and Lennon both had awful, self-sabotaging musical impulses that only their competition with each other surmounted. And George being the unheard little brother ended up pushing him to peak right as the group itself was self-destructing.

 

I taught the Beatles class at Our Local Fancy University for a long time, where I did my doctorate. 420 students at a time, which is the perfect number for that class. I was afraid that revisiting them would make me hate them, but the opposite happened: I came to think that in spite of their influence and acclaim, they were underrated because of their genre(s) and some of the habits of the time. Find a more concise bit of gem-level craft than "For No One"--from what was essentially supposed to be a boy-band no less--and I'll buy you a fake beer at a fake bar until the real ones are back again.

[mate stubb]

We were on the road, but had the night off so we were headed into Pittsburgh to do some Xmas shopping when we heard. We were devastated.

 

I started with my first band in 1967, the Summer of Love. Sgt Peppers was playing on every turntable and every radio station.

[Mark Schmieder]

I know exactly where I was, and everyone around me broke down in tears and we were all waiting for a "follow-up" that would say he was OK after all and was going to recover.

 

I was shopping at the main record store across from the gates to the Indiana University campus in Bloomington IN. They had NPR on in the store at the time. We were all in shock.

[Konnector]

I was on the road playing in a cover band. We were all staying in a large house for the week that the club provided for out of town bands. Our sound man heard the news first and ran into the room freaking out about Lennon being shot. Very tragic.

[MAJUSCULE]

Like Sam, I wasn't around. My crystal-clear memories are of Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant dying. Also Sidney Crosby scoring the Golden Goal.

[Al Quinn]

I heard the news while watching Monday Night Football and was devastated. My love for music started in 1964 at age 6 with my first album, Meet the Beatles.

 

I remember being in Music Theory / Counterpoint class at Queens College the morning after John"s death when the professor (who I perceived as a narrow minded stuffy classical snob stuck in the Baroque era) opened up about her love for the Beatles.. That morning she took a break from the regular curriculum and provided her analysis of Elenor Rigby. While the analysis was unexpected and informative I was more taken by her knowledge, respect, and love for John"s music.