Over the next week, you're likely to hear your fill of where-were-you's, as the 25th anniversary of John Lennon's death on December 8, 1980 nears.
I'll beat the rush: I was in a studio apartment on Chicago's North Side, half-assedly studying and halfheartedly watching Monday Night Football. But no, I did not hear of Lennon's slaying from Howard Cosell. This was not the crushing indignity the Cosell-informed have made of it; Cosell was a thoughtful man and apparently he was deeply affected by the news. Besides, all those Lennon-loving football fans were enduring Cosell anyway. I just didn't like him and preferred listening to the game on the radio with the TV sound off. A friend called to tell me.
I was dumbfounded. No doubt, this was a function of upheaval in my life. I had just started graduate school after a couple of years working a job I loathed; an on-and-off relationship spun slowly toward "off"; and Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. That last fact contributed mightily to the gloom felt by many of the thousands who gathered for a vigil in Chicago's Grant Park the next Sunday. My soon-to-be-ex girlfriend and I were there and the savage lakefront chill seemed to analogize the frost on the affair. Rootless grief had united us long enough to realize we were done.
Viewing the time from a quarter-century's remove, I suppose I was modeling some aspect of communal identity, desperate to associate myself with an event in which so many others, apparently, needed to implicate themselves. A poll taken after the assassination of President John Kennedy found that more people claimed to have voted for him in the narrowly decided 1960 election than actually had. Similarly, millions who loathed everything about New York City proclaimed themselves honorary citizens after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Our need to belong is no more profound than in moments of astonishing public misfortune.
Like most who wandered the gelid lakefront that afternoon, I was too young to have been much affected by the Kennedy assassination. But we grew up in its wake, and I think its televised lamentations tantalized us. And so it was our moment to mourn. It has been said that Lennon's death marked the final passing of the 1960s, but I think it also confirmed the death of the Beatles—for many, surely, the same thing. It finally put paid to the idea of a reunion.
Four years earlier, Lorne Michaels had launched a running gag on Saturday Night Live, satirizing various multimillion-dollar offers by promising the quartet a whopping $3,000. Paul McCartney has said that he and Lennon were watching together one night in Manhattan and considered cabbing to the studio. If true, the story appealingly pictures the two old pals kicking back to SNL, like any number of good buds around the country—and we can complete the scene by imagining the, uh, coffee table arrangement ... It also neatly seals their rapprochement, after their bitchy row in interviews and the pages of Melody Maker.
All the more reason to regret that Britain's Radio 4 is dredging up Jann Wenner's 1970 Lennon interview tapes to rehash the ugliness, including Lennon's assertion that he, George Harrison and Ringo Starr "were fed up with being sidemen for Paul" and his rage over their contempt for Yoko Ono. And Ono hasn't helped, recently carping that McCartney was a hack songwriter. (It took Harrison's 2002 death from cancer to remind the world a splendid songwriter toiled in the Maclen shadow.)
For his part, McCartney once told Playboy that "we all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest." And he was.
It's easy enough to see that bedside chats for peace were pointless. As Scottish columnist Alison Rowat recently noted, "the man who asked us to imagine a world with no possessions had several apartments in the Dakota building in New York, each worth millions." Rowat called Lennon "a musical genius but ... an ordinary, flawed mortal."
Yes, and one who died at 40, on the cusp of a comeback. The absence of that maturing wit continues to trouble me. We lionize pop elders such as Bob Dylan or Neil Young—neither of whom, in truth, has composed much in latter days to compare with their early catalogs. I can only rue that Lennon's aging was pre-empted.
And when I hear Bono assert, as he did recently on 60 Minutes, that his willingness to chat up conservatives has accomplished more than mere liberal ranting, I have to wonder how a mature Lennon would have taken on the trials of our time. Perhaps he'd have been a wily pragmatist, too.
Or maybe he'd have continued to remind us—and simple as it sounds, when you really think about it, it's true—that "War is over/ If you want it/ War is over now.
"Happy Christmas."
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.