I was in my bedroom at my parents’ house in the Detroit suburbs on the night of Dec. 8, 1980, doing much-hated calculus homework. The radio was on – WABX/99.5-FM which, at the time, played alternative and New Wave music.
The DJ came on during a break to announce the news that John Lennon had been shot and was being rushed to Roosevelt Hospital.
This was, of course, an extraordinary shock.
As a high school senior in 1980, I had never known a world without the hugely influential Beatles, who had formed in 1960.
And Lennon – the former Beatle turned solo artist and political activist – had just come out of a five-year self-imposed hiatus from public life with the album Double Fantasy, a phenomenal hit that had only been released a few weeks earlier. To re-use an already over-used sentiment inspired by the album’s first track, it was “just like starting over” for him.
A bit shaken, I went back to my homework. Math problems don’t solve themselves, after all.
A short while later, there was a sudden interruption in the song being played on the radio. The DJ was almost hysterical, inconsolable.
John was dead, she screamed.
John Lennon had been murdered, shot in front of his own home with his horrified wife, Yoko Ono, right there next to him to witness it.
“That guy with a gun” – Mark David Chapman – “stole away our childhood when he shot Lennon,” said Bob Geldof, lead singer of the Boomtown Rats and co-organizer of the 1980s Band Aid/Live Aid fund-raisers to benefit famine relief in Africa. That summed it up perfectly for me.
It was my 18th birthday.
And John was shot in front of the famed Dakota apartment building, which was only three blocks north of where I’d grown up in New York City before moving to Michigan in 1978. I used to look at that building every weekday morning, as I waited for the crosstown bus I rode to school.
So this moment felt very personal to me as an emotional teenage girl, as though there was instantly a demarcation between life as I’d known it before and an unfamiliar world that we’d suddenly all been thrust into.
But, of course, this was the universal experience.
Like the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., or the tragedy of September 11th, it was an instance that resonated with each of us who experienced it. Nearly all of us can tell you where we were and what we were doing when we heard that John Lennon had died.
And we all wonder now, “How can it possibly have been 40 years ago?” — the equivalent of his too-short life.
“Like so many traumatic moments like that, it seems like yesterday,” said Russell Reising, professor emeritus in the University of Toledo’s Department of English Language and Literature, who has written extensively about the Beatles.
“I was in grad school at Northwestern,” he said. He’d already gone to bed that night, but “at about midnight, my phone started ringing,” as friends called to tell him what had happened.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a more important figure in pop culture” than John Lennon, who gave us “music, religion, politics, psychology ... an all-encompassing impact,” Mr. Reising said.
The loss of such a man, “It just changed my life forever.”
A passionate aficionado who grew up in the small town of Oak Harbor, OH, and “went to rock music for things to believe in, things to be inspired by,” Mr. Reising considers 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, John’s first post-Beatles record, to be “one of the top two or three albums ever made.” He still listens to it at least once per month and said that, after initially hearing the song “God” – in which Lennon lists the idols he no longer worships, including his former band – “I don’t think I’ve ever been the same afterwards.”
“The dream is over,” Lennon wrote in that song. “And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.”
And that’s what we all did after that horrible night: we carried on. We mourned in community if we could, whether gathering at the Dakota in New York, in Lennon’s home town of Liverpool or, as Mr. Reising did, at a favorite record store with fellow music fans.
In an age before we could grieve together by instantaneously posting songs and pictures and memories on social media, people needing solace and some way to process what had happened sought each other out. They cried, they sang, and they made feeble attempts to comprehend how John Lennon could possibly be gone.
“It was a great shock and tragedy,” said Dale Snauwaert, professor of Philosophy of Education and co-founder of the Peace Education and Peace Studies program at the University of Toledo. “To be killed in that manner ... it was a great tragedy, a great loss.”
Since Lennon had been raised during World War II and its aftermath, and with the huge success of his career with the Beatles having taken place during the Vietnam War era, his protests against war – including the Bed-ins for Peace, during which “Give Peace a Chance” was recorded – were critically important.
“John Lennon affected people in terms of peace spiritually, politically, musically,” Mr. Reising said.
“He was such a prominent person and so famous,” Mr. Snauwaert noted, “it was wonderful that he chose such a message to the world,” using the power of his platform to amplify his ideas.
Each holiday season, we hear “Happy Xmas/War is Over” being played in heavy rotation. Like much of Lennon’s art – including drawings, films, and performances in addition to lyrics — it has continued to reiterate this central theme of his life for subsequent generations.
Lennon’s widow, Yoko, has tended his legacy very carefully these past 40 years. And the clear statement she nurtures and shares, still, with him is the promotion of peace through many and varied means.
In his honor, she’s established charities dedicated to supporting and uplifting the poor worldwide; organized tributes, events, exhibits, and concerts; and designed the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik, Iceland, which lights up on significant dates, particularly from John’s Oct. 9 birthday through Dec. 8 each year.
Perhaps most famously, Yoko helped to create the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park, across the street from the Dakota, which continues to be an oasis and a gathering site for people to remember John. Its central mosaic features the word “Imagine,” from the song possibly most identified with him, prompting visitors to join him in dreaming of “all the people living life in peace.”
“She’s been a continual champion of that message,” said Mr. Snauwaert of Yoko, “in tribute to him.”
Lennon “saw two forces in the world,” he continued: “fear and love.” And clearly, his own deep commitment was to “peace through love .... The idea is that peace and justice are interconnected.”
After all, “Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice.”
As for John Lennon’s legacy, “I think the promotion of love – not in the romantic sense,” said Mr. Snauwaert, “but in the sense of mutual respect — is a great and long-lasting message.
“And it’s one that we should all continue to follow.”
Contact Mary Bilyeu at 419-724-6155 or mbilyeu@theblade.com, and follow her at facebook.com/FoodMavenMary.
First Published December 8, 2020, 11:00 a.m.
