Crap. Can’t play that at work. I’ll listen tonight.
((°j°)) (1940-1980)
John Lennon’s death and the local radio stations’ reactions to it at the time are the reason anytime I hear more than one song by an artist on the radio, I worry that they have died.
It makes Tuesdays kind of difficult for me sometimes.
I get that thought whenever I flip around my station presets and find one artist on three or more stations at the same time.
It’s common to describe a murder as “senseless” and Lennon’s killing is close to being the quintessential senseless murder. The archetype of senseless murder.
I was in college at the time, and had an ‘multimedia’ art class the next day. There was a lot of blank staring and head shaking that afternoon. Dave (a “George fan”), set up a camera and taped a close up of his right hand as he tried peeling a big orange with just that one hand.
It seemed almost possible when he began, with some flaps coming off cleanly, but once the inside was exposed the orange slowly turned to mush in his hand.
Maybe not great art, but it’s stuck with me for 30 years.
To quote a letter published in Rolling stone following John’s murder:
I thought this was very eloquent for all of its brevity.
Wow, I never saw that before.
Time to go re-read Spider Robinson’s “Rubber Soul.”
One of my college roommates stopped me in the yard on my way home from class in September to tell me of the death of my favorite drummer, John Bonham. Then in December he stopped me again, the same exact place and said “You’re not going to believe this, but…”
We lost far too much that Fall.
Damn, you’re right. And Bon Scott died that year.
I just got it now. Cool.
I barely had a notion who he was when he was killed. My first boyfriend, who I met a few years later, was obsessed with him and at the time he was killed had been saving money from part time jobs in high school to go to NYC that summer and hopefully get his attention outside the Dakota, and this event majorly effed him up.
It is interesting to speculate what might have been had he lived, especially since he seems to have really cleaned up his act drug-wise and responsibility-wise towards the end and was trying to become a better person.
Chapman’s a complete loon; I doubt he has complete thoughts. The biggest shame of Lennon’s death was it was so damned random and meaningless and unprovoked and nuts- if he’d slipped on ice and hit his head or been hit by a meteorite it would have been more believable than a lone nut who had considered Johnny Carson or Liz Taylor even but decided Lennon was easier.
I didn’t have a TV in my off campus apartment and didn’t hear the news until later. When I was driving to class the next morning, the DJ was crying, talking about tragedy and waste and playing Beatles songs. I spent the day knowing that a Beatle had died but not which one. When I told the story later, a friend asked “Which one did you want it to be?”.
I was glad to hear that Gifford urged Howard to break the news during the game. Football definitely takes a back seat to news of this magnitude.
Was Howard hesitating because he thought football was more important, though? Or was it because he wanted to leave it to Dan Rather or whoever, during a commercial break? I think I’ve heard people say they thought it was a bit crude to have the news broken as what seemed like an aside between calling plays. I’m not saying I think anything in particular; just that this was a heavy decision and they had about two minutes.
We miss you John.
And I hope that whenever Chapman goes to his final reward it’s in a very special hell.
I read The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and it was really eerie, some of the comments he made. About how he and Julian were starting to reestablish their relationship. At one point he made a comment about something or other that he wanted to do before he died. “But that’s a lot time from now.” Then a few days later, he was dead.
(And didn’t Chapman sign out of his job as “John Lennon” that morning? The guy was up for parole a few years ago. What a fucked up individual)
I forget how long ago it was, but Chapman once did an interview with Barbara Walters in which he made a long speech about what prompted him to shoot Lennon – without ever saying anything that could be remotely construed as “I’M SORRY.” ::punch-in-face smiley::
Meanwhile, Lennon did kind of call his own death, although in a different context. During the “Jesus tour” he predicted, “We’ll either go in a plane crash or we’ll be popped off by some loony.” Of course, he meant on the tour, not thinking beyond that to his ultimate fate if he survived the tour. Still, he said it.
I was a dj at my local college radio station. My shift started at 11PM EST that night, we had a 5 minute rip and read news cast first. the news guy finished, went down the hall to the news office. Other than his reading the news, he was a real Asperger’s type, very quiet and shy always. He cam running back to the studio almost immediately during my intro, which never happened, trailing a new piece of yellow paper. He was too shy to go back on himself, he gave it to me, said read it, 10 bells. Only lottery numbers and assassinations got 10 bells on the teletype.
That first passage said (11:06) “A man tentatively identified as former Beatle John Lennon has been shot tonight in New York City”.
A couple of minutes later another 10-bells, “John Lennon has been shot tonight in New York City” followed almost immediately by “John Lennon has been shot and killed tonight in New York City”.
It seems like it was about 10 minutes later when I started to get calls from other station people and listeners telling me they heard about this on Monday Night Football and other stations and I should check the teletype. I am quite comfortable we broke the news to our large city, we had it all literally seconds after it came across the wire.
He thought that a football game was too trivial an event during which to announce it – that it would sound too flippant to just shoehorn it in between plays. even after he did announce it, he then said something to the effect of, “it’s hard to go back to football after that.”