John Lennon is Dead

As the 35th anniversary of John Lennon's death approaches, I thought I would post something I wrote in the days after his shooting:

John Lennon is Dead

That the death of John Lennon would first reach my ears through the rasping medium of a Howard Cosell monologue is a droll footnote to a sad tale. I don't know why I was watching Monday Night Football. It was one of those evenings that shatter one's pretensions of self-discipline and purpose.  I had probably contemplated reading a good book but ended up giving in to the addiction of my youth.

It was the week before final exams, and Boston had grown very cold and subdued.  The initial gaiety of the post-Thanksgiving preparations for Christmas had already subsided and the city was caught in that funny period between the two holidays.  No matter how hard the merchants and admen try, they cannot obliterate that dead zone in early December.

But Monday Night Football was impervious to the subtleties of the season, and Howard and Dandy Don Meredith were still in their heyday.  When the announcement was made, it reached millions of people and its stunning effect swept across the country.

My first reaction was shock.  Assassination was not an end I could imagine for John Lennon.   Rock stars had not fared well in the 70's, but they generally died from drug overdoses and motorcycle accidents, which were more like a professional hazard.  Being stalked and gunned down by an assassin cast Lennon's death in a very different light.

The initial shock began to transform itself into focused emotions, the most striking of which was a deep aching melancholy. I began to phone friends, passing the grim news and sharing memories of a youth that seemed suddenly to have ended.

My earliest associations with music centered around the Beatles.  In 1964 I was ten years old.  My sister was an authentic screaming-teen-beatlemaniac. Every day after school she would drag me down into our basement and we would play Beatle 45s until Mom yelled down that it was time for dinner.

Sometimes we would dance and she would show me the latest moves - the monkey, the jerk, the watusi. And always we would memorize, song after song, verse upon verse.  I can still sing along with scores of Beatle songs, rarely missing a word.

After the Beatles' conquest of the U.S., I left the tutelage of my sister and forged my own relationship with the Fab Four. In school I was a recognized Beatle expert. I led the Beatles songs in the bus on field trips. Three friends and I joined together as a pretend Beatles group, and the girls in our class were willing to pretend right along with us, so powerful was the elixir of Beatlemania.

By the end of 1965 the album Rubber Soul had come, and with it a transition out of the cuteness and innocence of their early image.  I was horrified by their longer and disheveled hair and the unabashed display of smoking on the album cover.  But the new sound in their music enchanted me and soon I was growing and changing too, just a few paces behind the lads from Liverpool.

Junior high, with its painful initiation into the rites of social intercourse, was the time when music first became a solace to my oft-injured soul.  And though I did not understand the details of their own quest - their age and sophistication were well beyond my tender years - somehow the combination of rebellion and truth-seeking in the Beatles music was comprehensible and comforting to me. I was searching too.

By the time I reached high school and began grappling with the issues of war, civil rights and social justice, the Beatles were in the final stages of collapse as a group. I have never regretted their breakup.  The Beatles had been able to stay one step ahead of the "rock impressarios" up to that time, but it was inevitable that they would have become yet another big business band and a monument to self-parody had they continued.

I continued to listen to Beatle music through college and beyond.  Though my interest in rock music offered up other heroes it was never the same. Other groups might capture my feelings for a few months or even a few years, but the Beatles were like lifelong good friends.  We had learned about the world together and nothing would ever change that.

Those four British boys were uniquely gifted as a group, creating songs and a sound that were far greater than the sum of the parts.  Their solo efforts never came close.  There was plenty of individual talent, and a generous portion of charm and wit, but their incredible impact on this world was circumstantial - a perfect union of those mystical forces that create an historical moment.

The day after the shooting, I walked over to MIT and found that Lennon's death was the topic of every conversation.  All of my friends and co-workers were grieving in some fashion. Radio stations played nothing but Beatle music and stores were quickly sold out of every Beatle album. In a review session that I attended, an Iranian graduate student announced, with eyes glistening, that he was dedicating the session to the memory of John Lennon.

Throughout that day and the next few, I wrestled with my memories of the Beatles and tried to reconcile sentiment with reason. John Lennon, whatever his faults or vanities, had stubbornly spoken for the idealist in all of us.  Why can't we just give peace a chance?  Why can't we imagine a world without war or hatred?

On the Sunday following his death, a rally and candle vigil was held in downtown Boston at Copley Square - timed to coincide with a worldwide ten minutes of silence for the fallen legend. The day was brutally cold, but still thousands came.

The embers of the 60s had smoldered and glowed throughout the 70s. Many had hoped that the gentle integrity of Jimmy Carter might fan them into life again, but it was not to be. Then, suddenly, a reaction of cynical pragmatism gripped the nation. Dreams of social equality and international peace were abandoned in a frenzy of greed and nationalism.

The year 1980 rang the death knell for the innocent questing spirit of the 60s.  The Soviets were in Afghanistan, the hostages were in Iran, and a disgruntled public voted in Ronald Reagan as president a month before the death of John Lennon.

The Beatles had served as an alter-ego for our generation. And now, a part of them was dead, shot down as if to exclaim once and for all the absurdity of believing that love could change the world.

The cold and the wind forced the crowd to huddle together for the ten minutes of silence.  The closeness had an electric effect, and I could see many around me weeping, yet smiling through their tears. I felt those twin currents of hope and despair surging through the crowd, but somehow the mood was triumphant. It was the end of an era, but love would carry the day.