When Music Died, Words Were Born
D E C E M B E R 9 , 2 0 0 5
Do you remember what you were doing when John Lennon was shot? I don’t, but I do remember, with a searing clarity, the moment 25 years ago this morning when I belatedly heard the news.
I was a year out of college and working as a copy editor at a lackluster little newspaper in western Michigan. Because the paper was published in the afternoon, my shift began at an ungodly 4:45 a.m. My job was to clean up the copy of others—the best I could often hope for was to nudge the truly awful up to merely mediocre—and then put a headline on it.
On December 8, 1980, I went to bed early without turning on the television or radio, clueless about the seismic shock waves emanating from the west side of Central Park in New York. The next morning I walked into the newsroom unaware, and the other copy editors—older men who reveled in pushing my buttons—gleefully awaited me, Associated Press copy in hand.
“Your little hero Johnny Lennon bit the big one last night,” one of them, a washed-up back-bencher named Brandon, said.
I literally reeled backward. I stuttered and stumbled. “He what?” I asked, trying to process it. They all found this immensely amusing.
I walked to the empty sports department and called my older brother in New York, waking him. “Did you hear?” I asked.
No Words Needed
He had, the night before as he walked home from work through Central Park, and he had joined thousands of others in the impromptu vigil outside the former Beatle’s apartment building. We just sat there on the phone, not saying much, not needing to.
Other icons of our age had “bit the big one,” as Brandon would say—Elvis, Jimi, Janis, Morrison—and yet this was different.
The others had died of their own excesses. Lennon, publicly and painfully, had worked through his, finding peace in the simple joys of fatherhood. And he was killed by one of us, a deranged fan carrying a copy of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
If the Beatles provided the soundtrack for my youth, J. D. Salinger provided the written text. Holden Caulfield— crazy, pitiable, confused, unpredictable Holden—was a little bit of all of us from that time, just as was Lennon, struggling to find his way, wearing his anguish on his sleeve.
And these two towering cultural icons came crashing together outside the Dakota apartments in a way that no one anticipated. Instant karma’s gonna get you. . . . And yet, not like this.
The fact that his death came just one day after the anniversary of another generation’s cultural earthquake— Pearl Harbor—only intensified the feeling that this was something far more than just a celebrity murder.
Inside Treatment
Back at the copy desk, the news chief, a World War II veteran who as a 19-year-old had dropped bombs on Berlin, had relegated Lennon’s death to two paragraphs on an inside page.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
Two hours later, the paper’s editor, a no-nonsense veteran who had survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor, arrived. He glanced over the news budget, stopping at the Lennon story, slated for the “In Brief ”roundup.
He looked at me, and for the first time sought my opinion .“This is big, isn’t it?” he asked.
“It’s really big,” I told him.
He seemed to grasp what my coworkers could not: that, like Pearl Harbor, this event was about to shut the door forever on a generation’s blissful naivete and innocence.
All you need is love.... Right.
We ripped up the front page that morning and stripped the Lennon story across the top. Then my editor, this relic from a simpler time when good and evil were more clearly defined, turned to me and asked if I would write a first-person commentary on how Lennon’s death affected me.
It was the first column of my life, and when I had completed it, I knew this was what I was meant to do.
In the crazy snowball of unanticipated circumstance that is life, four shots on a New York City sidewalk reverberated outward, touching many of us in unique ways.
For me that day, something inside died. And something was born.
