On the morning of December 9, 1980, I learned that John Lennon had been shot to death the previous night.Groggy and entirely unaware, I shuffled into the kitchen and looked down at the Louisville Courier-Journal lying atop the breakfast kitchen table.
The headline was very clear. My reaction was anything but.
My mother was listening to the AM radio, as was her morning habit before going off to teach school, and as I listened to the news reports, my enthusiasm for attending morning classes at Indiana University Southeast quickly disappeared.
However, I wanted to be with friends, so I drove from our home in Georgetown to the Grant Line Road campus in a daze, thoughts swirling, FM radio tuned to the inevitable all-day tributes, chronologically at the age of twenty, but on this day still far too painfully adolescent.
Apparently there had been too little of death in my upbringing, too few opportunities to learn how to handle grief. What was it about pop culture that made it easier to display emotion at the murder of an icon far, far away, even as it remained impossible to discuss feelings in my own family?
My father and his schoolmates could easily remember where they were and what they were doing when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and in the 1960’s, a different generation reacted in similar fashion to the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Martin Luther King.
When John Lennon was killed, I was quite certain something had come to an end, although it was unclear to me that morning exactly what it was. It was an emotion that I was not to experience again until September 11, 2001.
On December 9, 1980, walking through the corridors at school, I met a friend named Sean, who had moved to Louisville from the East Coast a short time before. Sean was Irish, and a drinker, and as we shared our feelings about John Lennon’s death, I was reminded that Sean’s father was an executive in the bourbon industry, something that loomed large considering our mutual desire to get drunk and the fact that neither of us was 21.
I don’t recommend driving while drinking, but we did, listening to the music of John and the Beatles, watching the Ohio River, and wishing we had girlfriends. After Sean returned to campus to meet other friends, it was safe for me to sit alone in the parking lot and have a good cry when one of the FM deejays played “Beautiful Boy” from the Double Fantasy album.
Two or three days later, I saw a letter in one of the local newspapers, in which a fundamentalist Christian took offense at the widespread depth of feeling for John Lennon, preferring to view the slain musician as an immoral agent of Satan, out to subvert Christianity and promote sinful lifestyles. Incensed, I wrote a rebuttal, which was published … and I began to reflect on the hatred and spite that so often preface religious fanaticism.
Suddenly, I understood what had changed. On December 9, 1980, I abandoned the notion – admittedly, a tenuous one even then – that a world in which artists are violently struck down before their time and the upwardly devout respond by piously sneering at the blood of the victim has anything whatsoever to do with deities and the supernatural.
John Lennon’s brutal death wasn’t the only impetus for this conclusion. It was 1980, and the ascendancy of Jerry Falwell. Ronald Reagan was in the White House. There were many reasons for a young man to be angry before the morning when the music died.
A quarter century later, there still are … even though I’m no longer young.
In recording these thoughts, honesty is my first aim. It would be much less jolting and far more pleasing to concentrate on remembrances of the good times when the music of John Lennon and the Beatles filled my life – and indeed, there were many such times.
There will be more. I cherish them.
But the image of the newspaper headline won’t go away, and neither will the conclusions that the tragedy of John Lennon’s death produced for me, in my life.
I miss his creativity.
And my innocence.
Where has twenty five years gone?
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