The Day John Lennon Died
By: Josh Rosenbaum
Tags: New York City, 1980s, The Beatles, John Lennons Death, John Lennon

It’s been four decades since the Beatles’ co-founder was murdered, but his legacy continues.

December 8, 1980. I was back in New York after two post-graduate years in California, bouncing around the country, looking for work, looking for my metier, my calling. Earlier that evening, I had passed the Dakota, the stately home on 72nd Street of John and Yoko, and Leonard Bernstein and lord know how many other celebrities, the wealthy and the famous. John was no stranger to New Yorkers. You could run into him walking in Central Park, or in a local diner, or browsing in a record store — remember record stores? New York was a much different city then, tawdry and dangerous, grafitti-ridden and down on its heels but innocent, a place where anything was possible.

I turned on the TV when I arrived home to catch the 11 o’clock news and watched as the grim-faced anchor told the world what had happened: John Lennon, the former Beatle, shot at point-blank range in front of the Dakota as he left his car, bleeding out as the cop car raced to Roosevelt Hospital. The emergency-room doctors did their best to resusciate him but the wounds were too deep, the effort too late. Pronounced dead.

For those of us of a certain age, or a certain disposition, John Lennon was more than a celebrity, more than a rock star, more than an icon. It sounds cliched, I know, more baby-boomer nostalgia to those too young to remember, but he was our confidant, our companion, our voice. He could be caustic and biting in Working Class Hero (“As soon as you’re born they make you feel small/ By giving you no time instead of it all/Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all…”) or spiritual and utopian in Imagine (“Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man…”) But he was always honest, always direct, with that Liverpudlian inflection that told us the truth, whether or not we wanted to hear it, that wouldn’t suffer fools gladly.

The world grieved when they heard the news. Thousands gathered outside the Dakota, chanting and singing, holding candles. That Sunday, millions of people world-wide paused at Yoko Ono’s request for 10 minutes of silence to honor her husband and for 10 minutes, every radio station in New York City want off the air. Some 30,000 people gathered in Liverpool, John’s hometown, to pay tribute to their slain hero. But the largest crowd was in New York where more than 200,000 gathered in Central Park to mourn his death.

I was in that crowd, tearful and shaken, mourning John’s death but mourning something greater, something felt but unspoken: the end of an era. A month earlier, Ronald Reagan had been elected president in a landslide after a campaign that called for a tougher, meaner America, a country that would no longer coddle miscreants or succor the weak, a triumphant, bombastic country where only the strong prosper, the kind of country John wrote about in Working Class Hero (“There’s room at the top they’re telling you still/

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill/If you want to be like the folks on the hill..”) To Reagan’s many supporters, it was a message of realism and strength, a long-awaited correction to the excesses of the 1960s. But to his detractors, it was a death knell, the end of a dream.

For 40 years, we’ve been living with the consequences or that slaughtered dream. Many, if not most of us, have come to accept the reality that Reagan championed — a meaner, less compassionate, more unequal nation where only fools and starry-eyed idealists really believe in John’s dream. But maybe — just maybe — the tide has turned. Yes, nearly half of America’s voters cast their ballots last month for a sociopathic leader who prides himself on his narcissism and callousness. But most of us didn’t. Most of us — however tentatively, in the midst of disease and despair— opted for empathy, for optimism, for the dream of a better world. Is it premature to say that the tide has turned, that this year marks the dawn of a new age? Probably. But still, there’s a reason why John’s words still resonate with people who weren’t born 40 years ago. Imagine. Just imagine.