peterfeld:December 8, 1980 was not a “cold December evening,” as Paul Simon sang on &ldq
peterfeld:December 8, 1980 was not a “cold December evening,” as Paul Simon sang on “The Late Great Johnny Ace.” It was a warm day – according to the weather check from a 1010 WINS news report I heard replayed this morning, it was 63° at midnight – and afterward I thought Chapman might never have hung out in front of the Dakota all day if it had been bitter cold. I was a senior at Columbia sliding into finals week. I remember spending part of the day typing a letter to two Berkeley professors I hoped would get me into grad school, going to the psych library in Schermerhorn Hall to make myself a copy before mailing it. At home in my apartment on West 121 Street I had a study session with a friend. Sometime after 11, the phone rang. It was another friend, telling me John Lennon had been shot outside his home. Everyone knew where he lived. “He’s not dead, is he?” “Yeah, he’s dead.” I turned on the rock station, WNEW, but wasn’t in the mood to listen to the radio. I slipped on a light jacket and walked the two and a half miles down Morningside Drive, which becomes Columbus Avenue below 110th St., turning left at 72nd where a large crowd had formed. It was a kind of a mob scene: there were police lines, police cars, people with boom boxes playing Beatles and Lennon music – I remember Dream #9 – but I found two women in their late 20s or 30s and we bonded over our shock and also the strangeness of the scene. I remember a TV camera with its lights shining at me, but I froze up and had nothing to say to the reporter. Someone later told me they had seen me on the news. All I could do was stare at the entrance to the Dakota and try to comprehend that Lennon had been killed right there, less than two hours earlier. Things started to get creepy: there were crazies in the crowd yelling random things and my two new friends decided it was a good time to leave. I did too, walking to the subway at Broadway and 72nd, stopping at a newsstand to buy a copy of Playboy, with its big Lennon interview, and the Soho News, a long-gone Village Voice alternative whose cover that week featured Yoko with the now ironic headline “Yoko Only.” I sat on the steps and read the interview while I waited for the train to come. There was a huge memorial the following Sunday in Central Park, one of those strange New York mass gatherings of which there were many in those days (No Nukes rallies, massive Sheep Meadow concerts with James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkel). As the crowd dispersed and I crossed Central Park West, I saw a violinist playing “Yesterday.” This was funny because, in that Playboy interview I’d just read, Lennon had recalled how a violinist at a restaurant once played him “Yesterday.” He joked, “Well, I couldn’t expect him to play ‘I Am The Walrus.’” I gave the violinist a dollar. The rest of December was so bitter. I don’t know how I got through finals. Lennon music played everywhere. His Christmas song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was especially heartbreaking. I bought Beatles records – one day I traveled down from Columbia to City Hall to buy the Help album at J&R Music because “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” was burning a hole in my brain, made mix tapes, listened to them with my friends. In January, this Rolling Stone came out, with Annie Liebovitz’s photos of John and Yoko, taken the day he died, on the cover. I guess if I hadn’t thumbed through it so many times it would be a collector’s item. RIP John Lennon. -- source link