The Beatles: Image and the Media

Preface

ix preface On the night of December 8, 1980, as John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono returned to their New York City home from a recording session, a voice from the shadows called, “Mr. Lennon.” As Lennon turned to face the speaker, Mark David Chapman pumped four bullets from his Charter Arms .38 caliber revolver into the musician’s back and shoulder. “I’m shot!” gasped Lennon as he stumbled into the doorman’s office. Chapman dropped his gun, which was quickly kicked aside by the doorman. “Do you know what you just did?” asked the doorman. “I just shot John Lennon,” replied Chapman. Lennon was pronounced dead upon his arrival at Roosevelt Hospital , located fifteen blocks from Lennon’s Dakota apartment (“Death of a Beatle” 35–36). The death of Lennon set in motion a month of activities and commentaries honoring and remembering the fallen ex-Beatle. The night of the murder, mourners began to gather outside the wroughtiron gates of the Dakota apartment building in which Lennon and Ono had lived since 1973. By 1 a.m. the crowd had grown to five hundred (Ledbetter B7).1 News of his death spread quickly around the world. According to the Times of London, “Sorrow over the loss of a prodigally talented musician is mixed with horror that, once again in America, an assassin has found it a matter of absurd simplicity to destroy a life at whim. In the immediate aftermath, the killing is being compared with the murder of President Kennedy x preface in 1963, immediately prior to the Beatles’ greatest success” (Leapman 1). Radio stations all over America devoted airtime to Lennon and Beatle retrospectives. In Los Angeles more than 2,000 people took part in a candlelight vigil. In Washington, D.C., several hundred mourners gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for a silent tribute. Record stores across the country reported that the Lennons’ new album, Double Fantasy, their first in five years, had sold out, as had other Lennon and Beatle albums (“Last Day in a Life” 18). At 2 p.m. EST on December 14, at the request of Yoko Ono, a ten-minute period of silence was observed around the world. At least 100,000 people gathered in New York City’s Central Park, within sight of the Dakota , to observe the period of silence; 600 people gathered in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park; 2,000 in Boston’s Copley Square; and 4,000 at Chicago’s Cricket Hill (Haberman B8). In Sydney, Australia, an observance was held at 6 a.m. to coincide with the period of silence. In Liverpool, England, where Lennon was born and raised, a memorial concert and candlelight vigil were held. Many radio stations in the United States, Europe, and Australia went off the air at the appointed time, while others aired commercial-free Lennon tributes (McFadden 43). Major magazines, among them Time and Newsweek , offered cover stories on the killing and its aftermath. Many viewed Lennon’s death as a cruel end to all that had seemed possible in the idealized 1960s. As Anthony Elliott notes in The Mourning of John Lennon (1999), the death “provided the impetus for cultural mourning on a worldwide scale—mourning for lost dreams, ideals, hopes, beliefs” (152–53). Yet, in the wake of Lennon’s brutal murder, some commentators , far from eulogizing the man, perceived an opportunity to advance their cultural agenda. Lennon—who once declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus,” promoted the use of recreational drugs, and actively opposed the Vietnam War—was far from a favorite of the American Right. This became readily apparent as the preface xi conservative press attempted to transform eulogy into condemnation . Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing in Commentary, observed that the “spectacle attending Lennon’s memorializing served primarily as the occasion . . . for a collective self-portrait of a generation whose faith in its own special stature may well be its principal distinction and sole enduring accomplishment.” She proceeded: “In the absence of those political certainties which had once defined them and served as their chief moral credentials—certainties which had been discredited by subsequent events—all that remained to distinguish this particular generation were the ineffable qualities of ‘feeling,’ ‘sensitivity,’ ‘openness,’ ‘awareness,’ and so forth” (Rabinowitz 59). The mourning rituals “reevoked for a moment the atmosphere of the 60’s: the cowed silence that once prevailed in the face of the...