On Wednesday When a violent death brings immortality
ON December 9 1980 as I walked into the newsroom of the local weekly paper where I had been working for a few months, a colleague stood up from his desk, grabbed his chest and staggered around as if he was about to fall to the floor. “Who am I?” he asked. I shrugged. “John Lennon...” he said, finishing his little bit of acting with a flourish.
The ex-Beatle had been shot in New York just before 11pm the night before. The news broke in the early hours in the UK. I hadn’t heard the early radio bulletins. My reporter friend’s bit of bad taste acting was the first I knew that one of the most famous men in the world had been killed by an obsessed fan, Mark Chapman.
That memory, still crystal clear almost 40 years on, came back to me on Friday last week as what would have been Lennon’s 80th birthday was marked. A slew of newspaper and magazine features and several TV documentaries were produced to mark the occasion. There aren’t many celebrities whose sudden and violent death would create such shock and grief around the world. But the murder of John Lennon certainly did that.
I was a late Beatles fan; a member of the generation that missed out on the Fab Four when they exploded onto the music scene and so spent my teenage years playing catch up. I had a Saturday job in a record shop and regularly spent my meagre weekly wage on a Beatles album, spurning – for the most part – the myriad compilations that were produced throughout the 1970s and ordering many of the originals, from Rubber Soul and Revolver through to
the White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be.
It’s always fun to play with a counterfactual story... a ‘what if’? So what if John hadn’t been shot? What music did he still have to produce? Might the Beatles have reformed...? All these issues and more have been pored over endlessly by music fans in the years since the shooting. It’s fun, but ultimately pointless. The truth is that by 1980 the song-writing magic that was Lennon and McCartney had been shown to be far greater than the sum of its parts. Even if most the best work was done as individuals the competitive spirit, or whatever it was, of being in the Beatles, drove them to greatness. Both men were major solo writers and performers, but the spark of genius was often missing. And after the enmity that clearly erupted when the band split, any hope of the band reforming seemed highly unlikely.
No one would wish an early death on an artist. But there is also no doubt that Roger Daltrey’s heartfelt cry in The Who’s My Generation “hope I die before I get old...” does give the Lennon ‘brand’ – if not Lennon, the husband, father and friend – certain artistic advantages.
He is forever the cool one, still young at 40, still giving off that aura of restless anger and angst in many of the pictures and the film footage. While Paul has grown into his grandad persona, first conjured up when he sang When I’m 64 on Sgt Pepper, and Ringo has become Hollywood’s resident ageing Scouser, John remains pretty much where he always was. He still has the strongest claim on Beatledom because when he died the Beatles were still fresh in the memory; he is still feted as the composer of some of the strongest and most thought-provoking songs and the manner of his death reminds us that real shining stardom has the power to create mad and unhinged emotions in others, almost proving how truly famous he was.
George Harrison died in 2001 from lung cancer at the age of 58. That was sad. I was a big fan of George, the “nice one,” the best guitar player and no slouch as a song-writer. But I don’t remember where I was when he met his end. No slightly sick colleague in whatever newsroom I was in when that news broke faked a coughing fit and a mock expire to mark George’s passing.
No, John’s death, shot four times at close range with a .38 revolver outside his New York apartment building, is the one lodged in the memory. Just like his songs, his style and his spirit.
‘John’s early and violent death means he is forever the cool one, still giving off restless anger’