December 8, 1980…

I wanted to include this early today before my posts for Sunday.

As I’ve told people before…I rarely do anniversaries…but this one I will post as long as I blog. I add something to it every year but I wish John would be alive and well at 84 years old but that didn’t happen. It brings back a lot of memories and I’m 13 all over again.

I grew up in the seventies and became a teen in the 1980s. The Beatles were not popular where I lived to say the least. One concerned mother of a friend actually called my mom warning her that I was headed toward destruction because I was listening to the Beatles at around 11 years old. No, I’m not kidding.  My mom, bless her heart, told the lady that “Max knows right from wrong. You worry about your child and I’ll worry about about mine.” Ok back to December of 1980.

Damn this date. Every Dec 8th I can’t help but think of where I was when I heard. Last year’s release of the UK #1 Now and Then only heightened the anger, sadness, and confusion over what happened. I post this post every year on this date and will continue. I have updated it each year and I’ve almost rewritten it since I posted it first back in 2018…and if it’s too long now I apologize. I still feel what I felt on that date. Although to be accurate it was on December 9th that I found out…the next morning getting ready for school.

When I watched the news clips at the time I felt like an interloper because all of these fans who were sobbing grew up with Lennon in real time…I was this 13-year-old kid who was late to the party…a decade late.

It’s odd to think the Beatles had only been broken up for 10 years when this happened…to a 13-year-old at the time…that was a lifetime but in reality, it’s nothing. To put it in perspective… it’s now 2023 and 10 years ago was 2013…that doesn’t seem that long ago does it? I was only 3 years old when the Beatles broke up so I had no clue.

Since second grade (1975), I’ve been listening to the Beatles. While a lot of kids I knew listened and talked about modern music …I just couldn’t relate as much. By the time I was ten, I had read every book about The Beatles I could get my hands on. In a small middle TN town…it wasn’t too many. I was after their generation but I knew the importance of what they did…plus just great music. The more I got into them the more I learned about the Who, Stones, and the Kinks. I wanted to get my hands on every book about the music of the 1960s. Just listening to the music wasn’t enough…I wanted to know the history.

I spent that Monday night playing albums in my room. Monday night I didn’t turn the radio on…I’m glad I didn’t…The next morning I got up to go to school and the CBS morning news was on. The sound was turned down but the news was showing Beatle video clips. I was wondering why they were showing them but didn’t think much of it.

Curious, I turned the volume up and found out that John Lennon had been shot and killed. I was very angry and shocked. The bus ride to school was quiet… at school, it was quiet as well. Some teachers were affected because John was their generation. Some of my friends were shocked but some didn’t get the significance at the time and some didn’t care.

I went out and bought the White Album, Abbey Road, and Double Fantasy in late December of 1980…I can’t believe I didn’t have those two Beatles albums already…now whenever I hear any song from those albums they remind me of the winter of 80-81. I remember the call-in shows on the radio then…pre-internet… people calling to share their feelings for John or hatred for the killer.

The next few weeks I saw footage of the Beatles on specials that I had never seen before. Famous and non-famous people pouring their hearts out over the grief. Planned tributes from bands and everyone asking the same question…why?

My young mind could not process why a person would want to do this to a musician. A politician yea…I could see that…not that it’s right but this? A musician? Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and JFK were before my time.  By the mid-1970s John had pretty much dropped out of sight…John and Yoko released Double Fantasy on November 17, 1980, and suddenly they were everywhere…Less than a month later John was murdered. The catchwords were Catcher in the Rye, Hawaii, handgun, and insane. The next day we were duly informed who killed John in the First, Middle, and Last name format they assign to murderers. I won’t mention his name.

I didn’t want to know his name, his career, his wife’s name, his childhood…I just wanted to know why… he says now…” attention”

I noticed a change happened after that Monday night. John Lennon was instantly turned into a saint, something he would have said was preposterous. Paul suddenly became the square and the uncool one and George and Ringo turned into just mere sidemen. Death has a way of elevating you in life. After the Anthology came out in the 90s that started to change back a little.

I called my dad a few days after it happened and he said that people were more concerned that The Beatles would never play again than the fact a man, father, and husband were shot and killed. He was right and I was among those people until he said that. Dad was never a fan…he was more Elvis, Little Richard, and country music… but he made his point. When my father passed in 2005 I thought about this conversation and knew he was teaching me again.

It was odd being into the Beatles at such a young age and after their time so to speak. While my peers were talking about all the contemporary artists at the time…all I talked about was John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I would end up comparing all the new music I heard to theirs…and that wasn’t fair at all to new music. I would think to myself…well this song (any new song at the time) wasn’t as good as Strawberry Fields and so on. I, fortunately, grew out of that but it took a while.

Below is a video of James Taylor telling how he met the killer a day before Lennon was murdered. Also, Howard Sterns broadcast the day after.

…

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

23 thoughts on “December 8, 1980…”

  1. I hear you and your mom (Love her!), about parents raising their own children… we had neighbors like that too, Max. One called and asked my mom if she knew what her daughter (me), was SMOKING! My mom said, Yes. I buy her cigarettes for her! Ha! My mom was a pistol like that. And she did but one pack for me to try and they made me sick, so thankfully, I never touched them again. My mom didn’t want me trying any friends’ smokes and getting something laced with whatever!
    I loved John Lennon too, and the Beatles. I had just graduated high school in 1980. Ugh. Sad.

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    1. Thanks Sheila…it hit me really hard at 13 years old because I just didn’t get it.
      My mom had confidence in me…like you and your mom…she thought I would make the right choices…my big sister…different story! lol but the Beatles she lived through so she didn’t see them as a threat.

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  5. First of all, I love the quote from your mom to the neighbor. She sounds awesome. I was born in 1962, so the Beatles are in all of my earliest memories. You can’t imagine how widespread their popularity was. Everybody knew which one was which. Even my mother, who was 42 when I was born. I didn’t hear about the murder until the next day either, when my mother woke me up to tell me. I don’t know what else to say but, senseless. Thank you for sharing your viewpoint on a tragic event.

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  6. You mentioned JFK’s assassination. It was something that came to my mind as well when I saw a Facebook friends (who also is a musician) posted about John’s murder earlier today.

    This made me think John’s senseless death is a musical equivalent to JFK’s murder. I realize that’s a bold comparison, but I feel similar to Kennedy, many folks who were around when John was shot to death still remember where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news.

    At the time, I was still growing up in Germany. I still vividly recall my great guitar teacher, who was a huge Beatles fan, arriving at my house for a lesson in the late afternoon/early evening and being completely devastated. I had never seen him like that before. He could barely keep it together. We forgot about practicing the guitar and instead ended up watching the early TV evening news.

    When John was shot I was still becoming the big Beatles I’m today. As such, I was sad he had been killed but I wasn’t as devastated as my guitar teacher. Nowadays, John’s murder touches me more than it did at the time, even though it happened all those years ago.

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    1. I was in the midst of Beatle fandom when it happened so that is the reason it hit me. Plus I had read where he planned to tour and I wanted to see him really bad…he was my Beatle so to speak as you know.
      Then life sunk in…wait…if it can happen to Lennon it can happen to anyone.

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  7. Nice…really nice Max. Oh yes, I remember watching that infamous Patriots at Dolphins game with my Dad (who was 84 this year) & my brother (who’s your age) when Howard Cosell announced that John Lennon had been shot. It shook us up to our core man. Then his posthumous album was released & that was a prolific hits machine. We were robbed as a culture. I to sometimes wonder what he would’ve been like if he could’ve lived until he was 84 this year.

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    1. Thank you Carl…I really appreciate it. Being 13 and a young Beatles fan of 5 years already…it hit and it hit me hard. I remember when Elvis died…it didn’t affect me as much as the grownups around me…but Lennon…I knew how they felt then and I wasn’t even part of that generation. Plus…Elvis died really at his own hand…but Lennon didn’t have that choice.
      It would have been a different world. He didn’t want a body guard because he said he would feel too much guilt if the guy would have got killed protecting him…he wasn’t a saint but I would have loved to have seen a world with Lennon.

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      1. Ya’, great points Max…at 16 I remembered the very end of the Beatles when I started Kindergarten because my parents sat me down & tried to explain (as much as you can explain to a 5 year old) who they were as they did about the with Supremes & the Doors & that hit all of us teenagers hard back then. I remembered that & that triggered that great song from my favorite Beatle George Harrison ‘All Those Years Ago’ my junior year in high school while John Lennon’s album & hits were still burning up the charts.

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      2. Oh yea…it was so nice to hear George sing that. I’ve been told by other musicians that lived through that period that we could not imagine how big they were and how much influence they had.

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  8. Rock’s most tragic death because he seemed to have his life on track finally & it was absolutely senseless. No reason at all for him to be killed, not even owing the guy money or having an affair with his wife, nothing that could be any real reason. Just random evil.
    At the time it didn’t effect me much though I did like some of his music, it obviously resonates more with me now for many reasons.

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    1. Random Evil is one of the best ways I’ve heard it described. I hated to just repost it but my memories don’t change… yea I was 5 years into the Beatles and by that time I had read so much about them and listened to them.

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