I don't normally hold onto mementoes of events; no scrapbooks of the moon landings from when I was a kid, not even my own newspaper clippings from when I used to act clutter up my shelf space. But I've held on to the front section of "The Globe and Mail" newspaper from one particular day now for almost twenty-five years.
Tuesday December 9th 1980 and the headline read: John Lennon shot dead in N.Y. They had picked up the American Press (A.P.) feed because the story had broken so late. It's not much more than a straight reportage of the facts surrounding the event, the flat details of John's life, and the fact that he was survived by a son from his first marriage, as well as his current wife Yoko Ono and a five-year-old son named Sean.
Periodically,/I pause to think about the world./Not something tossed off casually with slogans or platitudes,/just trying to keep track./Gauge against some standard,/(whose)/How are we doing?/ Richard Marcus "Thinking About John Lennon" Steps To Maturity 1994 p37
Of all the articles and photos and stuff that came out during the month afterwards, in all the magazines, newspapers, special issues etc., this is the only thing that I've held onto. It's survived countless moves, a flood that destroyed all my books and records, and a variety of hard hearted cleanings which have seen the throwing out of countless other objects clung to because of sentiment.
Yesterday I was over at my drugstore picking up a prescription and I idled away the time while waiting by looking through their magazine rack. What caught my eye was a huge glossy commemorative issue that "Life Magazine" has published in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lennon's death.
As I walk through neighbourhoods,/separated from lives by windows;/traces of sounds,/figures grouped around flickering blue light,/sipping and talking,/laughter and candle light./All echo in my head./ ibid
I casually leafed through it and looked at the photos and read what the people who had taken the photos had to say about John or the Beatles and when they called my name to tell me my prescription was ready, I just stuffed it back on the shelf. The photos were nice and the book was well put together, but I had no desire to buy it.
I realized something latter; why it was that I had no interest in those things that are being passed off as memories of John. It's because they aren't memories of John, they're memories of people's association with fame. Look, these articles and pictures seem to say, I knew John and was intimate with him. See, there I am posing with the Beatles, John took that picture.
Article comments
1 - GoHah
Very nice, well expressed and a refreshing warts-and-all overview: John, the smart one an the all-too-human one, would be the first to mock some of the more hagiographic remembrance that goes on.
2 - Victor Lana
Nice, honest, yet compassionate. That was John too if you think about it. He sat down with Dick Cavett, swilled Scotch and smoked cigarettes. Even when they were mop-tops, John was the "married" one, which of course meant he was having sex. Little girls didn't care; they just kept screaming.
The thing about John that caught me was that he was a dreamer (as he says in "Imagine"); and, for the most part, he shared his dreams with us and they became ours.
So, when he died that night (I'll never forget it), the dream died.
3 - Barry Stoller
"... it wasn't the man's fame that was important; it might not have even been the man himself that mattered. What mattered most of all was the importance we had attached to him in our minds and hearts. He was our potential for change and our link to an idealized past in one package."
Well, if that isn't fame, what is? I think Lennon was a potent "celebrity" because he was more adventurous yet more vulnerable than average mortals. Of course, Sinatra covered all that ground a generation earlier - the genius, the vulgarity, the recklessness and the grandiosity all mixed up in one perplexing man. Nothing new under the sun; if Sting would have done the drink or drugs he would've topped both.
4 - justin Kreutzmann
His spirit is missed.