By Staff
Twenty-five years ago, on Dec. 8, 1980, I was 23. In my life, John Lennon has been gone from more than half of it. That pre-Internet Monday night, Howard Cosell announced a crazy fan shot him in the back five times outside his home. He had just learned that his first new music in five years, “Double Fantasy,” had gone gold.
It was a dreadfully ironic end to an acerbic and violent man who publicly battled his demons and spoke up for peace during wartime to sing songs such as “All You Need is Love,” “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine.”
Imagine, Lennon at 65, talking on a cell phone, sending e-mail, influenced by hip-hop and appearing on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
Born Oct. 9, 1940, in Liverpool, he entered the world in the dark, the lights doused to thwart Nazi bombing raids.
While the other three Beatles grew up in housing projects, Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi in suburban Mendips. He had little contact with his father, who was at sea. His rebelliousness came from his mother, Julia, who taught him to play guitar.
Lennon lost his mother a second time in 1958 when a drunken off-duty policeman struck her, enlarging the chip he already carried on his shoulder.
The Beatles took America by storm on Feb. 9, 1964, on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” changing culture as well as music. Rock music suddenly wielded the power to not only irk the elders, but to change the world.
Drug experimentation colored the complexity of “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Once Lennon met Japanese artist Yoko Ono, the Beatles' split seemed destined. He brought her to recording sessions for the White Album, but agreed to withhold a breakup announcement - which Paul McCartney made April 10, 1970, in releasing his first solo album, “McCartney,” and close to the release date for “Let It Be.”
Lennon's powerfully spare first solo album, “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” released in December 1970, used a minimal amount of instrumentation to shield listeners from his raw memories, including “Mother” and “Working Class Hero” and culminating in “God,” a litany of things he no longer believed in, including the Beatles.
It ends: “The dream is over/What can I say/The dream is over/Yesterday/I was the dream weaver/But now I'm reborn/I was the Walrus/But now I'm John/And so, dear friends/You'll just have to carry on/The dream is over.”
On Thanksgiving 1974, toward the end of his separation from Yoko, Lennon appeared at Madison Square Garden with Elton John, with whom he recorded his first No. 1 single, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
A couple of nights before, I saw John at Notre Dame debut “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” - the closest I would ever get to my hero since I was 6 years old.
McCartney, who said, “What a drag,” when informed of Lennon's murder, marked the 25th with Grammy nominations for Album of the Year, Pop Album of the Year and Best Male Vocal for “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.” His last nomination for Best Album was during the Nixon administration in 1974 for “Band on the Run.”