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The Beatles · S11 E7
December 8, 1980
The Dakota building, 10:50pm. John Lennon, forty years old. Five gunshots. The world loses the voice of a generation, and the Beatles lose any chance of reunion
It's December 8, 1980, and John Lennon lies curled naked around Yoko Ono on the floor of the Dakota while Annie Leibovitz photographs them for Rolling Stone. He has twelve hours to live.
"Watching the Wheels" (John Lennon, official music video, 1981). Lennon's meditation on the five years he spent away from the spotlight. The video shows him at the Hit Factory and around New York, looking relaxed and content in a way he never did during the Lost Weekend. Released as the third single from Double Fantasy after his death, it became both a celebration and a memorial.
Five Years of Bread
After the Lost Weekend ended in early 1975, Lennon walked into the Dakota and disappeared. Sean was born that October, and John became a full-time father: baking bread, watching Sesame Street, and refusing every offer to record. When he finally returned to the studio in August 1980, he brought over two dozen new songs and more energy than producer Jack Douglas had ever seen from him.
Sources
Sheff, David. "All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono." St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.
Norman, Philip. "John Lennon: The Life." Ecco, 2008.
Watching the Wheels, John Lennon (1980)
The song is Lennon's answer to five years of reporters, record executives, and old friends asking when he'd come back. The piano figure circles the same few notes like a music box winding down, while the lyric calmly explains that stepping off the ride was the whole point. Producer Jack Douglas kept the arrangement sparse: piano, bass, drums, a hint of guitar. Lennon's vocal is the warmest thing he ever recorded, completely stripped of the anger and irony that defined his earlier work.
Sources
Du Noyer, Paul. "We All Shine On: The Stories Behind Every John Lennon Song 1970-1980." Carlton, 1997.
The Dakota, New York City
The 1884 apartment building where John and Yoko lived from 1973. Lennon loved it because New Yorkers left him alone: he could walk to Central Park without being mobbed. He was shot in the archway entrance on the evening of December 8, 1980.
TAP TO REVEAL: What almost didn't happen about the famous Rolling Stone cover?
10:49 PM
At 10:49 PM, John and Yoko return to the Dakota from a mixing session at the Record Plant. As Lennon walks past the archway, Mark David Chapman, who got his autograph on a copy of Double Fantasy earlier that afternoon, fires five shots from a .38 revolver. Four hit Lennon in the back and shoulder. He is rushed to Roosevelt Hospital in a police cruiser and pronounced dead at 11:07 PM.
Sources
Jones, Jack. "Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman." Villard, 1992.
Norman, Philip. "John Lennon: The Life." Ecco, 2008.
December 8 and After
Grow Old with Me, John Lennon (1980 demo / 1984 release)
One of the last songs Lennon ever recorded, captured as a home demo on a boombox in the Dakota. He wrote it as a companion piece to Yoko's "Let Me Count the Ways," both inspired by the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. John imagined a Phil Spector wall of sound for the finished version, with a full orchestra and choir. He never got to record it properly, and the demo, with its tinny piano and Lennon's voice cracking on the high notes, is more devastating than any studio production could have been.
Grow Old with Me, John Lennon (1980 demo / 1984 release)
"Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be." Lennon borrowed the opening line from Robert Browning and turned it into a wedding hymn for himself and Yoko. The lyric is so simple it almost sounds like a lullaby, asking for nothing more than time together. He recorded it alone in the Dakota on a portable cassette player, and that roughness, the room tone, the piano slightly out of tune, is what makes it impossible to listen to without knowing how the story ends.
How did most Americans first hear the news of John Lennon's death?
In the weeks after December 8, Double Fantasy sells five million copies worldwide. The album John Lennon made about starting over becomes the last thing he ever finished. Next season, S12E1: "Double Fantasy."
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To be continued
Season 12: Forever
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