TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80capmil.3

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                ▄                                                              December 22, 1980

COVER STORY

The Last Day in the Life

John Lennon: 1940-1980


John Lennon is shot to death at 40, and a bright dream fades


Just a voice out of the American night. "Mr. Lennon," He
started to turn around. There is no knowing whether John
Lennon, saw, for what would have been the second time that day,
the young man in the black raincoat stepping out of the shadows.
The first shot hit him that fast, through the chest. There
were at least three others.

Not that night, or the next day, but a little later, after the
terror ebbed and the grief could be managed, Lennon's wife, Yoko
Ono, took their five-year-old son Sean to the spot in the
apartment courtyard where she had seen his father murdered. She
had already shown Sean a newspaper with his father's picture on
the front page. She tried to do what everyone else has done
since that Monday night. She tried to explain.

Like everyone else, too, the boy asked simple questions to
which there would never be simple or satisfactory answers. If,
as was being said, the man liked his father so much, why did he
shoot him? His mother explained:  "He was probably a confused
person."  Not good enough. Better to know. Sean Lennon said,
if he was confused or rally meant to kill. His mother said that
was up to the courts to decide, and Sean wanted to know which
courts she was talking about: tennis or basketball?  Then Sean
cried, and he also said, "Now Daddy is part of God. I guess
when you die you become much more bigger because you're part of
everything."

Sean did not really know or understand about the Beatles, or
what his father was to the world. But Sean will surely know,
soon enough, that his father did not have to die to become part
of everything. Given the special burden and grace of his great
gift, he already was. Not just for his wife or son but for more
people than anyone could ever begin to number, the killing of
John Lennon was a death in the family.

For all the official records, the death would be called murder.
For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the
Beatles--which is to say, for much of an entire generation that
is passing, as Lennon was, at age 40, into middle age, and
coming suddenly up against its own mortality--the murder was
something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of
something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or
idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated,
fractured.

The outpouring of grief, wonder and shared devastation that
followed Lennon's death had the same breadth and intensity as
the reaction to the killing of a world figure:  some bold and
popular politician, like John or Robert Kennedy, or a spiritual
leader, like Martin Luther King Jr. But Lennon was a creature
of poetic political metaphor, and his spiritual consciousness
was directed inward, as a way of nurturing and widening his
creative force. That was what made the impact, and the
difference--the shock of his imagination, the penetrating and
pervasive traces of his genius--and it was the loss of all that,
in so abrupt and awful a way, that was mourned last week, all
over the world. The last Day in the Life, "I read the news
today, oh boy..."

Sorrow was expressed, sympathies extended by everyone from
Presidents and Presidents-elect. Prime Ministers and Governors
and mayors to hundreds of fans who gathered at the arched
entryway to the Lennons' Manhattan apartment building, the
Dakota, crying and praying, singing and decorating the tall
gates with wreaths and single flowers and memorial banners.
CHRISTMAS IN HEAVEN, read one. Another recalled the magical
innovation of a childhood memory that became one of his finest
songs:  Strawberry Fields Forever.

Ring Starr flew to New York to see Yoko. George Harrison,
"shattered and stunned,"  went into retreat at his home in
Oxfordshire, England. Paul McCartney, whom Lennon plainly loved
and just as plainly hated like the brother he never had, said,
"I can't tell you how much it hurts to lose him. His death is
a bitter, cruel blow--I really loved the guy."  Having no wish
to contribute to the hysteria that always follows the grief at
such public mournings, McCartney, who has hired two bodyguards
to protect himself and his family, said he would stay home in
Sussex, England, even if there was a funeral. There was not.
Lennon's body was cremated in a suburban New York cemetery, and
Ono issued a statement inviting everyone "to participate from
wherever you are" in a ten-minute silent vigil on Sunday
afternoon.

Before that, it had been a week of tributes. Radio stations
from New Orleans to Boston cleared the air waves for Lennon and
Beatles retrospectives. In Los Angeles, more than 2,000 people
joined in a candlelight vigil at Century City; in Washington,
D.C., several hundred crowded the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
in a "silent tribute" that recalled the sit-ins of the '60s.
Record stores all over the country reported sellouts on the new
Lennon-Ono album, Double Fantasy, their first record in five
years, as well as the back stock of Lennon's previous records.

Some reaction was tragic. A teen-age girl in Florida and a man
of 30 in Utah killed themselves, leaving notes that spoke of
depression over Lennon's death. On Thursday, Ono said, "This
is not the end of an era. The '80s are still going to be a
beautiful time, and John believed in it."

All the brutal and finally confounding facts of the killing
were examined like runes and held up to the light like
talismans, small shards of some awful psychic puzzle. A pudgy
Georgia-born ex- security guard from Hawaii named Mark David
Chapman fired his shots at Lennon from what the police call
"combat stance":  in a stiff crouch, one hand wrapped around the
butt of his newly purchased revolver, the other around the wrist
to steady it. As Lennon took six staggering steps, Chapman, 25,
simply stood still, and then went with the arresting officers
like a model citizen who had been unfairly rousted on a traffic
bust. Chapman's personal history showed, in retrospect, many
ominous byways, but immediately after the shooting, he offered
no explanations. And no regrets.

Chapman arrived in New York three days before the killing,
checked into a Y.M.C.A. nine blocks from Lennon's apartment, and
started hanging out in front of the building, waiting for Lennon
like any other fan. There were usually fans at the gates of the
Dakota, a grand, gloomy, high-maintenance Gothic fortress
overlooking the west side of Central Park, because the building
houses several celebrities:  Lauren Becall, Roberta Flack,
Leonard Bernstein. Fans of the Beatles and Lennon lovers
accounted for the largest portion of the curious. Two
unidentified women told an ABC television reporter that they had
fallen into conversation with Chapman outside the Dakota. Said
one, "He just seemed like a really nice, genuine, honest person
who was there because he admired John."  Others, like WPLJ Disc
Jockey Carol Miller, who lives near the Dakota, had noticed
Chapman and thought "he looked strange. He was older than the
kids who hung around there."  When Miller first heart that
Lennon had been shot, Chapman's face flashed in her mind.

On Saturday night, Chapman hailed a cab and told Driver Mark
Snyder to take him to Greenwich Village. On the way he boasted
that he had just dropped off the tapes of an album John Lennon
and Paul McCartney made that day. He said that he was the
recording engineer and that they had played for three hours.

On Monday afternoon Chapman spotted Lennon and asked him to
autograph an album. Lennon hastily scribbled his name and
climbed into a waiting car to take him to a recording studio.
Did Chapman feel slighted by Lennon?  Possibly. But the night
before he had suddenly checked out of the Y and moved into the
cushier Sheraton Center hotel and bought himself a big meal.
It was as if he were rewarding himself in advance for some proud
accomplishment. Now on Monday, only hours after getting
Lennon's autograph, Chapman was waiting again, this time in the
shadows of the entryway, with a gun. When the police grabbed him
after the shooting, they found he still had the autographed
album with him. He also had a paperback copy of J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye.

Lennon was no stranger to threats on his life. As early as
1964, at the first Beatles concert in France, Lennon got a note
backstage that read, "I am going to shoot you at 9 tonight."
He had only lately become accustomed to the freewheeling anarchy
of New York street life:  "I can go out this door now and go
into a restaurant..Do you want to know how great that is?" he
told the BBC. But friends remember him as being guarded both
in public and around the few people he and Ono met during the
long years of self-willed isolation that were only ending with
the completion of the new album. "John was always wary," says
his friend, Actor Peter Boyle. "Maybe partly because he was
extraordinarily tuned in. He'd pick up on people, and they'd
pick up on him."

Lennon also shared with many other rockers a kind of
operational fatalism, a sense that ding your best, whether on
record or in concert, required laying yourself open, making
yourself vulnerable. it was not only the pressures and excesses
of the rock-'n'-roll life that moved the Who's Pete Townshend
to remark, "Rock is going to kill me somehow."  And it was not
just the death of Elvis Presley that Lennon had in mind when he
said to friends in 1978, "If you stay in this business long
enough, it'll get you."

Rock, Lennon knew as well as anyone, is the applied art of big
risk and big feelings. The songs he and Paul McCartney wrote
for the Beatles, separately and together, brought more people
up against the joy and boldness of rock music than anything else
ever has. it wasn't just that Aaron Copland and Leonard
Bernstein were taking the Beatles as seriously--and a good deal
more affectionately--than Stockhausen. The worldwide appeal of
the Beatles had to do with their perceived innocence, their
restless idealism that stayed a step or two ahead of the times
and once in a while turned, bowed low, gave the times a razz and
dared to catch up. The slow songs were heart stoppers, the fast
ones adrenaline rushes of wit, low-down love and high, fabulous
adventure. The songs became, all together, an orchestration of
a generation's best hopes and fondest dreams.

The songs Lennon wrote later on his own--Imagine and Whatever
Gets You Thru the Night, Instant Karma and Give Peace a Chance
and the gentle and unapologetic Watching the Wheels from the new
album, or the gorgeous seasonal anthem, Happy Xmas (War is
Over), which he recorded with Ono in 1972--kept the standard
high and his conscience fine-tuned. The political songs were
all personal, the intimate songs all singular in their fierce
insistence on making public all issues of the heart, on working
some common moral out of private pain. Rock music is still
benefitting from lessons that LEnnon fought hard for, then
passed along. All his music seemed to be torn from that small,
stormy interior where, as Robert Frost once wrote, "work is play
for mortal stakes."

Despite the universality of interest in his death, Lennon
remained chiefly the property--one might even be tempted to say
prisoner--of his own generation. Some--those who regarded the
Beatles as a benign cultural curiosity, and Lennon as some
overmoneyed songwriter with a penchant for political
pronouncements and personal excess-- wondered what all the fuss
was about and could not quite understand why some of the junior
staff at the office would suddenly break into tears in the
middle of the day. "A garden-variety Nobel prizewinner would
not get this kind of treatment," said a teacher in Oxford,
England. Across the Atlantic, in schools and on college
campuses, those from other generations showed almost as great
a sense of puzzlement, even distance, as of loss. Gretchen
Steininger, 16, a junior at Evergreen Park High School in
suburban Chicago, said "I recognize the end of an era--my
mom's."

So a little reminder was in order, a small history lesson, and
there was no one better to lead the class than Bruce
Springsteen. Lennon had lately become warmly admiring of
Springsteen, especially his hit single Hungry Heart.
Springsteen could probably have let Lennon's death pass
unremarked, and few in the audience at his Philadelphia concert
last Tuesday would have been troubled. But instead of ripping
right into the first song, Springsteen simply said, "If it
wasn't for John Lennon, a lot of us would be some place much
different tonight. It's a hard world that asks you to live with
a lot of things that are unlivable. And it's hard to come out
here and play tonight, but there's nothing else to do."

Then Bruce and the E Street Band tore into Springsteen's own
anthem, Born to Run, making it clear that playing was the best
thing to do. Guitarist Steve Van Zandt let the tears roll down
his face, and Organist Danny Federici hit the board so hare he
broke a key. By the second verse, the song turned into a
challenge the audience was happy to accept:  "I wanna know love
is wild, I wanna know love is real," Springsteen yelled, and
they yelled back. By the end, it sounded like redemption. John
Lennon knew that sound too. He could use it like a chord change
because he had been chasing it most of his life.

John Lennon grew up on Penny Lane, and after a time he moved to
a house outside Liverpool, hard by a boys' reformatory. There
was another house in the neighborhood where John and his pals
would go to a party and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. The
house was called Strawberry Fields. His boyhood was neither as
roughly working-class as early Beatles p.r. indicated, nor quite
as benign as the magical association of those place names might
suggest. But John's adolescence in the suburbs, the garden
outside the back door and the warm ministrations of his Auntie
Mimi did not diminish either the pan or the sense of
separateness that was already stirring.

His father, a seaman named Alfred, left home shortly after John
was born, and his mother Julia sent him to her sister Mimi
because, it was said, she could not support her child. John was
4 1/2 when he was farmed out to the suburbs. All the sorrow,
rage and confusion of this early boyhood were taken up again and
again in songs like Julia and Mother. THese early years were
not an unhealed wound for Lennon, but more nearly a root, a deep
psychic wellspring rom which he could draw reserved of hard
truth.

Reserves of another sort gave him trouble even early on. "In
one way, I was always hip," Lennon remarked recently in Playboy,
during and interview that could stand as lively proof that some
of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life. "I was hip in
kindergarten. I was different from the others...There was
something wrong with me. I thought, because I seemed to see
things other people didn't see. I was always seeing things in
a hallucinatory way."  Lennon's songs made peace with those
hallucinations and expanded them--when psychedelics, psychiatry
sort of domestic mysticism while keeping them always within
reach, as a man might keep a flashlight on a nightstand in case
he had to get up in the dark.

Lennon was already well into his teens, living 15 minutes away
from his mother but seldom seeing her, when rock 'n' roll
grabbed hold of him and never let loose. All the raw glories
of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee
Lewis shook him to his shoe. He responded with the rowdiness
of spirit and emotional restlessness that already set him apart
from his peers and caused their parents concern. Paul
McCartney's father warned his son to steer clear of John, which
amounted to an open if inadvertent invitation to friendship.

By his 16th year, John had formed his first band, the Quarrymen,
and Paul McCartney had enlisted as guitar player. John and Paul
began to write songs together almost as soon as they had
finished tuning up, and they played any gig the band could get.
By the end of 1956, though he had his first group and a best
friend, Lennon suffered a lasting wound. His mother was killed
in an accident, while she stood waiting for a bus. As he said,
"I lost her twice."

Two years later, George Harrison had joined the Quarrymen, and
the band was actually earning some money. They had their own
fans, and a growing reputation that took them to club dates in
the gritty seaport of Hamburg, West Germany, where they
eventually changed their name to the Beatles and got a double
dose of the seamier side of rock life. Lennon, who like the rest
of the boys favored black leather jackets, pegged pants and
stomper boots, was sending long and passionate mash notes back
home to Cynthia Powell. "Sexist letters this side of Henry
Miller," he observed.

He was also a student at the Liverpool College of Art while the
Quarrymen were still gigging around. "I knew John would always
be a bohemian," Aunt Mimi recalled. "But I wanted him to have
some sort of job. Her he was nearly 21 years old, touting round
stupid halls for L3 a night. Where was the point in that?"

Well, the point was the music, a peak-velocity transplant of
American rock, with its original blistering spirit not only
restored but exalted. There was some concern for the future,
however. A Liverpool record-store owner named Brian Epstein
thought he might be able to lend a hand there. He signed on as
the group's manager in 1961. By the end of the following year,
the boys got their first record contract and their first
producer, George Martin, who remained aboard for the crazy
cruise that came to be called Beatlemania. There was one final
change of personnel:  Drummer Pete Best was replaced by a
gentleman named Richard Starkey, who favored quantities of heavy
jewelry, most of it worn on the digits, and who went by the name
of Ringo Starr.

It took just a month for the second Beatles single, Please
Please Me, to reach the top of the English charts. That was in
January of 1963. By the end of that year, they had released She
Loves You and appeared live on a BBC variety show in front of
thousands of screaming fans in the audience and unverifiable
millions of new converts and dazed parents sitting at home in
front of the telly. I Want to Hold Your Hand came out in the
U.S. in the first week of 1964, and it seemed then for a while
that both sided of the Atlantic were up for grabs. Beatles
forever.

Some history becomes myth, some myth goes down in history, some
statistics boggle the mind:  the Beatles have sold, all over
the world, upwards of 200 million records. They made history
so quickly, and so seismically, that their chronology can be
given like a code, or an association game in which words,
phrases, snatches of lyrics, names, can stand for whole years.
Even the skeptical on either side of the Beatles generation
will be startled to see how easily they can play along, Start
off with an easy one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you're off...Ed
Sullivan. Jelly babies. Plaza Hotel. Moptops. Arthur and A
Hard Day's Night. The Maharishi and M.B.E.s. Sergeant Pepper.
LSD. Apple. "More popular than Jesus."  Shea Stadium. White
Album. Yesterday. "I'd love to turn you on."  Jane. Patti.
Cynthia. Linda. Yoko. "Paul is dead."  Abbey Road. Let It
Be.

The history and the resonance of those fragments are so strong
that even out of chronological sequence they form their own
associations, like a Joseph Cornell collage. Some of the colors
may be psychedelic, but the shadings are the pastel of memory,
the patina made of remembered melody. Lennon, the only wedded
Beatle--he had married Cynthia in 1962 and had a son,
Julian--had early been typed as the most restless, outspoken and
creative of the group, even though he led, outwardly, the most
settled life. There was paradox in this popular portrait, just
as there was considerable tension in Lennon's belief that the
well-noted contradictions were true. There were both beauty and
ambition in his music, and a full measure of turmoil too. He
was experimenting with drugs and working up some of the material
that would eventually find its way into Sergeant Pepper's Lonely
Hearts Club Band, when he walked into a London gallery in 1966
and there, among ladders, spyglasses, nail boards, banners and
other props of her art, met Yoko Ono.

The daughter of a well-to-do Japanese banker, Ono, now 57, was
born in Tokyo. She had lived in San Francisco before World War
II, foraged for food back home during it, and afterward returned
to the States, where she attended Sarah Lawrence College and
became interested in the far-flung reaches of the avant-garde.
Her first husband was a Japanese musician. The marriage so
offended Ono's mother that she never reconciled with her
daughter. She worked on concerts for John Cage, became
associated with other artists such as La Monte Young and
Charlotte Moorman, the topless cellist whose staging of and
participation in art "events" came a little later to be called
happenings. Ono married again, a conceptual artists named Tony
Cox, and they had a daughter, Kyoko. Ono once brought the baby
on-stage during a concert as "an uncontrollable instrument."
Eventually, Cox and Kyoko went to Japan, and Ono to England.
Her artworks, or happenings, began to show a sense of humor that
was both self-mocking and affirmative, and when John Lennon
climbed a ladder to look through a telescope at that London
gallery, what he saw was no distant landscape but a simple YES.

The other Beatles were not delighted to have Ono around.
Besides whatever personal antagonisms or random jealousies might
have existed, one suspects now, Paul, George and Ringo may have
considered her dedicated avant-gardism somewhat inimical to the
best popular instincts of their music. For her part, she felt
she was under heavy surveillance. "I sort of went to bed with
this guy that I liked and suddenly the next morning I see these
three in-laws standing there," she recalled recently. John,
separated from Cynthia, fell in love with Yoko and her ideas.
Some of her conceptual art had the same intellectual
playfulness as his lyrics, and Lennon became a collaborator in
many of her projects. They made films--of flies crawling, of
dozens of bare bur made records, including the notorious Two
Virgins which they posed naked, front and back. Shock!
Scandal! Grim predictions for the future!

In fact, there was already a fair amount of dissension among
the members of the band:  McCartney wanted to get out more and
play for the folks, Lennon wanted to work in the recording
studio, like an artist with a canvas. The ideological pressures
and upheavals of the decade made the four Beatles stand ut in
even sharper contrast to each other. John became much more
political, George more spiritual, Paul seemingly more larky, and
Ringo more social. In the more than two years between Sergeant
Pepper and Abbey Road, Lennon and McCartney wrote, separately
and still (but more tenuously) together, some of their greatest
songs (Penny Lane, All you Need is Love, and Strawberry Fields
Forever). But if the turmoil had an immediate productive side,
it also took an inevitable toll. In 1969, after the completion
of Abbey Road, John told the boys he was leaving.

year, McCartney went his own way and that, one would thought,
was that. End of Beatles, end of era. But the Beatles would
never go away because their music endured; it became part of a
common heritage, a shared gift. No matter how many times they
were played in elevators or gas stations, Beatles songs were too
vibrant ever to qualify as "standards."  That these were Beatles
songs, not the single expression of an individual, needs to be
remembered amid all the Lennon eulogies, which call him the
strong creative force of the group.

In the process of riding out all the massive changes of the '60s
and bringing about a few on their own, the Beatles also trashed
an elementary law of geometry:  this was one whole that was
greater than the sum of its parts. Lennon was unfairly used as
a means to put McCartney in his place, although Lennon had taken
pains lately to redefine details of his collaboration with Paul,
and to make sure credit was distributed accurately. The melodic
range of the music ran from marching band to rhythm and blues,
from tonal stunt flying to atonal acrobatics, once in a while
all in the same song. The Beatles sang ballads that could
almost be Elizabethan, rockers that still sound as if they come
from the distant future, and it was hard to peg all that
invention to any single source. Lennon joked about walking into
a restaurant and being saluted by the band with a rendition of
Yesterday, a pure McCartney effort. Many radio and video
memorials to Lennon included Let It Be, another Beatles tune
that was all McCartney.

If it was hard to keep the credits straight with all the
Beatles, it was harder still for them to keep their friendly
equilibrium. McCartney, married to Linda Eastman and staying
close to the hearthside, released a series of albums that were
roundly drubbed as corny, until he broke through splendidly in
1973 with Band on the Run. Lennon, married to Ono and living
in New York, released a great solo record, Plastic Ono Band,
then threw himself headlong into uncertainty. He and Ono lived
in a series of elaborate post-hippie crash pads, became obsessed
not only with artistic experimentation but with radical
political flamboyance. Lennon's subsequent albums remained
achingly personal, but turned increasingly random, unfocused.
They were indignant and assaultive, adrift.

When he and Ono separated for a time in the early '70s, Lennon
went on an 18-month bender of drink, drugs and general
looniness. "We were all drinking too much and tearing up
houses," recalls one of his cronies at the time, Drummer Jim
Keltner. "No one drank like he did. He had broken up with Ono
and was with another woman at the time. Suddenly, he just
started screaming out Ono's name. That separation from her
almost killed him."  Being treated as some sort of witchy
parasite was no treat for the estranged Mrs. Lennon either, and
when they both finally reconciled, they changed their lives in
unexpected ways.

Lennon released one more record--a collection of rock
oldies--then settled back with Ono in the Dakota to raise their
son Sean, who was born on Oct. 9, 1975, the day of his father's
birthday. Said Lennon: "We're like twins."  Occasionally, John
and Ono would go public, often to fight the ultimately
unsuccessful attempts of the Nixon Justice Department to deport
Lennon on an old marijuana conviction in England. Mostly,
however, they stayed at home, rearing Sean, redecorating the 25
room rooms in their four Dakota apartments (art deco and
artifacts of ancient Egypt, including a sarcophagus in the
living room; blue clouds painted on the ceiling of a downstairs
office), expanding their financial holdings (Lennon left an
estate estimated at $235 million), buying property and Holstein
cows.

The Holsteins were selected because they were meant to yield
nourishment, not be slaughtered for it. Ono took care of all
the details, and Lennon did not know about the sale of the cows
until he read an item in the paper. He was more pleased than
surprised. "Only Yoko," he said admiringly "could sell a cow for
$250,000."

Ono could do a lot more than that. The banker's daughter set
herself to mastering the mysteries of commercial law and deal
making just as, earlier, she had wrestled with the exotic
exigencies of John Cage. She met the attorneys and the
accountants; she supervised the buying up of property in Palm
Beach, Fla., Cold Spring Harbor, an exclusive enclave on Long
Island, and in upstate New York. When the Lennons decided to
make another album earlier this year, it was Ono who called
Record Executive David Geffen and worked out the deal.

The Lennons may have been taking a step or two aside from art,
living quietly, but they were not hermits. They were collecting
themselves, looking for a center, a core. It seemed hard to
understand, but shouldn't have been. Ono sat behind the desk
and John stayed home with the little boy. Julian, Lennon's
other, older son, was now a teen-ager who lived in Britain with
his mother, but wore leather jackets and jeans, like his Dad
back in the days of the Quarrymen, and talked of becoming a
rocker. John did not see Julian often, and said recently, "I
don't remember seeing him as a child."  But Lennon suggested
that he had lately wanted to know Julian better, and one of the
most haunted faces in last week's gallery of grief was
Julian's, enduring the same pain that had afflicted his father
at almost the same age some 25 years before. He, like John, had
lost a parent twice.

John gloried in playing parent to Sean, and like to call himself
a househusband. What upset traditionalists was the fact that
he obviously reveled in his domestic role. this role reversal
was seen by the man raised by an aunt and three of her sisters
as no threat at all. He insisted--indeed, proved--that he was
putting nothing at risk, not his manhood and not his artistry.

Double Fantasy, the new record, demonstrated that. One's
contributions are especially accessible and congenial after
years of punk and New Wave conditioning. John's songs, simple,
direct and melodic, were celebrations of love and domesticity
that asked for, and required, no apology. It was not a great
record, like Plastic Ono Band, but it might have been the start
of another time of greatness.

The subjects of Double Fantasy, released last month, were
supposedly not the stuff of rock, but John Lennon never bound
himself to tradition. "My life revolves around Sean," he told
some radio interviewers from San Francisco on the afternoon of
the day he was killed. "Now I have more reason to stay healthy
and bright...And I want to be with my best friend. My best
friend's me wife. If I couldn't have worked with her, I
wouldn't have bothered...I consider that my work won't be
finished until I'm dead and buried, and I hope that's a long,
long time."  As he spoke those words, Mark David Chapman waited
for him out on the street.

Lennon's death was not like Elvis Presley's. Presley seemed,
a the end, trapped, defeated and hopeless. Lennon could have
gone that way too, could have destroyed himself. But he did
something harder. He lived. And, for all the fame and finance,
that seemed to be what he took the most pride in.

"He beat the rock-'n'-roll life," Steve Van Zandt said the day
after Lennon died. "Beat the drugs, beat the fame, beat the
damage. He was the only guy who beat it all."  That was the
victory Mark Chapman took from John Lennon, who had an abundance
of what everyone wants and wanted only what so many others have,
and take for granted. A home and family. Some still center of
love. A life. One minute more.

By Jay Cocks