Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.”—John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Nowhere Man,” written for The Beatles' LP Rubber Soul (1965)
If you ask any baby boomer, he or she is sure to recall where they were when they heard the news of John Lennon’s death on December 8, 1980. So, for what it’s worth, here’s mine: I was at home and, in those pre-personal computer days, typing a paper for a colonial history class that was due the next morning. While I had my notes assembled before me, I was listening to my favorite radio station at the time, WNEW-FM in New York.
It was well into Vin Scelsa’s 10 pm-2 am shift that Monday night when the normally talkative DJ announced, in a quivering voice, that Lennon had died. I was left reeling so badly by the news of the death of the musician I’d listened to for as long as I was musically conscious that I’m not sure how I managed to keep typing through the night and finish the paper.
In the years following his death, Lennon became a kind of secular saint, to the point where Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau even felt compelled to print approvingly his wife’s comment on the killing: “Why is it always John Lennon and John F. Kennedy? Why isn't it ever Paul McCartney and Richard Nixon?” (Much of the mountain of hate mail he received, I’m sure, reproved him for the comment on Lennon’s erstwhile songwriting partner rather than on the disgraced ex-President.)
Even the verb used to describe the event, “assassinate,” is one more commonly associated with the violent death of a political figure than of an entertainer. After all, Lennon’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War and his attempted deportation by the Nixon Administration solidified his reputation as a beloved figure of the Left.
But for the last several years, before the release of Double Fantasy three weeks before the killing, Lennon had been a house-dad, looking after his “beautiful boy” with wife Yoko, Sean. As murderer Mark David Chapman told a parole board earlier this summer, he had been outraged that Lennon could sing of love while living in the upscale Dakota apartment building. Chapman made two initial attempts to confront Lennon before finally managing to do so on December 8 (if, that is, you can call shooting a man in the back “confronting” him).
Because of Lennon’s belief in nonviolence, many baby boomers think of his death as, in effect, the end of the Sixties—a rather convenient date, in certain ways, given that Ronald Reagan (whom he had joined on air at halftime on “Monday Night Football” almost six years to the day before he was shot) would begin a new era of conservatism with his inauguration a month later.
But in its way, Lennon’s murder might have been more disturbing than a simple politically motivated assassination. A deranged fan’s resentment doesn’t even count as “politically motivated.” No, I’m afraid that this death signaled what hardly anyone understood at the time: the onset of the age of the “celebrity stalker.”
Four months after the Lennon killing, John Hinckley Jr. would try to kill President Reagan in a mad attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster. But “celebrity stalking” first came into the nation’s consciousness nearly nine years after Lennon’s death when Rebecca Schaeffer, the 21-year-old star of sitcom My Sister Sam, was shot by an insane fan. Schaeffer’s death prompted each of the 50 states, as well as Canada, to enact anti-stalking laws by 1993.
A good thing, too, because this syndrome has become a virtual epidemic. The line to Joey on Friends that he had arrived as an actor, because he now had his very own stalker, is a darkly comic acknowledgement of this growing psychological disease. David Letterman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Pamela Anderson, Jerry Lewis, and Halle Berry are just a few of the celebrities who have been afflicted with obsessive fans.
John Lennon was not the saint he had been depicted as in the immediate aftermath of his death. But he had arrived at a settled place in his life almost impossible to conceive of for someone with his anguished childhood and helter-skelter existence as a celebrity.
It was Lennon’s triumph as an artist not merely that he changed the face of the music industry as part of the Beatles, but also that he touched the lives of millions who thrilled to his chords and believed in the utopia held out by his lyrics. It was his tragedy as a man that one of those millions—a 25-year-old man who, by his own admission, “was feeling like a big nothing and a nobody"—chose to end the musician's chance to reap more happiness and record more great work.
In other words, Lennon died at the hands of the kind of “nowhere man” who, he warned years before, was “a bit like you and me.”
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