![]() John Lennon came in after a while with Brian Epstein and sat down next to me. Ringo and Paul were there too, and later the Stones came in, and we were all at a big table, with music pounding, and girls crowding around, and Brian Jones all blond and small getting drunk on whiskey in a pool of solitude. We met in London, in an upstairs joint called the Ad Lib. Our lives had intersected at critical moments since the winter of 1963, that bitter season after Dallas when people my age realized that they would never again be young. But I’m sorry even as the flood tide of rage receded, the cold eye wasn’t possible. Yes: If you’ve been trained as a reporter, you’re supposed to go places with a cold eye. ![]() This time someone had murdered a song.Īnd it had happened in a city to which that artist had come in order to be private, in order to be safe. This time the ruined body belonged to someone who had made us laugh, who had taught young people how to feel, who had helped change and shape an entire generation, from inside out. The ritual was the same, the liturgy as stale as ever, but the object of attack was a man who had made art. This time, someone had crawled out of a dark place, lifted a gun, and killed an artist. Not a man whose abstract ideas could send people to wars, or bring them home not someone who could marshal millions of human beings in the name of justice not some actor on the stage of history. We knew there would be days of cliché-ridden expressions of shock from the politicians tearful shots of mourning crowds obscene invasions of the privacy of The Widow calls for gun control apocalyptic declarations about the sickness of America and then, finally, the orgy over, everybody would go on with their lives.Įxcept … this time there was a difference. The earth shook, and then grief was slowly handled by plunging into newspapers and television shows. Kennedy and for Martin Luther King, for Malcolm X and for Robert Kennedy. ![]() If you were there for the sixties, the ritual was part of your life. Yes: Somebody had murdered John Lennon.Īnd because it was John Lennon, and because it was a man with a gun, we fell back into the ritual. Then the telephones ringing, back and forth across the city, and then another bulletin, with more details, and then more phone calls from around the country, from friends, from kids with stunned voices, and then the dials being flipped from channel to channel while WINS played on the radio. First a flash on television, interrupting the tail end of a football game. The news arrived like fragment of some forgotten ritual. *From the Decemissue of New York Magazine.
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