Millions of Americans were watching the Patriots and Dolphins on “Monday Night Football,” a dull game between two mediocre teams, when Howard Cosell delivered news that still sounds shocking 45 years later.
“Remember, it’s just a football game, it doesn’t matter who wins or loses,” Cosell said in his characteristic staccato just before 11 p.m. on December 8, 1980. “John Lennon, outside his apartment building on the West Side of New York City – the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles – shot twice in the back, taken to Roosevelt Hospital, died on arrival.”
It was an indelible TV moment, like Walter Cronkite’s trembling, tearful announcement in 1963 that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The world soon learned that Lennon had been shot four times in the back as he and his wife Yoko Ono were visiting the Dakota, the historic Manhattan co-op where the couple lived with their 5-year-old son, Shawn. (The killer, Mark David Chapman, is still in prison.)
The news of Lennon’s murder caused a wave of mourning. In the days that followed, a solemn candlelight vigil was held in Los Angeles; A wordless tribute on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; 225,000 mourners attended a gathering in Central Park; and a six-hour celebration of Lennon’s life (including a 10-minute moment of silence) in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool.
Sales of Lennon and Ono’s recently released album, “Double Fantasy”, immediately soared (despite mostly lukewarm reviews), as did interest in the Beatles’ catalog, and radio stations across the United States, up and down the dial, overran program schedules and played The Beatles and Lennon around the clock.
“I immediately put on WBCN and started recording cassettes,” says Cha-Chi LoPrete, a longtime Boston DJ who was just a 23-year-old listener the night Lennon was shot. “My apartment at the time was a complete Beatles museum – Beatles memorabilia everywhere.
“I was devastated,” says LoPrete, who was hired at WBCN the next year and has hosted The Beatles Show on Boston radio since 1983. (The current incarnation, “Breakfast with the Beatles,” can be heard Saturday mornings on WUMB.) “That night was one of the worst moments of my life, and I still remember it clearly.”
At the time of Lennon’s death – he had turned 40 – the Beatles had been apart for a decade and, while not irrelevant, the band had certainly fallen out of fashion, especially among younger music fans. David Quantick, an English critic and humorist who has written extensively about the Beatles (including a play about Lennon), recalls being ridiculed for enjoying the Fab Four.
Quantic says, “When I was in school, about 1978, I had some friends who used to make fun of me.” “It was the era of punk and new wave, and liking the Beatles was like liking Fred Astaire.”
Veteran British music writer and podcaster David Hepworth said that the outpouring of emotion following Lennon’s death had little to do with Lennon himself.
“Rock stars are those imaginary friends you have when you’re 12 and, in some cases, they still exist in your 70s,” says Hepworth, who at 75 is old enough to remember when John, Paul, George and Ringo were a real-life rock ‘n’ roll band, not a myth or distant memory. “You meet a lot of people today who say it was only when John Lennon died that they realized they were in a group with that guy from Wings.”
In the 45 years since that chaotic night outside the Dakotas, the Beatles’ popularity has continued to wax and wane. But since the release of Peter Jackson’s acclaimed eight-hour documentary “The Beatles: Get Back” in 2021, it seems there is an insatiable appetite for all things The Beatles. Most recently, this has included the newly updated nine-hour Beatles documentary “Anthology” (available on Disney+); The brilliant “One to One: John and Yoko” documentary (on HBO Max), focuses on the 18 months the couple spent living in a basement apartment in the West Village; And whatever you call it director Sam Mendes’ current project: four different Beatles biopics will be released in theaters in April 2028.
However, for some, like Jude Southerland Kessler, the fascination with the Beatles – and especially Lennon – has never waned. Kessler, who lives in Louisiana, is to John Lennon what Robert Caro is to Lyndon Johnson. He has spent the last 40 years researching and writing what will ultimately be a 10-volume story of Lennon’s life. He had hoped to complete the work in nine volumes – a nod to the Beatles’ song “Revolution 9” to “Number 9, Number 9…” – but the fifth book, covering the band’s whereabouts in 1965, ran to 1,600 pages.
“When I got to page 800 and the boys were only in August, I knew I had to break it,” says Kessler. “This is really a historic year for them.”
On the 45th anniversary of Lennon’s death, Kessler said he had no plans. But he did so the night he was shot. Kessler, an English teacher at the time, was at home getting ready to meet her husband, a Navy officer, who was scheduled to return the next day from a long deployment overseas.
“I had a brand new dress on the bed. I cleaned the house and had fresh flowers,” she says. “Then a friend of mine called and said, ‘I want you to sit down.'”
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. chase him @MarkAShanahan,
<a href=