Remembering Dec. 8, 1980

Lydia Lunch, writer and spoken-word artist

Look, I'm lucky if I remember what I did last week, much less 20 years ago. But the murder of John Lennon defined a turning point in American history. No longer could we deny our monomania with celebrities, our ghoulish fascination with their life and the haunting, harassing and stalking of them unto and even beyond death. Everyone becomes more popular postmortem. More heroic. Mythical. Dead men always sell more records, more newspapers. How typically American that some sicko would take it upon himself to wipe out the messenger whose mantra was "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance." We were forced to finally evaluate, because of his death, how truly radical Lennon was.

Roger Ebert, film critic

At the time the news was reported, I was on the air with the 10 p.m. Monday night newscast on Channel 5 in Chicago. We finished the newscast at 10:29 p.m., and then were startled to hear the voice of the station's booth announcer reading the Associated Press bulletin. The show's producer had made a judgment call that there was not time to get the bulletin to the news studio before the show ended.

I felt as if a chapter of history had been closed. I drove over to the Sun-Times and wrote a column for Tuesday's paper. The vigil had begun in Central Park.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, novelist

I was in Los Angeles and I was writing my novel "Water Music." And since I had been a witness -- not an eyewitness but a witness -- to many such traumatic events of the, let's say, 12 years that preceded that, it didn't rock me too much. It almost seemed expected in some way.

What's his legacy? He is a pure rocker, absolutely the pure rocker, whose gut-wrenching vocals on songs like "Money" are still ringing in my head and helped form my own appreciation of rock 'n' roll and my own vocal style -- him to a degree, but also people like Van Morrison and Muddy Waters and all sorts of great singers. But he was one of them. Many people will say as a composer he's most important, but for me it's just those gut-wrenching vocals he could do.

Cary Tennis, copy chief, Salon

I was living in a tent in rural Virginia, helping my mom build a house. My mom was living in a tent, too, a bigger tent. I had had a dream the night before of Yoko Ono yelling at John, "Oh, no! Oh, no!" You know, Yoko Oh No. Then I was riding on the back of a truck with a bunch of lumber and I was listening to the radio in the afternoon and the radio said that John Lennon had been shot. And then I remarked on my dream to my mother and we agreed it was an exceedingly curious dream.

Isaac Hayes, songwriter/musician

I was at the house of a friend of mine, Perlie Biles in Atlanta, when we heard the news on the radio of John Lennon's death. What a waste. What a loss. You know, he lives through his music. That's the good thing.

King Kaufman, associate managing editor, Salon

The day before John Lennon got shot, I got arrested. I was sitting in the back of a car in the parking lot of a mall in Brea, Calif., smoking marijuana with two buddies before a midnight movie showing of ... I forget what. So we spent several hours of Sunday morning getting processed at the local police station and waiting for our bitterly disappointed parents to come pick us up.

On Monday, as I served the first day of my grounded-for-LIFE! sentence, Lennon was killed. My friend Stacy Flanders called me up and said, "Kind of a shitter of a week so far, huh?"

Tuesday I got called out of class by the newspaper advisor, who was really the cheerleader advisor (this was post-Prop. 13 California), who wanted me to write a tearful essay about the tragic loss of John Lennon. I did write some dumb thing, but only after having spent most of the day goofing around in the library with Ellen, who a few years later wrote me that in her job as a London call girl she'd had sex with Moammar Gadhafi.

But that's another story.

Next Page: Mamie Van Doren, Karen Finley, Philip Kaufman, John Rechy

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