Remembering Dec. 8, 1980

Karen Finley, performance artist and author

I was crossing the Bay Bridge leaving San Francisco, going to Oakland, as I heard the news on the radio. I was just approaching the bridge. All I thought was that tragedy affects everyone. And in time it does affect everyone. Several years later, as a waitress, I would wait on Yoko with her dark glasses and serve her espresso. All I thought of was that both Jackie Kennedy and Yoko Ono wore dark black glasses after the death of our heroes.

Mamie Van Doren, actress and blond bombshell

I was in Florida, and I was working on a musical comedy called "Making Whoopee." I was staying at a hotel, and I turned the TV on and saw that Lennon had been killed. I remember I left the hotel and went to a place to eat by myself. It was very cold out, and very depressing. It made me very sad.

China Forbes, lead singer, Pink Martini

I don't remember where I was when John Lennon was shot. My sister tells me I was "in the living room with Dad." Since I was only 10 years old, it didn't have the effect on me that it had years later when I realized how tragic it was that he wasn't around anymore. Before his death, I remember dancing around our apartment with my sister, blasting my dad's LPs in the living room and acting out various characters in the songs on "Sgt. Pepper's": Lucy, Rita, Mr. Kite, the Hendersons. When "Double Fantasy" came out, we were mostly obsessed with Yoko's unusual singing style. But I really didn't feel the impact of what had happened on Dec. 8, 1980, until I grew up with all the great footage and all of his great songs. And now I feel gypped.

Geddy Lee, singer/bassist, Rush

I was at Morin Heights, a recording studio an hour north of Montreal, working on the song "Witch Hunt" for the "Moving Pictures" album the night he was shot. It was a very heavy moment, I recall.

I think we were all just stunned. I remember constantly going back and forth, from working to the TV, to try to get some news. If I remember the environment, looking around the room, my memory just shows me a lot of pale faces staring at the tube.

Bob Guccione Jr., editor and publisher, "Gear," and former editor and publisher, "Spin"

I was in New York with my then (now someone else's) wife. We had just had dinner and saw the news report on TV. We had been near the Dakota that night and I had walked past it the evening before, I think. We lived on East 67th Street then, just the other side of Central Park.

I was stunned by the news, but unmoved per se. It was simply a big news story -- I didn't know the man. I felt in the disconnected way one does at recognizing the name and life of a victim, but no more emotion than that. I loved the Beatles -- and therefore, abstractly, Lennon's contribution to my entertainment and cultural nourishment. But I've always thought that the people who get emotionally upset, even disturbed, at the death of someone they never knew are a little emotionally lacking. I mean, what happens to them when someone they knew, who knew them, dies?

Lennon didn't belong to the people (and neither did Princess Di or JFK Jr.) -- his work did. And it's still available for purchase.

My second reaction, which I insightfully imparted to my wife, was, "Well, that settles the issue of a Beatles reunion." Lennon never wanted it anyway.

Adam Parfrey, publisher, Feral House

Around that time Darby Crash, the lead singer of the Germs, died, and that was much more important to me than John Lennon's death. But when Lennon died, I was visiting my brother in L.A., and we were having a laugh about it with Michael Collins because people were boohoo-hoo-ing it so much.

Philip Kaufman, film director

I was in the basement of a house in St. Helena, Calif., in the wine country, watching television with a writer friend of mine named Bo Goldman, who won a couple of Oscars, for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Melvin and Howard." I can remember it coming over the TV, and Bo and I were sitting there drinking a bottle of wine.

It was shocking and terrifying. I remember both Kennedy assassinations. I remember Martin Luther King's. As with all of them, you felt this terror and outrage.

Virginia Vitzthum, columnist, Salon Sex

I was a sophomore in college, and it was the first public murder that mattered to me. I'd spent my adolescence buying Beatles and Dylan instead of Eagles and Frampton, wishing I'd been born 10 years earlier. Lennon's early death wrinkled time even more: New Yorkers John and Yoko moved suddenly into the history books with the Fab Four.

About 15 girls gathered in my dorm room that night. I played "I'm So Tired" and "Rain" and "I'm Only Sleeping" and "Cry Baby Cry" and "Strawberry Fields" -- all full of Lennon's dissatisfied intelligence and pain and desire for obliteration. The death wish in those songs gave a jagged comfort that night; to hear him sing "Oh Yoko" or "In My Life" or "Twist and Shout" would have been unbearable.

John Rechy, novelist

I was in L.A. when it happened, and I was, of course, appalled. I had never been a fan of the Beatles or of John Lennon particularly. But I was an admirer of what he stood for, if not of his music. It just seemed to be one more atrocity in a string of such atrocities sweeping the country, as with the killings of the Kennedys or of Martin Luther King, where individuals of a liberal orientation were assassinated.

Jeff Stark, associate editor, Salon Arts & Entertainment

I don't remember a thing. I was 8, and in terms of music, my parents considered Neil Diamond more important than John Lennon. We were probably listening to "The Jazz Singer" soundtrack at the time.

I can remember exactly when Kurt Cobain died, and that hurt, but I was really more angry at him than upset. I can't imagine how unjust, how unfairly ironic, it must have been to see Lennon go. There's really no comparison. I'd like to think that I was fortunate to be spared the hurt in 1980, but Lennon's music -- and Lennon -- has meant even more to me than sad Cobain.

At the same time, Cobain was real, and I got to watch him breathe and sweat and flail. He knew people I knew; he was a guy. Lennon has always been a ghost, just another person whose work grabbed onto me from out of the past, like Mark Rothko or Shakespeare.

I guess when you get older you learn that people die and that it's almost always unfair. And there are things that you wish you'd seen or said or even been around to witness. There wasn't enough time and there never is. But it feels weird to have shared eight years on the same earth with someone whom I admire so much and feel absolutely no connection to -- to have been essentially unaware that he even existed. I know he too was human, but he might as well not have been.

Next Page: Linda Hamilton, Benicio Del Toro, Andrew Leonard, F. Murray Abraham

• View blog reactions