The Death of John Lennon

Double Fantasy was John Lennon’s comeback album. The drugs, the infidelity, the listlessness were gone; he was re-committed to music and to his family. But the comeback never happened. On December 8, 1980—25 years ago today—a deranged fan shot him dead outside his apartment building.

A man committed to peace, Lennon lived a life book-ended by violence. He was born October 9, 1940, during a lull in the German bombing of Liverpool. His mother, Julia, wasn’t up to being a single parent, so she sent him to live with his aunt. He grew into a typically ill-behaved teenager—until Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” changed his life. Like many teens in bleak postwar Liverpool, he fell in love with the raw sexual and musical energy of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard. He formed a band, the Quarrymen, in 1957, when he was 16, and Paul McCartney joined shortly thereafter. Rechristened the Beatles, they did seven years of small gigs in underground pubs in Liverpool and the rough German port city of Hamburg. “I was raised in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg,” Lennon said of the experience.

The pop sensibility of McCartney and the raw rock ’n’ roll of Lennon combined in a musical alchemy that would make the Beatles one of the most important bands ever, a group that took the United States by storm in 1964 with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” a jangling pop number perfect for the teen audience. McCartney and Lennon wrote it “eyeball to eyeball,” according to Lennon. Stateside, the boys were instant charmers, with Lennon as ringleader, reeling off sardonic and nonsensical quips in his nearly incomprehensible Liverpudlian accent. But he was also the “thinking man’s Beatle,” publishing two books of dense prose-poetry and pushing the band to try more innovative music-making techniques.

The close collaboration of McCartney and Lennon took the group through a dozen albums, but as the foursome matured, they pulled in different directions. Their idiosyncratic styles fit together like a jigsaw puzzle on the 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But the next year on The Beatles (also known as the White Album), they were writing distinctly different songs. McCartney’s bouncy ditties “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “Martha My Dear,” and “Wild Honey Pie,” rubbed elbows with the complex and allusive Lennon songs “Glass Onion,” “Julia,” and “Dear Prudence.”

That was also the beginning of a knock-down drag-out fight between McCartney and Lennon about business, money, and personal loyalty. Lennon had already garnered a reputation for megalomania, comparing the Beatles to Jesus and declaring that the Rolling Stones would never be in the same league as him. He was embroiled in an affair with the Japanese performance artist Yoko Ono, skipping out on his wife, Cynthia, and young son, Julian.

After the Beatles broke up, in 1970, the group’s members began solo careers. The next 10 years were highly uneven for Lennon, with extraordinary albums like “Imagine” and “Walls and Bridges” but also some ill-conceived experimental music that grew out of his primal-scream therapy. Some of his public stunts were just silly, like the “bed-ins” of his honeymoon with Yoko Ono, where the couple sat in a Hilton with “Hair Peace” and “Bed Peace” scrawled on paper taped to the wall. Songs like “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” suggest a lack of forethought, and others like “Love” are painfully tedious and inane. (“Love is feeling, feeling love” the dreamy dirge goes.) And then there was his famous “lost weekend,” actually an 18-month bender in Los Angeles in 1973 and ’75, during which he carried on a public affair (which Yoko actually encouraged).

The turning point came in 1975 when Yoko became pregnant with the couple’s only son, Sean. After hearing the news, Lennon went into “retirement” and jumped on the wagon, dedicating his time to raising Sean and reconciling with his wife. In 1980, feeling refreshed, he released Double Fantasy, with the spirited “Just Like Starting Over” charting as a hit single. He was recording a follow-up album, Milk and Honey, when he was stopped on the morning of December 8 by a fan who asked him to sign a copy of Double Fantasy. The fan, Mark David Chapman, waited all day for him to return home. As Lennon approached the apartment building, at about 10:50 p.m., Chapman called out, “Mr. Lennon.” When he turned, Chapman pulled out a gun and fired five shots, hitting his back and fatally piercing his aorta.

A few days later, people flocked to Central Park at Yoko Ono’s request for 10 minutes of silent prayer. The crowd of between 50,000 and 100,000 was joined in prayer by people around the world. Pete Hamill, writing for New York magazine, reported that “at the morgue, the entrance was sealed shut with a lock and chain. Attendants in green mortuary masks moved around in dumb show… . Behind them, in a refrigerator, lay the sixties.”

In addition to embodying the spirit of an age, John Lennon had irrevocably changed the musical landscape, proving that rock ’n’ roll didn’t have to be just kid stuff. He influenced generations of musicians, a major inspiration for successors from Run-DMC to Elvis Costello.

He also left a legacy of fierce idealism in the cause of peace. His song “Imagine,” though dismissed by some as simplistic, remains an anthem for peace movements. Astrid Kirchherr, a German photographer, took the first photographs of the Beatles in 1960, when they were still belting out rock covers in dank clubs in Hamburg. When asked about Lennon’s legacy, she eloquently answered, “His bravery… . He really wanted peace on earth, and John’s lyrics—well, that’s the brave poetry of the ’60s. If he had stayed with us, he could have done so much more.”

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.