John Lennon: The Teamaker, by Yoko Ono Lennon

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/08/remembering-john-lennon/?hpt=C2

In his life: A tribute to John Lennon

December 8th, 2010
12:08 PM ET
CNN

John Lennon wanted us to imagine many things.

There was one thing, however, he never could have imagined: how the world would come together, distraught, while learning the news of his death. In fact, in his last interview before his murder, his comments were tragically ironic. In a December 5, 1980, interview for Rolling Stone, he complained about critics who he said were only interested in "dead heroes," something he had no desire to be, saying that he had "plenty of time" to accomplish some of his life goals.

"These critics with the illusions they've created about artists – it's like idol worship," he told the magazine. "They only like people when they're on their way up. … I cannot be on the way up again.

"What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interested in being a dead (expletive) hero. ... So forget 'em, forget 'em."

But forget him, we would not.

Three days later, the Beatles front man was murdered on the steps of his New York apartment building. He and his wife, Yoko Ono, had just come home from an evening of recording tracks in their studio.

And in the years to follow, and 30 years ago Wednesday, Lennon is remembered exactly the way perhaps he had not wanted to be – as an idol.

Leading up to the anniversary, Vanity Fair even wrote a piece imagining where Lennon would be if he were alive today.

The anniversary of his untimely death marks a day of mourning for a whole generation. The cultural icon of their lives is gone. It's a day just about everyone who was alive remembers. One of those days where you recall exactly where you were when you heard the news.

During "Monday Night Football," Howard Cosell told Frank Gifford – off the air – that Lennon was dead. And in an ESPN video the two discuss how – and whether they should break the news to fans.

CNN's John Roberts, then a music journalist for City TV in Toronto, writes of the day, "It was one of those moments where time seems to slow down and the mind considers a hundred questions before finally settling on the truth: How could he have been shot? Are the reports mistaken? Who would do such a thing? How could we lose such a pop culture icon? Didn't he just turn 40? Didn't he have a young son? Didn't he have security?

"Will I wake up and this will all have been just a dream?"

Like Roberts, a few journalists shared their recollections of that fateful night and the roles they played in the coverage.

Jim Farber, a New York Daily News music critic, was a recent college graduate who was writing the record review column for Circus magazine when Mark David Chapman assassinated Lennon. He recalled hearing people talking about Lennon's death but dismissed it, until he saw the news. So he went to the scene where the music icon was gunned down.

"There were hundreds of people there, and they shut down parts of 72nd (Street) because there were so many people there," he said. "It was very emotional, if you could imagine, and I stayed there the whole night wandering around, talking to people and trying to get our heads around what had happened."

Ono, writing a column for The New York Times, however, chooses not to think of the day with unbearable sadness. Instead, she says she remembers the quiet moments she had with her husband and reflects on a night they shared laughter over a cup of tea.

"They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I see many teenagers sad and angry with each other. John and I were hardly teenagers," she said. " But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed."

And she writes she hopes his legacy is not just in the words of his music, but in the work he did as well and his hope for peace.

"The most important gift we received from him was not words, but deeds. He believed in Truth, and had dared to speak up. We all knew that he upset certain powerful people with it. But that was John. He couldn’t have been any other way," Ono writes. "If he were here now, I think he would still be shouting the truth. Without the truth, there would be no way to achieve world peace."

Lennon indeed was a man who wanted to imagine – to imagine peace. Who wanted to help start a revolution to get us there.

So today, many fans around the world remember, and will as they gather Wednesday at Central Park's Strawberry Fields, how on December 8, 1980, what they couldn't imagine – that the man who gave them the words they lived by was gone.

And as he once sang, there are places we all remember.

"All these places had their moments, with lovers and friends, I still can recall. Some are dead and some are living. In my life I've loved them all."

And for Lennon fans, today is one of them. And without a doubt, they've loved every moment he created for them.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/StrawberryFieldsJuly200...

... Imagine................

John Lennon Remembered
Editor's Note by Jann S. Wenner

Photo:John Lennon and Yoko Ono on November 26th, 1980
Photograph by Allan Tannenbaum/Polaris

By Jann S. Wenner
Dec 07, 2010 11:30 PM EST

Thirty years ago this week, on December 8th, 1980, John Lennon was murdered in New York. He was emerging from five years of seclusion after the release of Double Fantasy, the masterpiece he had just finished recording with his wife, Yoko Ono. In my lifetime, the only comparable event was the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Lennon's death hit particularly hard at Rolling Stone. John had shared many of his final hours with us as we were preparing a cover story to celebrate his return to public life. Three days earlier, our reporter, Jonathan Cott, the only person besides me whose name has appeared on the masthead since our first issue in 1967, had interviewed John for more than nine hours. When Jonathan, who had known John and Yoko for years, showed up at their apartment in the Dakota that evening, John seemed nervous. "Don't worry, it's just Jonathan," Yoko told John. "It's OK." And with that, they began.

This article appears in the December 23, 2010 - January 6, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the online archive.

The conversation was a wide-ranging journey through John's thoughts and dreams. As the talk extended deep into the night, John invited Jonathan to join him and Yoko at the Record Plant to hear some of the new music they were creating.

John Lennon's Last Days: Audio clips from Jonathan Cott's 1980 interview with Lennon, plus video, photos, playlists and more

"He was the same guy he was before," Cott recalls. "A joyous, vibrant, subversive, acerbic, funny, always inspiring, fearless guy. He hadn't lost it or become bitter or cynical. He never gave up." John's last words to Jonathan, as he escorted him to the elevator at 4 a.m., said it all: "I love her and we're together."

Two days later, Annie Leibovitz, our chief photographer at the time, made her trek to the Dakota to shoot the cover. She created one of the 20th century's most unforgettable images: a naked Lennon embracing a clothed Ono — named in 2005 by the American Society of Magazine Editors as the greatest cover of the past 40 years. When John and Yoko saw the photo, they told her, "You've captured our relationship exactly." What you saw in the photo was the real John — open, daring, vulnerable, warmhearted. Nobody could have guessed it would be our final glimpse of him, or that his long conversation with Rolling Stone would turn out to be his goodbye to the world. Although John did a radio interview on the day of his murder, his talk with Jonathan constituted the last time he spoke in-depth to a reporter before the tragedy.

When John was killed, our plans for a celebratory profile of a reinvigorated artist turned into a mournful tribute. Jonathan listened to his two interview tapes, pulled out a few quotes for his story, and stashed the tapes in a closet, where they sat for nearly three decades — until he discovered them, held together by a decaying rubber band, earlier this year. It seemed appropriate on the 30th anniversary of John's death to present the interview in full, along with a portfolio of photographs from Annie's sessions. Some appear here in print for the first time, among them a more intense shot of John and Yoko embracing.

We also asked Yoko to tell us about the final hours of John's life. Her reminiscence, "John's Last Days," is the first time she has written about that period, discussing everything from the making of Double Fantasy to their final intimate moments together. Both pieces remind us of how much John left behind, from his groundbreaking music to his and Yoko's ongoing dedication to the cause of world peace. His life continues to transform the world and make it a better place in ways that none of us, not even John, could have imagined. But then, that is exactly what John spent his life trying to tell us: Imagine.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/68404/239168

Rolling Stone's coverage of John Lennon

By Rolling Stone
Dec 07, 2010 11:40 PM EST

Three days before John Lennon was killed, Jonathan Cott spent hours interviewing him for a planned cover story. The complete Q&A, which is running in the new issue of Rolling Stone — available on stands, as well as in the online archives — has never been published before now. On this page you can find our web-exclusive companion coverage to the piece — everything from audio clips from the interview to a gallery of Lennon and Ono’s years in New York.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/12/01/roberts.lennon.assassination.reflections/i...

Remembering the day Lennon died

American Morning
By John Roberts, CNN
December 1, 2010 9:43 a.m. EST

Image: John Lennon with Yoko Ono in December 1980, shortly before he was shot and killed.

New York (CNN) -- Like so many other people of my generation, John Lennon and the Beatles made an indelible stamp on my life. The very first piece of vinyl I actually owned -- and hadn't borrowed from my older brother -- was the album "Help!"

To this day, I can remember at the age of 8 dropping the needle on the disc and hearing Lennon's voice roar through the 10-inch speaker on my record player.

The Beatles had a profound influence on me. They're the reason why I picked up a guitar, formed a band at age 11 and dreamed of a life as a rock star.

Fast-forward 16 years to December 8, 1980.

At the time, I was a music journalist for City TV in Toronto, Canada, hosting "The New Music" program. Just a couple of weeks earlier, we had reported on Lennon's comeback with the album "Double Fantasy," which marked his re-emergence after five years out of the music business as a self-proclaimed "househusband." We were actively working with his record company, trying to set up an interview for a future edition of the program.

I was not far from my 24th birthday when the telephone rang on that December day around 11:30 p.m. It was my executive producer, John Martin.

"Lennon has been shot,"he said, "and we need to do a special."

It was one of those moments where time seems to slow down and the mind considers a hundred questions before finally settling on the truth:

How could he have been shot? Are the reports mistaken? Who would do such a thing? How could we lose such a pop culture icon? Didn't he just turn 40? Didn't he have a young son? Didn't he have security?

Will I wake up and this will all have been just a dream?

We gathered that night in our offices to sift through the material that we had: old Beatles footage, a Lennon documentary that my producer shot years earlier, and the famous D.A. Pennebaker film.

We collected the names of friends, collaborators and other acquaintances who could help us tell the Lennon story. A day or two later, City TV aired a live broadcast of a memorial to Lennon at Nathan Phillips Square in front of Toronto's City Hall.

Canada had a rich history with Lennon: It was there that he made his post-Beatles debut with the Plastic Ono Band in 1969 and staged his famous North American bed-in in Montreal.

...Wednesday marks 30 years since Lennon's murder. His killer, Mark David Chapman, 55, is still serving his prison sentence of 20 years to life at the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

He will stay there for at least another two years as he was just denied parole for the sixth time.

The impact of Lennon's death still reverberates today. Several tribute concerts and ceremonies started in October, when Lennon would have turned 70, and have carried on since.

This year, Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, revived the Plastic Ono Band with current rock stars including Lady Gaga. Ono told Rolling Stone she believes this rekindling of interest in Lennon "has to do with the social climate, with wanting some of John's energy, power and conviction."

Lennon's profound influence on music and musicians continues to this day. Marc Roberge, the lead singer of alt-rockers O.A.R., was not even 2 years old when Lennon was killed. Roberge penned the recent song "Dakota" after stopping by Lennon's old apartment building with his wife.

He was so taken with the images that came to mind as he looked into the entranceway where Lennon was shot that he walked across Central Park West, sat down on a park bench and penned these lyrics:

Outside the archway lies a thief, awaiting Double Fantasy

He's something evil underneath

Outside Dakota died the symphony

"I watched and I tried to imagine this going down," Roberge told me. "And then I tried to imagine what if it never happened, and that's really the question of the song: 'If you just kept walking on your way.' I mean, would the world be different? And I think the world would be better."

Like Roberge, I've often wondered what would have happened had Lennon not been murdered. Would the world have been a better place? There's certainly every possibility that his commitment to peace would have added something substantive to the global conversation.

At the very least, we would have had years more of great music and performance from a man who was truly an artistic genius.

.

'Til either my memory or my life ends, I will not forget the horribleness of thirty years ago today, when we lost a peacemaker to an assassin's bullets.

John Lennon
9 October 1940
8 December 1980

PEACE

Imagine...