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40 years had passed, December 1980. On the 4th, a Thursday, the death of the then Prime Minister and Social Democratic leader, Francisco Sá Carneiro, occurred in the autumn for an unclear cause, of the plane with which he had just taken off from Lisbon. Portugal was in shock. Sunday 7, presidential elections with the triumph (56.4%) of the candidate who collected the votes of the left, Ramalho Eanes. From Monday to Tuesday evening, already on December 9, a flash of the radio telex has turned into night: “John Lennon murdered outside New York”. That one-paragraph-on-a-line news broke off late night radio programming (RDP-Antena 1), at a time when the programming wasn’t yet flexible to change with the news.
From that moment, at 5 in the morning, until late in the morning, the music on the radio became the Beatles. Paulo de Medeiros, then early director on the first public radio channel, favored Portuguese music with a more popular profile. But I had LPs in the record bag Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. That “Sergeant Pimenta”, from 1967, put on a baroque cover that brought together fifty actors, writers and musicians (Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando, Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Joyce, even Marx and Einstein), with thirty of the songs underwent the musical illustration of the conversations until the arrival of other Beatles records in reinforcement. The interaction between the animator and the news type in the studio worked in full. Testimonies followed by lovers of the band who in the last 20 years had led the musical revolution that transformed the sound atmosphere of the time that reaches today, and inspired much of the cultural revolution that marked the 60s, which changed the customs, and which gave expression to previously hidden feelings.
That dawn had to go through so many memories of the Beatles time. How it all began: that afternoon of July 6, 1957, when Paul McCartney, aged 15, went to a benefit party in a parish in a poor neighborhood in Liverpool; there was a band, The Quarry Man, founded by John Lennon, then 16. During a break that afternoon, McCartney rehearsed with the group as a lead guitar. It was the first moment of the Lennon & McCartney brand to define the musical identity of the Beatles, who would appear three years later, in 1960, with Lennon, McCartney plus Ringo Starr and George Harrison, also manager Brian Epstein.
There is a constant in the panorama of musical bands of the 60s of the twentieth century: when others tried to compose inspired by the Beatles, they were already into something else.
In the late 1960s it was evident that the Beatles were already a band, still breathtaking, but in decline. The duo Lennon & McCartney who had been the engine of the band, then, with tense rivalry between them, had become the accelerator of the breakup. Lennon, increasingly autonomous and libertarian, accused McCartney of composing music for grandmothers.
1968, with the revolutionary May in Paris and elsewhere, revealed what separated them. Lennon was fascinated by the ideals raised in the protests and sang the revolution in two versions of Revolution, one in blues mode, for a record, and another more rocker, for a video. Lennon campaigned against the Vietnam War and many other causes.
1969 begins with the recording of street of the abbey. One feels it is the great farewell album desired. There is at the end end, in which each Beatle, in two minutes, plays a solo (one for drums, three for guitar). The verses of end End with “The love you take / equals the love you make”. This exchange of love anticipates the final point with a flourish. In March of that 69, in Gibraltar, Lennon married the avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. It remains to be seen how much influence it had on Lennon’s disengagement from the rest of the group that emerged and triumphed in that decade. Lennon also recorded with Paul The Ballad of John and YokO. A year later, the breakup of the Beatles was consummated, announced by Paul McCartney in April 1970. Every Beatle entered his life.
Japanese-American Yoko seduced Lennon to the idea of living in New York. In 73 they bought a house in the mythical Dakota Building, a luxury building in New York, Gothic architecture, built in 1884 on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. It has 65 apartments, each with its own shape, all different, where celebrities such as Laureen Bacall, Judy Garland, Leonard Bernstein, Rudolf Nureyev and Roberta Flack have lived. Roman Polanski chose Dakota to shoot Rosemary’s Baby, the film in which Mia Farrow plays the role of a woman who became pregnant with the demon.
It was at the door of the Dakota Building that the end of life came for John Lennon. It was the night of December 8, 1980, 40 years ago. The police report states that at 10:52 pm, John was on his way home. As he climbed the front steps, a fan, in the most fanatical sense of the word, Mark Chapman, called him “Mister Lennon,” in a voice that the police call soft. John stops and looks back. Chapman is in the firing position, with a .38 caliber revolver in both hands. John Lennon didn’t have time to react. Chapman fired five bullets. Lennon crawled into the hall again, the doorman came in trying to help him, but nothing to do. John Lennon’s death, aged 40, would have been declared a few minutes later, that night 40 years ago.
The killer, Mark Champan, then 25, acted out of sheer folly. He was an absolute fan of Lennon. On the afternoon of the day he killed him, Chapman waited for Lennon at the Dakota door, with a disc Double fantasy, in hand for him to sign it. So it happened and they exchanged smiles. At night he kept waiting for him with the revolver. He fired and then leaned against the wall to continue reading The hunter in the rye, the mythical Uma Agulha no Palheiro, by JD Salinger, a book that was a kind of manifesto of that generation.
When the first of many police patrols appeared, Chapman surrendered without any resistance. He talked to the detectives early that night. It is learned that Chapman projected the psychotic frustrations he was suffering from onto Lennon. He said he heard that John Lennon betrayed the ideals of brotherhood when he became rich.
Chapman was sentenced to life in prison and is serving a sentence in a New York prison. He tried parole 11 times, always refused.
Yoko Ono refused John Lennon’s funeral. He organized a ceremony in nearby Central Park, in the landscaped space called Strawberry Fields, a name inspired by a Beatles song. A sea of people gathered.
SEE:
Estes Portraits of Gaza.
Images that remain last week.
The French knew how to respect the curfew when it was set for 9pm. They managed to improve the results.
The face of three Madrid newspapers this November 30: this, this and this. Also this image of a miracle.
The hypocrisy of politicians, the denunciation of the absurdity of war and social injustices are recurring themes in John Lennon’s production. He was 16 and the leader of a band, The Quarry Man, who attended a charity party in a church in a poor neighborhood in Liverpool on 6 July 1957.
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