If you’re an aging Boomer, several events involving guns probably stick out as “I remember where I was when” dates: JFK was shot, MLK Jr was shot, RFK was shot, and John Lennon was shot. I was a poor college student in 1980 without a TV, so unlike many people I didn’t hear about Lennon’s murder on December 8 from Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football:
Evidently a few of the MNF crew didn’t think the shooting should be reported, but some argued, as you can hear in the announcement, that some things are bigger than a football game. Cosell’s comment that Lennon was shot twice in the back would prove incorrect. He was shot at least four times (some accounts say five) and while Wikipedia and most sources say he was shot in the back others maintain John turned when the killer called his name and was shot in his side or even his chest. Like the JFK assassination, the circumstances of Lennon’s murder remain hazy and continue to generate books and podcasts full of conspiracy theories, like the killer was a Manchurian Candidate trained by the Nixon administration.
I didn’t hear the news that night, so I got up the next morning and turned on my favorite FM album rock station, which was only playing Beatles records. I thought, “How cool,” until the DJ said why and I dropped to the floor. Like the story that’s become a cliche, after I saw The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on February 9, 1964, my world shifted in a lot of ways, from asking my friend Jack the next day to teach me how to play three chords on his guitar to listening to John’s “Plastic Ono Band” album on a cracked cassette player with low batteries in the fields of Vietnam. They were always there and now one of them wasn’t.
Today John would’ve turned 85, and I imagine a lot of us think about the music we missed and what the activist who left a pile of the world’s greatest peace anthems would’ve contributed to our national conversation, especially now when an immoral fascist’s Covid and USAID policies alone have murdered hundreds of thousands of people—a democracy-destroying, bigoted autocrat who seems hell-bent on turning the military loose on American citizens.
So tomorrow Apple will release “Power to the People,” another Lennon anthem whose title could not be more important today. It’s another boxset of music, stories, and art like Apple’s been releasing for over a decade every time a Beatles’ record or one of the lads’ solo LPs nears its 50-year anniversary.
This one captures most of the music from John’s “Sometime in New York City” album as well as songs from the “One To One” concert and other protests—John and Yoko at their activist best: Attica State, John Sinclair, Angela Davis, Vietnam, Sunday Bloody Sunday, and the N-word song among others. The original “Sometime in NYC” album didn’t fare well with the critics or the buying public, and the new package is just as controversial in BeatleWorld because Yoko or Sean or some record executive decided to omit “Woman is the N-word of the World,” even though John had the blessing of Jet Magazine and Black politicians who understood and supported the song’s feminist message—from a man who admitted he was a terrible husband to Cynthia and far from a feminist. Musically it’s probably the strongest song on the album, but I sure wish they could’ve made the point using different words.
Most of the songs are of their time. How many people today know the poet John Sinclair or that John’s song helped get him released from prison? Still, while the tunes are topical the issues are still all too much with us. Below, for instance, is “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a tune about a 1972 tragedy remastered for the new boxset. It’s more than two minutes longer than the original version, primarily because there have been so many more wars and atrocities to document since the original release, and a lot of them were sparked by the United States. All of the events are terrible but the final one really hits home: more than 1,500,000 people have been shot and killed in America just since John Lennon was murdered on December 8, 1980—that’s more than the total number of Americans killed in every conflict here and abroad since the Revolutionary War (approximately 1,270,000).
Whenever October 9 rolls around it’s nice to imagine John still with us, wise as ever, preaching love, which is the premise of the 2019 movie “Yesterday.” The story assumes John never met 15-year-old Paul McCartney that day at the church festival in 1957 and The Beatles never happened (as I write 83-year-old Paul is on tour, opening the show with John’s “Help!”).
“Fantastic! You made it to 78!”
