This day in music - December 8, 1980: John Lennon is shot outside the Dakota building in New York City
As we all know, John Lennon died of his wounds at 11:30 that evening. I was walking into a kitchen/commons room at a student co-op housing unit I shared with about a dozen others in Toronto when I was told. I arrived in the city three months earlier from New York to begin graduate school.
I remember it as a sad event, not necessarily life altering, but sad. Maybe by 1980 we were starting to think it wasn't all that remarkable that famous people sometimes get shot.
Not to make light, just trying to remember what I was thinking at the time. Perhaps if I had actually been a child of the '60s, I'd have felt it differently. It did feel like the end of something. Not sure what.
I remember it as a sad event, not necessarily life altering, but sad. Maybe by 1980 we were starting to think it wasn't all that remarkable that famous people sometimes get shot.
Not to make light, just trying to remember what I was thinking at the time. Perhaps if I had actually been a child of the '60s, I'd have felt it differently. It did feel like the end of something. Not sure what.
Maybe my mood was influenced by the fact that Ronald Reagan was elected president a month before.
John Lennon's "Imagine" is still probably my favourite of his.
(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)
Labels: John Lennon, music, This day in music
posted by Richard K. Barry at
5:00 PM
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