In the very early morning of December 9, 1980, asleep in my Manhattan, Murry Hill apartment directly across the street from the recently bombed Cuban Mission to the United Nations, on the corner of East 38th Street and Lexington Avenue, I was stirred to consciousness by my regular 5 a.m. wakeup call from the overnight staff at our JFK offices.
"Have you heard?" Floyd asked.
"Hm? No. You just woke me. What?"
"John Lennon was killed."
I sorted through my shock as I showered. I dressed and prepared for work. Garbed in brown, 3-piece, pin-striped suit under a brown felt Borsalino hat with feathered hat band, grounded in sleek Italian shoes, finished by one among a diverse selection of silk, abstract ties, I descended the elevator with leather attaché case in hand and strode to my street-parked Datsun 280ZX to make my morning escape through the nearby Midtown Tunnel ahead of the morning tow trucks.
I was a long way from The White Album and "Revolution 9." ("Number 9. Number 9.")
It wouldn't be accurate to say that when I left the Sixties behind I never looked back. I'm as subject to nostalgia as the next person, maybe more than many, but I learned early in life and repeatedly after that nostalgia — hm, how to put this — is all in the mind. If I did sometimes look back, I also surely turned my back. No youth glorifying, aging hippie, I, by a decade later and ever after.
I was never one among the millions of aspiring, fantasizing rock musicians. I wasn't headed back to the earth. I had already been scorned at age 20, by the Oregon bus masters of a stripped-down Greyhound doing cross country service, as an uptight "city hippie."
(They informed me the morning of departure that they weren't actually going to drop me exactly where it was I had paid to go. No biggie. Whatever. I'll walk a hundred miles. It’s cool. It's all good. Life is beautiful. The birds in the trees are musical, the flowers are fragrant. Om.}
What I was, was a teenager, and I was, very manifestly, in the process not of being anything, really, very particular at all but, rather, of becoming, and as multiple events would determine, I wasn't becoming what it was that, temporarily, I had, between the ages of 16 and 20, donned as a guise and pretended to be.
But if any temporary and, as it turns out, undefining experience is not who we definitively really are, living that experience nonetheless contributes to defining -- creating -- who it is we more complexly become, and so does any reaction to it.
And I had a reaction.
Since my not well educated or especially cultured family delivered no high musical culture to my ears, my self-education in music began with the purchase as a boy of my first two 45 rpm recordings, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” not long after the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. John quickly emerged as my favorite. The personal saga of his psychological struggle with fame, thrust unexpectedly and so overwhelmingly on four otherwise ordinary lads, called for attention. The wit, the spirit of fun, the missteps, with occasional arrogances, the struggle toward becoming, with scribblings published as poetry under the title of In His Own Write, which I bought and still possess, all worked to endear John to me.
After the Beatles broke up and John struggled, with and without Yoko Ono, through addiction and toward some reimagined sense of self, I found a new identification with him for my more anonymous and personal struggles. The cover photo of that first solo LP, John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band – that was what I sought, though I was mostly, intermittently, alone, with no Yoko of my own. And then its song “God,” with its repeated, interrupted crescendos of increasingly dramatic piano chords alternating with Lennon’s declarations of independence from all and any claims on his identity, including that of the past:
God is a concept
By which we measure
Our painI don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-Ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in Tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in Mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in Yoga
I don't believe in Kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
Dramatic pause to understand what’s just been rejected.
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
That's reality
And then.
The dream is over.
Too many times, deep into my soul’s dark night alone, terrorized by LSD flashbacks induced by near-hallucinogenic Jamaican ganja or Thai stick, or from the depths of my already destabilized ego, I had needed to pace the floor to forestall in the motion my slippage into mindlessness, to strut through whichever current, small studio apartment for hours at a time to assert myself against my demise, stand before the bathroom mirror and declare to the image there in the face of my perilously disintegrating brainscape, the disassembling physical reality around me, and any coherent self that was me at its center:
I. I am. I am strong.
Puffing out my chest, glaring fiercely into the mirror, fearing I’d go mad,
Nothing can take me from me. Nothing can destroy me.
Over and over through the night.
I just believe in me. That’s reality.
I emerged from the Sixties knowing one thing. I would never again identify myself by membership in a group. I would affix to myself no label. I might by various appearances be a member of any number of distinct groups – American, Jewish, New Yorker had always come readiest to mind and recognition – I might at times feel pride in a membership, but none of them would ever define me, none would I permit to serve as anyone else’s claim to insight into who I was or to any perception of me. None could ever make a claim on me that might transcend the greater commitment I had found and on which I chose to stand my ground: the independent intellectual values born out of the developing history of Western and, later, too, Eastern philosophical tradition, the progress of humans on this earth toward some form of universal wisdom. (The name and iconography of this Substack are neither casual nor careless.)
Six days after John Lennon’s murder, on Sunday, December 14, 1980, a memorial gathering was held in Central Park. At its center stood a photo of Lennon, propped on an easel placed downstage center of the park’s Bandshell, on the eastside of the park just south of Bethesda Terrace. According to the news report below, two hundred thousand fans gathered to listen to Lennon’s recorded music and, at Yoko Ono’s request, end the remembrance with ten minutes of silence.
I arrived early enough to stand in clear sight and relative near proximity to the bandshell, to the left of the flagpole, in front of the tree. I came, it must be said, in the spirit of what I write here, with a very dear and close friend since high school, and who continued to be my friend for decades more before she was no longer. (The world is not sentimental. Nostalgia is only in the mind.) The memorial lasted long enough, just listening to Lennon’s music and singing along, with no speakers but only the photo of Lennon to gaze at, that many people descended to sit on the ground. I stayed on my feet. When the time came for Ono’s requested ten minutes of silence, all around me, as one might expect, rose to stand in respectful stillness. I, however, had a different plan. I had brought with me, wrapped in a plastic bag, the long Mexican vest that I had worn like a uniform over my shirtless torso all during the teenage years I had identified as a hippie. (A girl I knew in high school, one among others I had always been too shy to ask out, had later confided to me that she often felt too intimidated herself to approach me. I had always seemed to her, she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor in my vest at whatever party, my hair descending in curls to my shoulders, joking and passing a joint, like “the perfect hippie” and she feared whatever she might say would sound inadequate.)
When everyone around me stood, I opened the bag, withdrew the vest I had not looked at for nearly a decade and donned it now like a Hebrew tallit. Then, I sat cross legged on the ground. I closed my eyes. For ten minutes, while all around me silently remembered John Lennon, prayed for his soul or cried for his loss, with whatever other private thoughts no one else will ever know, I sat like the perfect hippie, remembering John Lennon and myself. I said goodbye to both. When it was all over, I rose and returned the vest to its bag, which, when I returned home to that Murray Hill apartment, I placed in a box. I did not take it out of that box again for over thirty-five years.
I’m in New York this week. I’ve been walking in Central Park, which holds many memories, and I had these thoughts.
AJA
To read about my experience of the counterculture Sixties, see
To read about my brief but whirlwind career as a business executive, see
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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
Such a thoughtful and insightful reflection Jay. You write beautifully, and I always look forward to your work. Thanks for another excellent essay. 🙏🏻
A lyrical and poignant tribute. The Lennon Wall in Prague is one of my favorite landmarks. When I saw it last there was an exhibit (or a spontaneous display) of poetry written by refugees. I have not yet decided how I feel about the fact that some of Lennon's songs have found their way into the songbook at my Quaker meeting (while that is charming, I think he encouraged a lyrical humanism, not "worship," per se). It's funny that I'm kind of nostalgic for the sixties, even though I was born in 1975. My parents were Christian hippies, and the folk revival heavily impacted our Pentecostal circles. So I have many memories of bonfires and bearded men, women with long hair and beads, and guitars. In fact, those memories give me some hope, because your generation's revolt against the conformism of the 1950s might inspire a similar rebellion against the industry-bound, branding-addled culture now. Surely there are young people who are tired of monetizing everything, who have wearied of "content," who want more simplicity, who want to grow and "be" rather than picking their lane.