This December Day Still Haunts Us
The first thing you see when you open the cover of Laurie Kaye’s memoir is an inscription inside the book. “To Laurie, Love, Yoko Ono, December 1980 and John Lennon, 1980. Lennon adds a drawing of the couple’s eyes that is distinct with his glasses and nose.
It was signed inside the Dakota apartment in New York City just a few hours before Lennon went out to the recording studio. It was the night of December 8, 1980 and he worked on his wife’s blistering dance track “Walking On Thin Ice.”
On the anniversary of Lennon’s death, the inscription and remembrance of the last interview he did with Kaye for RKO radio blurs the most famous image of that day. It’s the picture of the killer getting Lennon‘s autograph earlier that day. Yoko Ono would later say that with that signature, he signed his name into heaven.
Laurie Kaye was just twenty-five and an aspiring journalist who was at the Dakota to talk with the couple about their new album Double Fantasy, Lennon’s return to form after a five-year exile. When she left the apartment, she couldn’t help but run into a creepy guy outside who pestered her incessantly before she told him to fuck off.
Kaye was out to dinner following the interview in which a beaming Lennon espoused how he had found his creative muse again. It’s a focal point of her delightful memoir Confessions of a Rock ’N’ Roll Name-Dropper: My Life Leading Up To John Lennon’s Last Interview.
That night was unseasonably mild for the time of year. I was a few blocks away at the WNEW Christmas concert headlined by the Marshall Tucker Band. It was a night that was made memorable when Blues Brother Dan Akroyd sat in and played harp with the Tuckers. I had gotten to know the MTB since I’d done one of my first interviews five years earlier when I was fifteen and they played the Beacon Theatre.
The good vibes of the holiday season were suddenly crushed when guitarist Toy Caldwell came blazing through the backstage area to announce that John Lennon had been shot. A woman came in a few minutes later crying uncontrollably as Caldwell and concert promoter Ron Delsener commiserated, their anger rising.
The fortress building of Avery Fisher Hall felt like a cocoon and provided a kind of protection from stepping into the reality of the outside world. When I approached a taxi and opened the door, “Dream #9” was blaring over the radio and my heart sank.
Kaye was out to dinner when she heard the news. She remembered the face of the creepy guy that pestered her and knew who was the likely shooter. She raced to the hospital where she could see Yoko Ono through the doors where she was consoled by a friend. She writes that for years she was wracked by guilt that she didn’t report him to Dakota security.
Within just a few hours, all of the promise and optimism espoused by the Lennons that afternoon for a new creative era vanished. Lennon had come to terms with his place in life and who he was writing for. He and Ono’s tenure was longer than the Beatles.
“I’m really talking to the people who grew up with me,” he told her.” I’m saying, ‘Here I am now: how are you? How’s your relationship going—did you get through it all? Wasn’t the Seventies a drag? Well let’s make the Eighties good. We’re going into an unknown future but we’re all still here.”
In many ways, Kaye’s reminiscences with Lennon, and several late Seventies interviews with George Harrison and Paul McCartney, are collectively illuminating as they provide portraits of artists who were still grappling with the overhang and enormity of forever being a Beatle.
Kaye was not even a teenager when she reached the upper deck seats to see the Beatles at Dodger Stadium. Readers will delight in the anecdotes she shares of coming of age in early Seventies Los Angeles. Kaye reminisces about dropping a dime repeatedly into a high school pay phone to get past a busy signal so she could get a reservation at the Troubadour (where she saw Jim Messina play with Kenny Loggins.) She reminisces about the time Elton John played at the Hollywood Bowl, introduced by porn star Linda Lovelace just before hundreds of doves were released from the stage. Then there was that time she went to see Iggy Pop and was approached by a rotund older guy who said he could get her backstage. She shrugged him off only to later learned he was Jerry Garcia.
“I remember looking up and down the length of our table,” she writes of the Troubadour that night, “thinking to myself that this was without a doubt just where I belong; it was made up of my fellow live music lovers and always would be.” Later Paul Kantner would tell her their was almost a tribal like spiritual experience shared at rock concerts
I felt a kinship remembering my own aspiration as a teenage music journalist and writing my first review of Elton John’s “Captain Fantastic” album. Kaye recalls pitching the Zoo with some samples and writing about Paul Simon’s first tour.
When Kaye worked with an RKO team to interview the Lennons in 1980, it was originally planned as a Valentine’s Day special. That December day she brought a copy of Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit” book which delighted the couple. Lennon said the book was a series of instructions that inspired his song “Imagine” with his wife’s admonitions “Imagine this, imagine that….”
Lennon felt he was starting over, not competing with the current crop of artists, including new wavers like the B-52’s and Lene Lovich who copped Ono’s vocal techniques.
“The eighties is going to be another step up, and be beautiful,” Ono speculated that afternoon. Lennon voiced his hopes that he’d have full years of creativity ahead.
It seems just like yesterday. But just like that, 44 years have gone by. It’s almost a lifetime and the pain of that night and what was taken away from us never goes away.
(To read Confessions of a Rock ‘N’ Roll Name Dropper, visit FayettevilleMafiaPress.com and Amazon.)
Enjoy our previous related coverage here: The End of an Era of Love: Love is Still All We Need.