The Day The 60’s Was REALLY Over

Published by Rick on Tagged Uncategorized

I have chronicled the whole “where I was when it happened” scenario in a blog I wrote on the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s tragic death. It’s easily accessible by going to rickright.com and once you’re on the home page, just scroll down a bit and you’ll see the blogs categorised by what month they were written. Click on the date of December 2010, and you’ll find a blog entitled “It Was 30 Years Ago Today…”

Too lazy to do that? OK, here’s a quick recap. I was in my last month of living in San Francisco, so Monica (aka Ruby) and I were down in LA to check out the scene we’d be working in. We were invited for dinner on Monday, December 8, 1980 to the house of Dale McRaven, who was the producer of Mork & Mindy, in the LA suburb of Woodland Hills. He had seen us open for Robin at Universal Amphitheatre a year or so earlier, and wanted to produce an episode around us. With Ruby being pregnant, it gave him plenty of basis for an episode. We had finished dinner, and were having multiple after dinner drinks. Dale also had the TV on Monday Night Football, but with the sound off. The game was in the final quarter when we noticed it was being interrupted by a special ABC news bulletin. We decided to turn up the sound, and the newsman announced that John Lennon had been shot in front of his New York apartment. It took a while for that to sink in, and really only hit me when I went to the toilet about 10 minutes after it was confirmed he was actually dead. We still had a productive night, even though on the drive home, we had an incessant reminder as all that was being played on the radio was Lennon/Beatles music.

What interested me about watching the football was the late Howard Cosell, the erudite though often obnoxious announcer, who became totally disinterested in football given the situation, yet he needed to continue to broadcast a game which was important to the fans of the two teams playing (Miami Dolphins and New England Patriots). He was personally touched, as he had interviewed Lennon on several occasions. The game itself was actually quite exciting, with playoff implications for both teams, and the Dolphins wound up winning 16-13. (I looked it up! I could have cared less at the time.) As the cameras kept focusing on jubilant fans who knew nothing of what was going on outside the stadium, Cosell almost belittled the fans for being so happy. “It means nothing” he continued to say. Turns out ABC News had gotten the exclusive on the story, as a reporter for the network was in the same hospital Lennon was brought into, having been in a minor accident a few days earlier, and was able to pass the word along that the legendary Beatle was fighting for his life after having been shot.

3 1/2 years later I was reminded of why and how ABC kept the story away from the 50000 fans in the stadium, though on a slightly smaller scale. On April 1, 1984, I was participating in an Only-In-San-Francisco event called The St. Stupid’s Day Parade. The band I was in, called The Stupeds, who performed all the worst (by our reckoning) songs to ever hit the top 10, and were performing at the close of the parade in Washington Square Park in SF. Our stage raison d’être was to do just enough of each song for people to recognise it and groan before moving on to the next one. The crowd here knew all the songs we did, maybe even confessing to actually LIKING some of them. We were very well received, got a couple encores, got the crowd to chant “Less! Less!” It was a truly glorious day all around.

Until we got off stage! One of the sound men had gone to his van to pick up a few items about 15 minutes before we were done, and came back to the sound booth in time to play us off with recorded music. He looked distraught as he came over to us after the show to let us know that Marvin Gaye had been shot and killed by his father in a scenario at least as bizarre as Mark Chapman shooting John Lennon. He knew the news would be upsetting to anyone at the festivities, so he had to keep it mum until an appropriate time. In retrospect, I was probably not as saddened by Marvin Gaye’s death as I was by Lennon’s, but not too long after, I rediscovered the What’s Goin’ On album, and to this day, I believe it’s the most near-perfect album of all time, and the song Save The Children is one of the most beautiful ever recorded.

John Lennon would now be 80 had events not transpired as they did, though I have my doubts he’d have wanted to live that long. I remember saying the night Lennon was shot, “Well I think we can finally say the 60’s are over.” “Over” in the sense that there was now no hope of any Beatles reunion/tour, and we could finally move on from our psychedelic fantasies. There was a funny novel written in the mid 70’s, entitled Paperback Writer, about The Beatles reuniting and recording an album, mostly out of necessity because of how irrelevant they had become over their absent years. There were new singles released in 1995 with the 3 surviving members playing along with some Lennon demo tracks, so they could actually credit it as being The Beatles but does anyone honestly rank those tracks among their favourites? Very few, if any.

December 8th, 2020



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