It Was 35 Years Ago This December. … Hello Bruce, Goodbye John

A Brief Remembrance of John Lennon by Doug Draper, Niagara At Large

December 8^th, 2015

On a crisp Thursday night in Buffalo, New York, 35 years ago this past December 4^th, I was climbing up to my seat in the blue section of the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium – more warmly known to locals as “the Aud” – for one of the most anticipated rock concerts of the year.

John Lennon

On that night in 1980, Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band took the stage in front of more than 15,000 cheering fans for another show in their now-legendary “River Tour” and Bruce counted “one, two, three, four” and ripped right into one of his anthems, “Born To Run,” to cheers that were ear-piercing before he finished singing the first line.

The energy and wealth of great sounds from “the boss,” his powerful sax man Clarence Clemons and other band mates, rolled on for two hours before the lights dimmed and the performers left the stage to every fan in the place clapping and shouting for more.

The shouting and clapping continued for what seemed like enough time to tune five or six guitars before Springsteen returned briefly to the stage to tell the crowd to “stay cool cause that was just the first set.”

Minutes later the Springsteen and the band were back and launched right into “Badlands” before finishing with “Jungleland” and two encores that included what by then had become his blockbuster cover version of Mitch Ryder’s ‘Devil With The Blue Dress Medley. The show lasted for four and a half hours with Springsteen, almost drained and his shirt soaking wet, leaned into the mike and yelled; “I can’t help it. I’m a prisoner of rock and roll,” before belting out one last song.

I saw Springsteen in concert two more times following the release of the ‘Born In The U.S.A’ album that transformed him into a full-fledged superstar. Those shows were good too but they never quite matched the magic of that night in Buffalo when there were no big screens or elaborate stage lights – just Bruce and the band wearing blue jeans and sharing their raw talent with fans that had followed their music religiously from the beginning.

Bruce Springsteen and his band mate – Clarence ‘Big Man’ Clemons rock on during a River Tour show 35 years ago.

That show in Buffalo had me on a musical high until four nights later when I returned to the newsroom at the St. Catharines Standard after covering a council meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake and one of the editors checked the news wire and said; ‘Oh no. Something awful has happened,” he told the few of us who were working that night of December 8^th, 1980. “Someone shot John Lennon dead outside the building where he lived in New York City.’

A lover of John Lennon and The Beatles since their first North American appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, I don’t know how I got through writing stories from that council meeting. And on the way home that night, there was no more Springsteen music playing in my head. I’d gone from rock and roll nirvana to nightmare, and I didn’t feel like going to work the following day.

Later I learned that one of Springsteen’s band mates and closest friends from growing up in New Jersey, Steve Van Zandt, said he didn’t feel the band should go through with the show they were scheduled to do in Philadelphia the night after Lennon’s murder. Springsteen, recalled Van Zandt later, “reminded me of why we do what we do, and how it was important to go out that night in particular.”

And so they did do a show that night and took time to pay tribute to John Lennon and I went to work, driving to Dunnville and back for a meeting on hotly opposed plans for a toxic waste dump their while big flacks of snow were falling gently from the sky and Lennon’s music was playing on a radio station I was listening to.

One of the songs the station played, from an album called ‘Double Fantasy’ that Lennon and his wife Yoko released only a few weeks earlier, was written for Lennon’s then barely five-year-old son Sean and contained the lyric; “Close your eyes. Have no fear. The monster’s gone, he’s on the run and your daddy’s here.”

Sadly, the monster wasn’t gone. He was there with a gun, waiting in the shadows on the night of December 8^th, 1980, when John Lennon and his wife were returning home from working on some new recordings.

This December 8^th, Yoko released a statement on twitter, along with an image of Lennon’s bloodied glasses from that night that I share below.

This past December 4^th, 35 years to the day I attended that Bruce Springsteen concert in Buffalo, a box set of audio and video discs from The River Tour was released around the world and given what a high that concert was for me, I could not stop myself from buying it.

My beautiful memories of that concert though, will forever be linked with that moment, four days later, that I learned the horrible news of John Lennon’s slaying.

A few days ago, I also learned that Bruce Springsteen is coming back to Buffalo on February 25^th of this coming year with the surviving members of the original E Street Band to reprise music from The River Tour.

The old Aud was demolished in 2009 and Clarence Clemons died two years later, but it is great to know that that Springsteen is still around playing his sands.

How sad it is to think of how much life and music John Lennon, who was only 40 when he was so senselessly cut down, has missed over the past 35 years and how much more music he could have shared with us.

We can only imagine.

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