It was twenty-seven years ago today…

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=Wcm68UteL0M[/youtube]

…that John Lennon was killed in New York. There are many memorials to Lennon on YouTube and around the net (including this good one on the Huffington Post). The one above shows Gary, the “Mayor of Strawberry Fields,” talking about the Central Park memorial, not far from Lennon and Ono’s Dakota apartment building home.

It’s always interesting to see how public memorials are used, and where they occur “naturally.” Some are like secular versions of the Wailing Wall, but all have a sense of power and magnetism because so many minds and bodies collectively focus on that spot. The U.S. consulate on University Avenue, often the target of marches and protest, was surrounded by what became a thick Princess Diana-style collection of bouquets after 9/11. Similarly, after the shooting of Jane Creba, the Foot Locker on Yonge Street had a deep row of flowers out front for a while afterwards. Smaller memorials dot the city marking car crashes, where anonymous friends or relatives tie one or two bouquets to hydro polls. Two weeks ago on a bike ride up the Don Valley trail I found a poem left under the Leaside Bridge for somebody who had recently jumped to their death. Each memorial turns that place into a small patch of sacred ground.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=AJIoTGH9IS0[/youtube]

This 1980 report of Lennon’s death is from WXYZ-TV in Detroit by their infamous anchor Bill Bonds. Compared to how most reserved Toronto newscasters present themselves, Bonds had a intense and passionate relationship with politics and the news he read, and in particular local City of Detroit events. In later years he would call out his nemesis and then-mayor Coleman Young and challenge him to a boxing match.

Though much of it was over-the-top populist theatrics, it was the first time I saw such passion for all things local. Imagine the CBC’s Diana Swain or even City-TV’s Gord Martineau (who is probably as cantankerously-close as we get to a Bonds-style character) challenging David Miller to some fisticuffs. In this clip, Bonds also comments on American gun culture, sounding like he could have been speaking last week, not twenty-seven years ago.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=OAZhJzIyqLI[/youtube]

This last clip is of Lennon and his ad hoc Plastic Ono Band (including Eric Clapton here) performing at the “Live Peace in Toronto” concert held at (the old) Varsity Stadium on Bloor in 1969. That’s Ono squirming around in a white bag at the beginning of the clip. It was a 12-hour show with other musicians, including Alice Cooper, who got his reputation for tearing apart a chicken on stage here. He in fact threw a chicken back into the audience after it was tossed on stage — thinking “Chickens have wings, so they must be able to fly” — where it was promptly ripped apart by the Toronto audience (say-it-ain-t-so, Yorkville baby-boomers).

In D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary of the concert, Sweet Toronto, there is a great shot of Lennon’s limo entourage coming up Devonshire Place to the backstage area. The concert wrapped up at 1:45AM Sunday morning, leaving me wondering what the Annex Residents’ Association had to say about it. Click below for some more interesting Toronto facts and quotes (and general weirdness including the Vagabonds motorcycle gang and the Eaton family) surrounding the concert from this fan page:

• JOHN LENNON: “Well, it was late, about 11 o’clock one Friday night, I was in my office at Apple, when we got a phone call from this guy saying, ‘Come to Toronto’. They really were inviting us as King and Queen to preside over the concert and not to play. But I didn’t hear that part and I said, ‘OK. OK. Just give me time to get a band together.’ So, I thought, ‘Who could I get to come and play with me?’ So it all happened like. We left the next morning.”
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• THE GLOBE AND MAIL: “The Lennons flew in from England with Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, Alan White and Nick Knowlands. Their black limousine crept through the backstage area at about 10 p.m., while Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys were singing Good Old Rock ‘n’ Roll to an audience of about 20,000. Flashbulbs popped, the kids scrambled over fences, as the Lennons, protected by police, made their way down a long blue canopy to the musicians’ dressing room under the stands. They stayed there until performance time.”
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• MOJO MAGAZINE: “John and Yoko stayed locked in their dressing room for three hours before their performance — and Yoko wasn’t impressed with the surroundings. ‘I came from the avant-garde world, which is kind of like the classical world,’ she says. ‘They have lovely reception rooms, they treat you really well. We arrived in this dressing room, and it is a concrete locker room, it’s dirty, it’s ugly. I looked a John and he laughed and said, ‘Welcome to rock ‘n’ roll.'”
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• JOHN LENNON: “I can’t remember when I had such a good time. Yoko was holding a piece of paper with the words to the songs in front of me. But then she suddenly disappeared into her bag in the middle of the performance and I had to make them up because it’s so long since I sang them that I’ve forgotten most of them. It didn’t seem to matter.”
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• THE GLOBE AND MAIL: “John said; ‘This is what we really came here for,’ and he and Yoko sang Give Peace A Chance, written during their bed-in in Montreal. Lennon sang, the audience sang, Yoko made peace signs with both hands.”
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• JOHN LENNON: “Yoko’s first number had a bit of rhythm but the second number was completely freaky. It was sort of the thing she did at Cambridge ’69, but it was more like Toronto 1984.”
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• LITTLE RICHARD: “I remember the show that people were throwing bottles at Yoko Ono. They were throwing everything at her. Finally she had to run off the stage. Oh, boy, it was very bad.”
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• RONNIE HAWKINS: “The Lennons’ appearance on stage did not cause ‘a near-riot in the stadium’ as several books have remarked. For one thing the unrehearsed performance of Cold Turkey and a number of oldies like Blue Suede Shoes was not a great blast of Beatles magic everyone was waiting for. For yet another, there was Yoko, stepping out from a canvas bag, to wail her very own microtonal ululation. As hip as everyone there tried to be, Yoko was too much. ‘Get the f_ _ k off the stage,’ people started to scream. John tried to comfort her immediately.”
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• – Rock promoter John Brower with John and Yoko drive in a limousine from Toronto’s airport and arrive at Varsity Stadium with the help of an 80-motorcycle escort by the Toronto Vagabonds. They also escorted The Doors to the stadium.
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• – Ritchie Yorke wrote in the Globe and Mail that rock promoter John Brower was responsible in obtaining the necessary Canadian Immigration clearance for John and Yoko.
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• – John Lennon and the band members first rehearsal was aboard a plane making its way to from England to Canada but Lennon said rehearsing “was impossible! We couldn’t hear a thing because we didn’t have any amps…” Lennon’s claims are backed up by Eric Clapton: “…you couldn’t hear because we had nowhere to plug in, and, of course, Alan didn’t have his drums on the plane with him.”
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• – Concert tickets were $6.00
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• – Brower and Walker spent $100,000 on talent.
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• – $11,000 was spent for the best sound system.
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• – Total revenues from the show was $150,000.
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• – The 13-hour pop show ended at 1:45 a.m., Sunday, September 14.
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• – After the concert, John and Yoko stayed at the estate of Mr. Eaton, whom at the time was a wealthy Canadian businessman. Said Mal Evans: “When it was over we all piled into four big cars and drove for two hours to a huge estate owned by a Mr. Eaton, who is one of the richest men in Canada. His son had actually picked us up after the show so that we could stay overnight at his house
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• – Ringo Starr states the Live Peace In Toronto concert became the turning point in John Lennon’s mind to leave the Beatles.