{"id":375712,"date":"2020-12-08T16:04:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T21:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/?p=375712"},"modified":"2020-12-09T16:00:28","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T21:00:28","slug":"your-host-remembers-the-night-john-lennon-was-killed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/admin.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2020\/12\/08\/your-host-remembers-the-night-john-lennon-was-killed\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Host Remembers the Night John Lennon Was Killed"},"content":{"rendered":"

RUSH: This is Joe in Detroit. Welcome, sir. Great to have you with us.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I know you keep up with pop music and sports and American culture and all that. This is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John Lennon at age 40. I remember it happened during Monday Night Football. Were you a disc jockey at the time? Did you program around this? And what are your memories of Lennon?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

RUSH: Let me run the clock back. So, 40 years ago — this is 2020. So that would have been in 1980?<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yeah, December 8th, 1980, right.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah, December 8th, 1980. And where was I on December 8th, 1980? You know what? I was working for the Kansas City Royals at the time. I had decided to give up radio and I had been at the Royals from 1979 — I was there from 1979 to 1983. So, that December — I was in the marketing department. We\u2019d have been working on the marketing plan for the 1981 season.<\/p>\n

But I was watching Monday Night Football that night. I watched it and I remember Cosell coming on with a sadness in his voice I had never heard, and I remember him acting disgusted and hurt like a deeply personal friend of his had been shot. And I didn\u2019t know that Cosell knew John Lennon. Then I figured who didn\u2019t know John Lennon? He was New York. Everybody knew him that was there, and Cosell treated it as almost like a presidential assassination, is what I remember.<\/p>\n

CALLER: How did you feel?<\/p>\n

RUSH: Pardon?<\/p>\n

CALLER: How did you feel?<\/p>\n

RUSH: How did I feel?<\/p>\n

CALLER: About the death of Lennon and his legacy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

RUSH: His legacy. Well, let me think about that. In fact, let me take a break, and I will have to go back and think about that \u2019cause I gotta put myself in front of the TV. I\u2019m gonna try to reconstruct where I actually was when I saw this happen. It was near 11 o\u2019clock Eastern time; so it would have been near 10 o\u2019clock where I was in Kansas City. Let me ponder this for a second. You want to hang on so you can react to what I say?<\/p>\n

CALLER: Okay. If that\u2019s all right.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Okay. I think I may be being set up here, so I\u2019m gonna give the guy the chance to pull off the setup.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: Okay. We\u2019re back to Joe in Detroit, who wanted to ask me what I thought of the death of John Lennon and his legacy 40 years ago. Look. I was like everybody else; I was stunned; I was shocked. Who in the world would want to shoot one of the Beatles? It didn\u2019t make any sense.<\/p>\n

Now, I knew, when I was growing up, I was a deejay when the Beatles hit. I got my first job as a deejay in 1966, and the Beatles hit \u201963, \u201964, I Saw Her Standing There, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and all that. And then here came Let it Be and the different direction the Beatles took that hit in the seventies, Hey Jude and so forth.<\/p>\n

I worked with a guy, Joe, who literally thought John Lennon was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. He really thought it. And I said, “Are you serious about this, dude?”<\/p>\n

“Yes, yes. He is the reincarnation Jesus Christ.” So I knew there were people out there who really elevated Lennon to a lofty height that I don\u2019t think Lennon — I don\u2019t think he thought he was Jesus Christ. Do you?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

CALLER: Well, he once was quoted as saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but I think it was tongue-in-cheek. I don\u2019t think he was serious.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. I don\u2019t think he was particularly religious, either.<\/p>\n

CALLER: No, he was not.<\/p>\n

RUSH: If you become that big and that famous, you\u2019re bigger than Jesus. You get into a fame contest with the guy that\u2019s in charge of the Bible. That\u2019s what happens to you. But I didn\u2019t understand it. And then I learned who did it and how it happened and, you know, at the time I had no experience with people who needed security around them. I\u2019d never needed it myself. I had no experience whatsoever.<\/p>\n

But even at that I was asking, “What\u2019s Lennon doing walking out of the Dakota at 11 o\u2019clock by himself? And talking to this guy at the same time.” I just didn\u2019t understand it, Joe. I didn\u2019t understand a thing about it for a while \u2019til they did the psychological pickup of this guy. I forget what the reasons he gave for killing Lennon were, but they never made any sense to me.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Right. Okay. Were you a Beatles fan yourself? Did you like Lennon or the Beatles?<\/p>\n

RUSH: Absolutely I was a Beatles fan. I was a huge Beatles fan. I probably wasn\u2019t the biggest but, yeah, I was part of the group of people that really got into them. My parents hated the Beatles \u2019cause of the long hair.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yeah.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

RUSH: I said to my parents — at the time there was a group called The Hollyridge Strings. They were an instrumental group that was an orchestra, a lot of strings. And they had an album out called The Hollyridge Strings do the Beatles, and they just played the melodies of all of the early Beatles songs, I said, “Mother, listen to these.”<\/p>\n

CALLER: Yes, I remember. Yeah.<\/p>\n

RUSH: “It\u2019s beautiful music, Mother. There\u2019s nothing subversive in here at all. It\u2019s just you don\u2019t like the long hair, I understand. But the music is literally beautiful.” My dad thought that they were communist plants, jokingly and so forth. But, no, I was a Beatles fan from the first moment of I Saw Her Standing – no, it was I Want to Hold Your Hand. That\u2019s it. That was what got me, that was the first Beatles song that hooked me.<\/p>\n

CALLER: Well, it\u2019s good to hear your thoughts. We\u2019re the same age. We\u2019re both from the Midwest and I don\u2019t agree with you much, but I thought there might be some overlap on this issue, and I found it.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Well, what did you think?<\/p>\n

CALLER: When Lennon died?<\/p>\n

RUSH: Yeah.<\/p>\n

CALLER: I heard it from Jack Buck and Hank Stram on CBS Radio. They interrupted with the bulletin. It wasn\u2019t Buck and Stram saying it. And it felt like when Kennedy died.<\/p>\n

RUSH: It sounded like what?<\/p>\n

CALLER: John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination. It hit me the same way.<\/p>\n

RUSH: Oh, oh, really? It hit you that hard. Okay.<\/p>\n

CALLER: It still does.<\/p>\n

\"\"RUSH: Interesting. I can\u2019t say that it hit me like that. Now that you mention it, it was close, but it wasn\u2019t on that par. I just couldn\u2019t understand why anybody would want to do it. Then I saw guy that did it, and I said, “This just doesn\u2019t make any sense.” (interruption) I was just asked how I felt when Princess Diana died in the tunnel, in the car, with Dodi Al Fayed in the backseat. She was in the backseat, and the car was being driven by who? Henri Paul. He was the security guy for Mohammed Al Fayed, who was the father of Dodi Al Fayed. Dodi was the playboy son of Mohammed Al Fayed.<\/p>\n

And he\u2019d run around. He wrecked his dad\u2019s yachts and he wrecked his dad\u2019s cars and sometimes Princess Diana was at the wrecks and sometimes she wasn\u2019t. I remember they had stopped at the — what was the hotel in Paris? They had stopped, it was like 10 o\u2019clock at night — I\u2019m having a mental block on the hotel. But they stopped and had gone up and had scrambled eggs and then got back down in the car driven by Henri Paul.<\/p>\n

And apparently this guy had been drinking just out the wazoo, his blood alcohol level was 10 times normal, and he\u2019s weaving, he\u2019s trying to avoid the paparazzi traffic, and he just wrapped that car around all kinds of obstructions in the tunnel as he was trying to escape them. And the media was trying to figure out what were her last words, was she saying, “Oh, Dodi, oh, Dodi.” Was she in love with Dodi. And they were not her last words. Anyway, I\u2019m out of time to answer your question about this.<\/p>\n

BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n

RUSH: We have the audio, a partial of the audio of Howard Cosell on December 8th, 1980. This is Monday Night Football, the New England Patriots at Miami against the Dolphins. Howard Cosell drew the straw to announce that John Lennon had been killed. And here is how it sounded. You\u2019ll also hear Gifford, Frank Gifford, you\u2019ll hear a little bit of him in this.<\/p>\n