The 1971 album Mark David Chapman listened to on the day he killed John Lennon
It’s now over 45 years since Mark David Chapman fired that fatal shot that killed John Lennon.
It was a frightening introduction to the music world as to the violent roads celebrity obsession can lead. On the morning of December 8th, 1980, Chapman left his hotel residence in Midtown Manhattan to spend the day hovering around the outside of the Upper West Side’s Dakota Building, where Lennon lived. After eerily having crossed paths with Lennon’s five-year-old son Sean earlier on, Chapman finally encountered the former Beatle in the late afternoon and managed an autograph of his personal copy of Double Fantasy.
At approximately 10:50pm, upon Lennon and Yoko Ono’s return to the building, Chapman fired five shots from a .38 revolver into Lennon from behind and waited for the NYPD to arrive while reading The Catcher in the Rye.
The motives have never been entirely clear. A long-time fan, it’s been speculated that a religious conversion triggered a furious clash in Chapman at Lennon’s ‘Bigger than Jesus’ quip back in 1966, fomenting a simmering seethe fuelled further by the perceived hypocrisy of his celebrity lifestyle and the anti-material sentiment of much of his songs.
It was the lyrics to ‘God’ that Chapman professed to feeling the deepest fury. “I just wanted to scream out loud, ‘Who does he think he is, saying these things about God and heaven and the Beatles?’” He revealed to author Jack Jones.
“Saying that he doesn’t believe in Jesus and things like that. At that point, my mind was going through a total blackness of anger and rage.”
Mark David Chapman
It’s well known that Chapman’s fraying grip on reality prompted a blurred relationship with Lennon, even signing his identity as “John Lennon” on the final day of his Hawaii security guard logbook, as well as constant comparisons to The Catcher in the Rye’s alienated protagonist – “my mindset is Holden Caulfield and anti-phoniness.” Yet, it’s often forgotten that the disturbed murderer was also a massive Todd Rundgren fan.
So much so that on the day of the murder, Chapman was wearing an official Hermit of Mink Hollow T-shirt underneath his coat, and left an 8-track of Runt: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren at his Sheraton Hotel room, along with his multiple copies of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s unclear if he had a means to listen to Rundgren’s second solo LP in the room, but Rundgren’s blue-eyed collection of pop balladry may well have been the last album he spun in some capacity on that fateful trip. An extra slice of uncanny happenstance adorns its front cover, Rundgren with his back to the cover playing a piano with his noose around his neck.
It’s been thought that public exchanges between Rundgren and Lennon may have added fuel to Chapman’s assassination fantasy. As well as rumours that he visited Woodstock to search for the artist, a semi-serious feud stoked by Melody Maker in 1974 involving the two has been posited as enflaming a sense of betrayal. We’ll never know. Such connections have been shooed away by Rundgren himself, eager to keep his presence far away from Chapman’s dark legacy in rock and pop history.
“You can’t blame the world,” Rundgren mused to The Guardian in 2013, reflecting on Chapman’s selfish lack of regard for another’s life. “Blame yourself, then blame John Lennon. I don’t feel any connection to Mark David Chapman. I never met the guy.”
