The Beatles song played over the hospital speakers the moment John Lennon died
Sometimes, it feels as though culture has become anaesthetised to a sort of tragedy, like John Lennon‘s death. His mortality has almost added to the folklore of his career, and maybe, we’ve forgotten about the actual tragedy that fell onto the world, December 8th, 1980.
The end of the 1970s was somewhat of an exciting time for Lennon and music. The previous decade had given way to a much-needed sense of individual exploration, in a time when music had changed and become even more expansive since his domination with The Beatles in the ‘60s. And the dawn of the ‘80s felt similarly fresh and unknown, particularly given the fact that Lennon and his famed partner, Paul McCartney, had reportedly reconciled.
So what awaited in this new chapter of maturity, reconciliation and artistic modernity? It was something we never really got to find out, thanks to Lennon’s now notorious murderer, Mark Chapman. On that evening, Chapman approached Lennon under the archway of his apartment building, The Dakota, and fired five bullets at him, with four hitting him in the back.
Lennon was then rushed to the Emergency Department at Roosevelt Hospital, where several doctors worked frantically to save his life. Stephan Lynn, the doctor credited with working on Lennon in the hospital, recalled attempting to resuscitate him for an entire 20 minutes, while another doctor, Richard Marks, administered what was remembered as huge blood transfusions. “When I realised he wasn’t going to make it,” said Marks, “I just sewed him back up. I felt helpless.”
It was a dramatic and tragic end to the life of one of music’s most beloved artists, and a moment in medical time that many doctors surely wouldn’t have thought to be real. But the shock of the entire situation was compounded, albeit lightened, by the moment of poesy that bled out of the hospital speakers.
At 11:15pm, the official time of Lennon’s death, the early Beatles track ‘All My Loving’ played in honour of the songwriter. Of course, it must have felt like a natural choice given its juxtaposition of upbeat optimism in a moment of sad desperation, combined with the opening verse of “Close your eyes and I’ll kiss you / Tomorrow, I’ll miss you / Remember I’ll always be true / And then while I’m away / I’ll write home every day / And I’ll send all my lovin’ to you”.
But did it not dawn on anybody in the hospital that this was actually a McCartney song? Maybe they deemed that more apt, allowing his musical partner to narrate the moment with such poignant empathy, while also giving way to a performance Lennon is particularly proud of, “‘All My Loving’ is Paul, I regret to say,” Lennon told David Sheff in that very year, 1980. “Because it’s a damn good piece of work. [Singing] ‘All my loving’… But I play a pretty mean guitar in back.”
But despite the fitting nature of this song, for this moment, I can’t help but feel the same as a ton of Lennon fans out there, that there is surely something more suited to soundtrack the modern Lennon, who left us on that fateful day.
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