Donald Fagen Recalls Lennon's Murder

In December 1980, I was living three blocks from the Dakota,
watching Monday Night Football, when Howard Cosell announced that John
Lennon had been shot in the back.  I walked over and watched while a
huge crowd of sobbing New Yorkers gathered at Seventy-Second Street and
Central Park West.  This pretty much set the tone of the decade to come.
 After delivering my album The Nightfly to Warner Brothers, I came apart
like a cheap suit.  The panic attacks I used to get as a kid returned,
only now accompanied by morbid thoughts and paranoia, big-time.  I could
barely get through the day, much less write music.  I starting seeing a
shrink and gobbling antidepressants.
-- from Fagen's memoir Eminent Hipsters