Re: Donald Fagen Recalls Lennon's Murder

On 2024-10-09 11:23:40 +0000, Norbert said:

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.

Also how I learned of the assassination. At the time I also happened to be perusing a listing of Beatles 45's in a record shop catalog, Corny's Record Shop in Ohio who did mail order. Most (but not all) were later generation Capitol pressings and I still own them today.

  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,

Great album.

 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.

It's a shame if it shook him up so bad he was never able to replicate the critical and commercial success of the Nightfly album, either solo or with Steely Dan (he wasn't, even if "Two Against Nature" won a Grammy and sold fairly well I guess).

-- from Fagen's memoir Eminent Hipsters