After the shocking assassination of John Lennon, thousands of mourners gathered spontaneously outside his and Yoko Ono\u2019s Central Park West apartment building, the Dakota. Tens of thousands more gathered six days later in New York, Liverpool and other world cities to honor Yoko\u2019s request for a silent, 10-minute vigil in John\u2019s memory. Radio airwaves were saturated with Beatles\u2019 songs during the weeks that followed, as well as with John\u2019s most recent recordings, one of which\u2014\u201d(Just Like) Starting Over\u201d\u2014became a posthumous #1 hit in late December. By late January, the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the release of the American hostages in Iran had pushed accounts of Lennon\u2019s death and the massive public response to it from newspaper headlines. Then, on January 22, 1981, Rolling Stone magazine\u2019s John Lennon tribute issue hit newsstands, featuring a cover photograph of a naked John Lennon curled up in a fetal embrace of a fully clothed Yoko Ono. The iconic Annie Liebowitz portrait would become the definitive image of perhaps the most photographed married couple in music history.<\/p>\n
The now-famous photograph of John and Yoko is all the more poignant for having been taken on the morning of December 8, 1980, just twelve hours before Lennon\u2019s death. Sent by Rolling Stone to capture an image of Lennon alone for a planned upcoming cover, Liebowitz had to negotiate the issue with John. Liebowitz recalled years later that Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner \u201cnever told me what to do, but this time he did. He told me, \u2018Please get me some pictures without [Yoko].\u2019 Then I walk in, and the first thing [Lennon] says to me is \u2018I want to be with her.’\u201d An angry Liebowitz reluctantly agreed to John\u2019s request, and the image she captured proved to be one of her most famous\u2014one that Lennon told her on the spot had \u201ccaptured [his] relationship with Yoko perfectly.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While the famous Rolling Stone image is sometimes called the final photograph of Lennon, it is in fact only the final portrait of him and Yoko together. The final photo of John was taken a few hours after Liebowitz\u2019s, by a fan waiting outside the Dakota. That photo captured John immediately after signing an autograph for Mark David Chapman, the man who would shoot him dead some six hour later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the shocking assassination of John Lennon, thousands of mourners gathered spontaneously outside his and Yoko Ono\u2019s Central Park West apartment building, the Dakota. Tens of thousands more gathered six days later in New York, Liverpool and other world cities to honor Yoko\u2019s request for a silent, 10-minute vigil in John\u2019s memory. Radio airwaves were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}