Sam Amico
It’s been more than 40 years since John Lennon was shot dead in Manhattan. It’s taken almost as long for Paul McCartney to talk about it.
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“When John died, it was so difficult,” McCartney said on SiriusXM’s Beatles channel, via People. “It was difficult for everyone in the world because he was such a loved character and such a crazy guy. He was so special.”
Lennon died after being shot by Mark David Chapman on Dec. 8, 1980. Shortly after signing an autograph for Chapman outside of The Dakota apartments in the Upper West Side of the city.
Like so much of the world, McCartney was at a loss for words.
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“I remember getting home from the studio on the day that we’d heard the news he died and turning the TV on and seeing people say, ‘Well, John Lennon was this and what he was was this,” McCartney said. “It was like, I don’t know, I can’t be one of those people.
“I can’t just go on TV and say what John meant to me. It was just too deep. It’s just too much.”
“I couldn’t put it into words.”
McCartney, 80, eventually did put it into words, or at least tried, when he sat on the floor of his recording studio and began to put together a song.
“I found a room and just sat on the wooden floor in a corner with my guitar and just started to play the opening chords to Here Today,” he said, going on to explain what the lyrics meant to him.
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“‘The night we cried,’ that was to do with a time when we were in Key West down in Florida, and for some reason — I think it was like a hurricane — something had been delayed, and we couldn’t play for a couple of days, so we holed up in a little Motel,” McCartney said. “So what would we do? Well, we’d have a drink, and we would get drunk.”
“We got drunk and started to get kind of emotional. On the way to that, there was a lot of soul-searching. We told each other a few truths, you know, ‘Well, I love you,’ ‘I love you man,’ ‘I love that you said that,’ and we opened up.”
“So that was kind of special to me. I think that was really one of the only times that ever happened.”
Both McCartney and Lennon had gone on to solid careers without the Beatles, with McCartney forming a new band and Lennon recording songs with and for wife Yoko Ono.
But you get the sense that their time together in the band that made a massive and lasting impact on rock was the most special times of their career.
