Well Julius...this won't exactly answer your question, but I was on the air at a long defunct AOR/Rock station in Portland, Me on that night. I remember it well...At 10:50PM, I was starting off a block of The Byrds...We used to feature a 60s Classic band every Monday night at 10:50..."The Psychedelic Supersession" as it was known. I was a 25 year old DJ at the time, just chilling out to my show. At 11:10, I had just begun the last song of that Byrds set, which was ironically "He Was a Friend of Mine", a song about the assasination
of President Kennedy. Suddenly, the phone lines just seemed to explode, as freaked out listeners called to ask if John Lennon had been shot. At that moment, I had not heard anything about it, but I ran across the hall to the UPI Wire machine which seemed to be in overdrive! Lennon was wounded and there was "blood everywhere" I seem to recall the one news story reading. I grabbed the article to bring back to the studio,
just as the UPI machine began to ding...indicating a bulletin, which was of course that John Lennon had died.
I ran back into the studio, as that last Byrds song was fading, quickly backselling it only, as well as what it was about and quickly tied it in with the bomb shell that I than dropped on the audience letting them know
that John Lennon had been murdered. I immediately went into nothing but John Lennon music for the duration of my show. The Program Director called...I put him on hold and totally forgot that he was there! I remembered 15 minutes later...He was still there and was cool about it. Obviously the phones were completely nuts that night. Anybody else have on air memories of that night in December, 1980???
