Mark, Jose, and John Lennon

It was 33 years ago this Sunday that John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartments in New York City. He was shot at 10:50 p.m., pronounced dead at 11:20, and by midnight the grim news was going forth to a shocked world. Most Americans heard the news that night from Howard Cosell who made the announcement during ABC’s Monday Night Football. I had spent most of that day in bed with the flu and had fallen asleep during a repeat of The Tonight Show. In one of those eerie moments when I was drifting between sleep and consciousness, I heard a bulletin from NBC News which said Lennon had been killed by “a local screwball.” In those pre-Internet days, my first instinct after digesting the news was to turn on the radio. A station that generally veered to the middle of the road was playing “God,” the rarely heard blasphemous centerpiece of the Plastic Ono Band album. It was then that I knew I wasn’t dreaming

The doctor on duty at Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Room that night said that though Lennon‘s killer claimed to have no previous experience with firearms, each of the bullets in his prey’s body were right on target and destroyed the arteries that carry blood to the heart. Of course, the alleged killer was easily apprehended since he made no attempt to flee, having decided to sit down and read The Catcher in the Rye while waiting for police to arrest him. Identified as Mark David Chapman, he fit the now familiar profile of the "lone assassin." That was the initial clue that he might have been a patsy, another of the CIA’s Manchurian Candidates, brainwashed into taking the fall for a killing that he may or may not have committed and which was planned by other parties.

In retrospect, it should have seemed obvious back in 1980. In Rolling Stone’s special issue memorializing Lennon, all but one player on the scene that night in December 1980 was identified.

It was Jay Hastings, an off-duty doorman, who futilely tried to fashion a tourniquet to prevent the massive bleeding after Lennon stumbled into a nearby office. Two police officers, Jim Moran and Bill Gamble, carried Lennon’s wounded body into the patrol car that took him to Roosevelt Hospital. The city’s medical examiner, Elliott Gross, was identified, as was Richard J. Nicastro, deputy chief of Manhattan detectives, Dr. Stephen Lynn, who made the official announcement that Lennon was dead, and even A. Burton, the hospital’s director of public relations.

Who was missing?

In Rolling Stone, he was identified only as “The doorman stationed outside” and “the other doorman.” He was the one who identified Chapman as the assailant. As Lennon, in his persona of Dr. Winston O’ Boogie, wrote on the back cover of his 1975 greatest hits collection, Shaved Fish, “A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words.” The silence concerning “The doorman stationed outside” continued until 1987 when People magazine identified him as Jose Perdomo.

Who was Jose Perdomo?

In The Illuminati Zone, William Fevers reports that Jose Jacquin Sanjenis Perdomo “was a Cuban exile who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, the failed CIA operation that much of the evidence suggests was led by George H. W. Bush, former CIA director and the vice-president elect at the time of Lennon’s murder.” In Let Me Take You Down, author Jack Jones writes that Chapman frequently discussed the Bay of Pigs with Perdomo while the alleged killer was stalking his prey at the Dakota. Before embarking on his doorman career, Perdomo was on the CIA’s payroll where he worked with Frank Sturgis, the convicted Watergate burglar employed by Richard Nixon, the president who wanted Lennon deported and encouraged the FBI to harass him in the early ‘70s. Sturgis is also believed to have had a hand in the Kennedy assassination.

If Chapman had no previous experience with firearms, Perdomo almost certainly did.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that Perdomo, the CIA agent and Dakota doorman, was the true assassin on the night of December 8, 1980. Perdomo said it was Chapman. The police said it was Chapman. The news media said it was Chapman. Hell, even Chapman said it was Chapman. The only ones who would say it might not have been Chapman are “conspiracy theorists,” and the same people who tell us it was Chapman would also say that “conspiracy theorists” are kooks and crazies. Let's get it straight: It was Chapman.

Say it with me:

It was Chapman.

It was Chapman.

It was Chapman.

Now go back to sleep.

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Elvis Is Everywhere

Elvis Presley would have turned 78-years-old this Tuesday, January 8. I can’t forget the King on his birthday even if he isn’t around to celebrate. Here, from 2002, is my tribute to a man who truly changed the world:

“Before Elvis, there was nothing.”

John Lennon's frequently quoted tribute to the King of Rock and Roll is an exaggeration. Before Elvis, there was the girl, name unknown, who won first prize in the talent program at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945. Ten-year-old Elvis Aaron Presley won second place singing 'Old Shep,' a heartbreaker about a boy's love for his doomed dog. Years later, with characteristic modesty, Elvis would remember finishing fifth or even seventh in the contest, but no matter. He won the competition that counts.

Today, you can visit any record store and search the bins in vain for even one recording by the first place winner. But, as a song by Mojo Nixon declares, Elvis is everywhere.

For his performance at the fair, Elvis won five dollars and a free ticket to all the rides. With stardom, the five dollars multiplied into millions, and Elvis still had a ticket to all the rides, including the chemical kind that most reports indicate were in his system on the afternoon of August 16, 1977 when his lifeless body was found at Graceland, his estate in Memphis, Tennessee.

There are those who maintain that drugs were not a factor in his death, that the original autopsy citing an irregular heartbeat was correct. But the conflicting reports about the cause of his death are just another part of the mystique of the man for whom even the word "superstar" always seemed inadequate.

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, and some fans remain convinced he did not die at all, but fabricated his demise to escape the burdens of fame. Silly as these true believers often seem, you can't blame them. In a sense, Elvis is more alive than ever.

Although none of his 33 movies earned Oscar nominations, three of 1994's Best Picture nominees (Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and Quiz Show) refer to him, as have too many movies and TV shows to count. There are songs about him and enough books examining his legend to stock a special Elvis section in a large bookstore or library. Greeting cards bear his likeness, as do collector plates, and virtually any product that has room for his portrait.

He's been officially recognized by the United States Postal Service with a stamp in his honor, and his gaudy estate earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places several decades earlier than the rules allow, simply because its place in history is a foregone conclusion. Even the announcement made at the end of his concerts – “Elvis has left the building” - has taken on a new life. It's an exclamation point now, a way to describe an exciting moment, such as the winning touchdown in a football game.

The Beatles idolized him, as did former U.S. president Bill Clinton. It could be argued that the wavy-haired Clinton might not have been elected to the Oval Office if not for the social revolution that Elvis started in the Fifties. Before Elvis, the 20th century's presidents were old and often bald. “(Elvis) introduced the beat to everything,” said Leonard Bernstein. That included hairstyles. Presley paved the way for Clinton's presidential pompadour.

His unrivaled popularity, even in death, is proof that talent and charisma are more important to stardom than marketing or management. Elvis had the worst manager of them all in the form of Colonel Tom Parker, a con man to whom many give undue credit for Presley’s success. But Parker latched on to Presley only after the star had conquered the South in ways unseen since the Civil War. Parker rode Presley’s coattails to glory while creating hurdles that his client had to overcome. The long string of mindless movies that wasted the star’s talent for almost a decade were Parker’s idea. And if Parker had his way, the 1968 TV special that rescued Elvis from Hollywood’s manipulative and destructive claws would have been a cozy, mild-mannered hour of Christmas carols rather than the dynamic showcase for Elvis’s talents that it became.

Nor did RCA Victor, the record company that bought his contract from Sun Records, provide him with much support. The label treated its biggest star as little more than a steady source of predictable profits. Knowing his records would always sell a minimum number of copies, the company rarely gave his albums and singles the promotional push that would have increased his existing fan base. Until his death, his RCA contract required him to crank out three albums a year at a time when major artists were considered prolific if they released only one in the same time period. With Presley product flooding the market, it’s little wonder that after 1972’s “Burning Love,” his singles consistently failed to crack the top ten and his albums stalled below the half million mark needed for gold certification.

But if his management and record company let him down, his voice never did. Bob Dylan compared the experience of hearing Elvis for the first time to "busting out of jail." No one led more jailbreaks than the sharecropper's son from Tupelo, Mississippi. "It was like he came along and whispered some dream in everybody's ear, " Bruce Springsteen said, "and somehow we all dreamed it." And down at the end of lonely streets all over the world, late at night in rooms illuminated only by the glow of the radio dial, he's still whispering that dream, inspiring more broken-hearted lovers to bust out of jail. The dream may only last a moment, but its memory can live a lifetime and beyond. Twenty-five years after Elvis left the building for a final time, his voice still echoes, and so does the dream it carried.

Originally published at Paris Woman Journal

© 2002 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Previous posts on Elvis:
Remembering Elvis
Elvis Remembered
August 16, 1977

Who was Harry Nilsson?

Harry Nilsson wrote the song, “One,” as in “the loneliest number you could ever do,” which became a top 10 hit for Three Dog Night in 1969. He also wrote “Cuddly Toy” for the Monkees, and “Best Friend,” the theme to TV’s The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. So it’s a bit ironic that his own first hit single, “Everybody’s Talkin’,” and his biggest hit, 1971's “Without You,” were covers written by others. Nilsson, who preferred to be billed by his last name only, had an erratic career. These days, if he’s known at all, it’s as the guy who partied too hard with John Lennon during the latter’s infamous “lost weekend” of 1973-74. He’s also the guy who owned the London flat in which both Mama Cass Elliot and Who drummer Keith Moon breathed their last, respectively, in 1974 and 1978.

There was a time, however, when Nilsson was big. His 1971 album, Nilsson Schmilsson, produced by Richard Perry, sold a million copies and was nominated for Grammys as Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Engineered Recording, etc, and won Nilsson a second Grammy for Male Pop Vocal (the first was for “Everybody’s Talkin’”). Rather than follow that blockbuster with something equally commercial, he chose to litter 1972's Son of Schmilsson with profane lyrics that guaranteed it would receive minimal exposure on the radio. He followed that with an album of standards, then Pussy Cats produced by John Lennon, wherein he sang so forcefully that he damaged his voice. Robert Altman recruited him to write the songs for Popeye, released in 1980, the same year that Lennon’s murder inspired him to campaign for tougher gun control laws. The next time the world heard from Harry Nilsson was in 1994. On January 15 that year, he died of a heart attack at age 52.


Nilsson is the subject of a documentary film, Who Is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him, by John Scheinfeld, who previously made The U.S. VS John Lennon. With his blonde hair and sad eyes, Nilsson looked like a choir boy when he first emerged on the scene in late 1967. Terry Gilliam may have said it best: “He was a fallen angel.” Nilsson started on the path to self-destruction almost as soon as he became successful. The song “1941,” named after the year of his birth, may have offered a clue to his troubles:

“Well, in 1941, a happy father had a son,
and by 1944, the father walked right out the door.”

After moving from New York to L.A., he got a job in a bank’s computer center. He wrote songs on the side that were impressive enough to attract music published Perry Birken, Jr., who signed him up at $25.00 a week. His first album, Pandemonium Shadow Show, was released by a reluctant RCA (which already had poet Rod McKuen on the label and didn’t want another singer-songwriter) in 1967. It didn’t sell, but Derek Taylor of the Beatles’ empire heard it and passed it on to the “Fabs” who raved about it during a 1968 press conference in New York to promote their new Apple Corps. John Lennon said “Nilsson is my favorite group.” His next album, Aerial Ballet, wasn’t a big seller either, but his name was on the tip of the tongues of people who could make things happen. Film director Otto Preminger asked him to write the score for his deranged, LSD-drenched 1968 misfire, Skidoo, and he was one of several songwriters (Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were some of the others) asked to write songs for the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy. “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City” was rejected (as was Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay”) when director John Schlesinger decided to stick with the Nilsson recording from Aerial Ballet that he had been using as a temporary track. “Everybody’s Talkin’,” written by Fred Neil, became the song heard over the credits of the Oscar winning X rated film starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, and Nilsson’s first big hit.

A career in the fickle world of pop music requires a certain consistency and Nilsson’s career was perversely inconsistent. He was a songwriter, but after scoring a hit with someone else’s song, he followed that with an album devoted to Randy Newman compositions. Despite sterling reviews and a citation from Stereo Review proclaiming it the album of the year, it tanked, and Nilsson’s career didn’t get back on track until he hooked up with hit maker Richard Perry who had successfully produced Carly Simon and Barbra Streisand, for 1971's Nilsson Schmilsson, a lavish recording put together with scraps of songs that Nilsson completed only once the sessions were underway at London’s Trident Studios.

He obviously had some pretty good scraps. The infectiously loony “Coconut” became a top 10 hit, and the psychedelic “Jump Into the Fire” would be given a second life when memorably used on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece, Goodfellas. Once again, however, Nilsson the songwriter was overshadowed by Nilsson the singer who sang the hell out of the Badfinger ballad, “Without You,” a dramatic torch song that became a huge number one smash. He and Perry found themselves awash in Grammy nominations and gold records.

“Harry was the most insecure person I’ve ever known, He just didn’t have any self-esteem,” a former wife said in explaining Nilsson’s refusal to perform in concert. Whereas the big “Rock Tour” was a common practice for every artist (except the former Beatles) at the time, Nilsson never hit the road to promote his albums. It didn’t seem to hurt him, but another associate describes him as having a “death wish.” He seriously damaged his career by following Nilsson Schmilsson with Son of Schmilsson, once more under Perry’s guidance, but this time the whimsy of “Coconut” and “The Moonbeam Song” was replaced with the hostility of “I’d Rather Be Dead” and the notorious “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” with its message to a former lover: “F___ you.”

A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, was something else again. An album of standards like “As Time Goes By” and “For Me and My Gal” with Sinatra favorite Gordon Jenkins conducting, it was a beautiful production, but hardly what the world was expecting or wanted in 1973, a year when Led Zeppelin and David Bowie were all the rage, and Elton John released Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Derek Taylor, his mentor from the Beatles empire, produced the disc when Perry refused, warning Nilsson that it wasn’t the right time in his career for such an adventure. The album sales proved Perry right, and it’s little wonder that RCA was preparing to drop Nilsson from its roster of artists. He was spared that fate when John Lennon intervened on his behalf, visiting the record company with Nilsson and hinting that he, and maybe Ringo, might, just might, sign with RCA when their contracts with Capital expired in 1976, but only if they were willing to keep an artist as important as Nilsson on the label.

Nilsson’s life and career rolled downhill rather speedily after that. RCA kept him for a time, but Nilsson was proving successful only at getting his now bearded mug in the papers by joining Lennon (and some say, egging him on) in heckling the Smothers Brothers during the comedy duo’s comeback engagement at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour. According to Lennon’s lover at the time, May Pang, it was Nilsson who instigated trouble but always escaped to let others take the blame. “Harry was a wonderful perpetrator, an agent provocateur,” remembers percussionist Ray Cooper. Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the club, and though it was the former Beatle who got most of the ink in the tabloids, Nilsson’s reputation took a hit from which it might have recovered if he had been producing some other kind of hits, but his well had gone dry.

“In the End, Only Creditors Talked to Nilsson,” was the headline of a Los Angeles Times article about the singer’s troubled final years published in the year of his death. A business manager had made off with his savings, leaving him bankrupt. Years of drinking, drugging, and chain smoking had caught up with him, and he was now suffering from diabetes. Other than some chest pains, he was apparently unaware of the massive heart attack he had in 1993. A second heart attack on January 15, 1994 ended his life at the relatively youthful age of 52. Appearing on an HBO Comic Relief telethon that night, Dustin Hoffman, star of Midnight Cowboy and the original narrator of the animated film, The Point, which Nilsson had created for ABC’s Movie of the Week in 1971, broke the news to the audience and praised him as a “great artist.”

Who Is Harry Nilsson and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him may not rescue Nilsson from the obscurity to which he had been consigned long before his death, but it succeeds in rehabilitating his reputation for those who do remember him, but only vaguely, as the guy who sang that song in Midnight Cowboy and gave free rein to his emotions when belting out “Without You.” He was so much more than the guy in whose bed Mama Cass and Keith Moon died, and tore up the town with John Lennon, which, he told Rolling Stone, “still haunts me. People think I’m an asshole and a mean guy.” As the film proves, he could be an asshole at times (though there’s little to suggest he was mean), but he was also a great artist deserving of more kudos than he has received.

See the trailer HERE.

© 2011 Brian W. Fairbanks

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