Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust

I asked several people at a gathering last night what they remembered about the night that John Lennon was shot. Most were too young to remember or to have cared.
That night in 1980, I was working  at the old Enterprise-Sun news office in Marlborough, finishing up my stories about the Hudson selectmen's meeting. Computer terminals had just been installed a few months earlier. I saw the story come in from the U.P.I. wire service. There was one other reporter in the office that night. We talked for a little bit and then sat quietly until it was time to go home.
As Brian observed, music was being ripped in a lot of different directions at the time. The Beatles, gone for more than a decade, weren't part of anyone's current listening, but they still formed the backdrop for popular music. Punk was ricocheting between angry politics and just louder. We'd come out of the disco crisis scarred and a bit embarrassed that we'd liked Saturday Night Fever.
So, while Lennon's murder was a shocking reminder of violence, it wasn't a demarcation. With the assassinations of the 60s, a line of dreams was broken. We were sad at Lennon's death. We weren't, however, grieving for what he and we might have been.