The DU Lounge

Last edited Wed Dec 8, 2021, 09:04 PM - Edit history (4)

Monday evening. Phone rang. It was the assignment desk in Burbank. A lovable, rumpled old news warrior on the night shift.
“Uh, calimary, it’s Sherman Bazell in Burbank. New York just called. One of the Lennon Brothers just got shot.”

So I’m stopped in my tracks. Trying to “translate” what that meant. Stood there like an idiot, gaping at the phone. “‘Lennon Brothers’ … WTF … Lennon … JOHN Lennon? Nah, couldn't be... could it? Uh, better call New York!”

And I did. And as the song goes, “I got the news today, oh boy.” Threw my clothes on and grabbed my car keys to hightail it back to the Burbank bureau. And from there, worked for hours trying to get some celebrity react/any celebrity react. I was the Hollywood reporter there, after all. Best I could do was Art Garfunkel, who was annoyed about being bothered at home.

Our young-adult news network that NBC had just launched had snapped to attention, and cranked on that story solidly all week.

I was so focused on my end of the coverage that the magnitude of the loss of John Lennon didn’t hit me til Friday of that week, when we’d (please pardon me) beaten the story to death by then. It was all-business, high-pressure, around the clock, covering the biggest story in our rock ‘n’ roll world. Second-day leads, third-day leads, fourth-day leads, and now a fifth day, and we were scraping bottom by then, desperately searching for fresh angles to cover, to keep the story alive and our still-hungry affiliates well fed.

My supervisor in NYC told me about a woman who he’d heard had written a song about John Lennon. They fed me the tape of her song, called her, did the interview, and I put a story together for my newscasts. “A Song for John.” Her voice was so beautiful, and it was such a sweet, poignant song, accompanied so gently on her piano, that for the first time all week, I cried. Hard.

When I cry, I more than mess myself up. Whole face and nose and breathing passages get clogged, swollen, and red. Talking is almost impossible because when I get into that state, I’m nothing but a walking wall of mucus. And I had to go on the air with this, across a network of dozens of FM rock stations from coast-to-coast, who spurned our network because they were playing the hits and not emphasizing news - until John Lennon got shot. At that point, they couldn’t get enough of us.

So I stumbled into the booth, my script in my hand, and my whole head and lungs full of snot and my eyes blurry from crying. How the hell could I go on mic for two full minutes with any coherence at all? I could barely even breathe! I was SOOOOOOOOO screwed…

Until the countdown to air, and then I was live. And DAYUM if I didn’t pull it off! Clear and strong as ever, not an inkling of the munged-up mess I was, and I got to the “kicker” - which was the last story in the newscast - that girl and her plaintive song. I kept thinking - “I am gonna die.”

And I didn’t. I was, shockingly, not only coherent but crystal clear and, well, actually magnificent. I do not know how. I don’t know where it came from or how it happened. I got all the way through it including a soft, gentle closing line “…she said she sat down at the piano, and it - just - came out.” And the sign-off. Mic off. Satellite link closed. And BANG, I collapsed back down on the desk and resumed crying my eyes out. Couldn’t help it. IT just came out. My engineer hurried around the control board into the on-air booth and hugged me hard. He said he heard in his earpiece that the gang in the control room in New York had broken into applause.

To this day I still don’t know how that happened, or how I got through that newscast, much less an entire day’s news shift (for five hourly two-minute news updates). But I did.