When It's John Lennon, It Is Personal

Bill King reported to work at The Atlanta Constitution in 1974, when the music scene in the state of Georgia and its capitol city was in full bloom. The Allman Brothers Band was still together; its Macon-based label, Capricorn, was developing promising new acts. The Atlanta Rhythm Section was starting to gain national attention, and there were three great rock clubs, each within a few miles of the other in the Midtown and Buckhead vicinities, featuring eclectic acts beyond the rock genre. It was a great time and place for a young reporter to start a career at what was then called “The South’s Standard Newspaper.”

Within a few years, King became the town’s most widely-read music writer. His “Quick Cuts from the Rock Scene” column in each Saturday’s Weekend Leisure Guide of the combined Saturday Atlanta Journal-Constitution was a must-read for music fans and industry people alike. It was a hot column and those of us in the record business would talk about what was in the previous week’s column and how we might get in the next one.

Over time, King made his fondness and critical appreciation for The Beatles, together and apart, clearly known to his readers. In the meantime, he and his wife, Leslie, also a journalist, had given thought to starting their own publication. In October ‘78, it came to them: a magazine about The Beatles — Beatlefan, a periodical for serious-minded fans of The Beatles, one not dealing in nostalgia, but deeply delving into the continuing impact The Beatles have in the world of music. With four such talented men as the centerpiece of the magazine’s coverage, there would be news of The Beatles for as long as the Kings kept rolling the presses.

The first edition of Beatlefan rolled off the presses in December ‘78 and has stayed in publication since. Issue #265 landed in my mailbox three weeks ago. From the beginning, the powers-that-be at The Atlanta Constitution were supportive of King’s sideline publication. After all, the paper’s pop music critic making connections in the world of The Beatles was good for his beat, and therefore good for the paper.

A very symbiotic situation indeed: Beatlefan was an early success and each issue of the Weekend Leisure Guide was filled with pages of ads for the local record stores. The locals of the record industry knew they found the ideal forum to promote their wares.

Then came December 8, 1980. John Lennon murdered. Shot down by a man who had just received Lennon’s autograph several hours earlier. The Atlanta Constitution decided to run a special pull-out section on Lennon for publication two days later. Contributing to the section, of course, would be Bill King, who discovered that it wouldn’t be as …. Well, we’ll let Bill take it from here:

When the news of Lennon's shooting first hit, I was at our Beatlefan office (Leslie was the one who told me about it, as she'd just heard it on the radio when she was driving home from a typesetting session on our magazine). I immediately called in to the paper and offered to provide background on Lennon for the wire story they were running in the later editions of the next morning's paper. The wire editor gratefully accepted. Then I headed downtown, where I spent the night alone in the newsroom, cruising the wires and gathering material. I went home for breakfast and to watch the morning shows. Leslie and I sent mailgrams (remember those?) to various Beatlefan contributors, asking them to send us whatever they could, as we were ripping up our second anniversary issue (which was almost complete) and making it a Lennon special. 

Then I headed back to the office, having had no sleep. We had an editorial meeting that morning to plan the special Lennon section and they asked me to write the lead piece. I told them it would have to be a very personal piece about losing a friend I'd never met, and the Features editor said, "Of course." 

And that's what I wrote. Then, just as I was about to head home that evening, one of the assistant managing editors (known for his capricious behavior) came up to me and told me I needed to rewrite it into a straight news obituary. "If you wanted that," I said, "you could have pulled one from the wires. I told the folks doing the section what I was planning on writing, and they approved." He said that didn't matter, that he was in charge, and he wanted me to rewrite it. By this point, our voices had become quite loud and most everyone in the newsroom had stopped what they were doing and was watching. I told him he was abusing his position and I refused to rewrite the piece. And then I walked out. Jaws dropped.

I went home. A couple of hours later, one of the line editors called me and apologized for what had gone down, and said he had been tasked with taking all the personal stuff out of my piece. He wanted to know if I'd like to help smooth it out. I told him I appreciated the offer, but no. I was not going to have anything further to do with that piece. He said he understood. I told him I would prefer if my byline was removed from the edited article and he apologized again and said he could not do that. 

The next morning, when I went to work, I fully expected to be fired. Instead, one person after another came up to me, shook my hand, patted me on the back and congratulated me on standing up to the Assistant Managing Editor. And I never heard a word from him or anyone else in authority about our newsroom showdown.

Anyway, the piece as I originally wrote it ran in Beatlefan instead.

And, as Paul Harvey used to say, that's the rest of the story.

Bill King’s astute, but truncated piece on Lennon ran on the front page of the Constitution’s special section on December 10, 1980. Like most of us in the local record business, all of us at Peaches Records and Tapes were impressed with Bill’s story, his review of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy, as well as the stories by other young writers, such as Eleanor Ringel, Howard Pousner, and Steve Dougherty, who like King, were providing thoughtful coverage of rock music long missing from “The South’s Standard Newspaper.” Ringel, always good with quick summations, wrote an excellent piece on films featuring The Beatles as well as the black comedy, How I Won the War, the ‘66 film directed by Richard Lester and starring John Lennon. She called Lennon’s assassination “the dying of the Age of Aquarius.”

Still, the assistant managing editor (AME) would have served his paper and its readers a lot better if he had let King run the piece as agreed upon earlier. What did the AME have to fear over King observing that he was personally impacted over Lennon’s death? What was so improper over the following words running early in King’s appreciation of Lennon?

“Some people don’t quite comprehend just what that means to those of us who grew up with The Beatles and who are hurting so badly right now. They don’t understand the bond between performers and audience that developed over the nearly 17 years since Lennon and cohorts Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr left the obscurity of Liverpool for the international limelight.”

And what bothered the AME about this?

“He also showed us that we do not have to become slaves to the expectations others have of us. While still at the top, he walked away from it all to spend time raising the son who shared his birthday. It won’t be easy for little Sean to grow up now that Daddy’s gone, but the foundation built by those five years of intense closeness with his father will no doubt help see him through.”

The attitude conveyed by the AME reminded me of a comment by a local concert promoter, the late great Alex Cooley, made in the mid ‘70s, blaming the local newspapers for the slower-than-expected growth of the Atlanta concert scene. Cooley was as decent as he was smart; he wouldn’t criticize an individual or business without good reason.

Maybe the AME thought it was enough to give the “kids” a section since one of their heroes died. Perhaps he feared that soon he’d have to deal with some young reporter tossing prose like a southern-fried Hunter S. Thompson. It was 1980 and major newspapers still didn’t know what to do about the boomers.

Bill King survived numerous AMEs in his 43 career with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Though retired, he still provides the newspaper with informative feature stories on a free-lance basis. Eventually the AJC became more adept at covering rock music, just as it did Hip Hop. Alex Cooley’s Concerts Southern Promotions was impressed enough with the scope of music coverage that they became a top advertiser in the arts and entertainment pages. A lot has changed, but the murder of John Lennon remains tragically current in our minds. For those baby boomers the older editors disregarded more than 40 years ago, the gloom will never lift.

Author’s Full Disclosure: I have been a contributing editor to Beatlefan magazine since 2014. Bill King and I have been friends since 1978 when he interviewed me one afternoon at Peaches Records and Tapes. I talked with him often during the 27 years I worked in advertising at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I had managers too. Someday I might write about them.