On the evening of December 7, 1980, Paul McCartney attempted to reach John Lennon by telephone. The details of this call — whether it connected, what was said, whether McCartney reached Lennon directly or left a message with someone at the Dakota building — have been reported with slight variations across different accounts and McCartney himself has spoken about it with the specific imprecision of someone returning to something too painful to examine with full clarity.
What is consistent across every account is this: the call did not result in a real conversation between the two men. And John Lennon was shot and killed outside the Dakota the following evening, December 8, 1980.
The relationship between McCartney and Lennon in 1980 was in a better place than it had been for most of the preceding decade. The years following the Beatles’ breakup had been characterized by a bitterness on Lennon’s side — expressed in the Rolling Stone interview of 1970, in the contemptuous lyric of How Do You Sleep? written directly at McCartney, in various public statements — that McCartney had received with the public dignity of a man who has been hurt and has decided that retaliation is beneath him. Privately, by all accounts, he was genuinely wounded. The partnership that had defined both their lives had ended in acrimony and the person he had been closest to for two decades had turned his sharpest gifts against him.
By 1980 that period had softened. Lennon had spent five years in the Dakota raising Sean, had found something resembling peace, had made Double Fantasy — an album whose warmth and domesticity felt like the work of a man who had come through something and arrived somewhere livable. McCartney has said that the late 1970s correspondence between them — notes, occasional calls — had regained some of the ease of the early years. That the relationship was healing toward something, though neither of them had named what that something was.
The missed call sits in the space of what was unfinished. McCartney has spoken about it — carefully, with the restraint of grief that has no resolution — as one of the things he carries. The conversations they did not have. The things that remained unsaid on both sides because each man assumed, reasonably and fatally, that there would be time to say them.
He heard the news the next morning. He made an unguarded comment to a reporter outside his home — “it’s a drag, isn’t it” — that was reported widely and interpreted as callous, which was the opposite of what he was experiencing. It was shock. The words that come out of shock are rarely the words that represent what is happening inside.
McCartney has played Lennon’s songs at concerts for forty years. He has spoken about Lennon at awards ceremonies, in interviews, in the documentary The Beatles: Get Back, with a grief that has not diminished and a love that has not required resolution to remain real. He has said that Lennon was the person who understood him most completely and that the loss of him has never become the past tense.
The phone call the night before. The conversation that didn’t happen. The things that were going to be said. Music has many silences. That one is the loudest.