Sholin Featured Tonight On Lennon Special
• On December 8, 1980 the world stood still as we learned about the shocking death of John Lennon. Now, 40 years after that infamous day — and a week after what would have been John’s 80th birthday, the season premiere of ABC’s 20/20 tells the story of Lennon’s life, his final days, and lasting legacy through the eyes of close friends and colleagues and rarely seen footage from the ABC News archives. The program includes new interviews with legendary rock photographer Bob Gruen, who took the iconic photo of Lennon in his “New York City” t-shirt; Jack Douglas, the producer of Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album, and the couple’s close friend and publicist, Elliot Mintz.
More importantly to those of us who know… the two-hour program will also highlight the last interview Lennon did the very day he died and feature interviews with radio reporters who conducted it — our friend, and “Your Duke,” Dave Sholin and Laurie Kaye, who were working at KFRC/San Francisco at the time. Kaye wrote the script for the three-hour radio special that Sholin narrated, and aired worldwide the weekend following Lennon’s death. Sholin tells RAMP that the interview with Lennon was set up a few months earlier when he was National MD for RKO Radio and David Geffen asked him to do it.
As Sholin relates, “We went to the Dakota and spent about three and half hours interviewing John and Yoko in their apartment. We then drove them to the Record Plant and raced to JFK to catch a flight back to SFO. I was with Ron Hummel, one of the finest production gurus ever, who produced and engineered the special. We landed in San Francisco and I was driving home, listening to Broadway Bill Lee play a Beatles song and then he made the announcement about John’s death… to this day I’m as stunned as I was when I first heard it.”
After that, life became a blur, said Sholin, who remained awake for the next 36 hours, doing interviews with Good Morning America and a bunch of other news outlets, while getting the radio special ready. “I stayed in a hotel near the radio station and didn’t go home until the following Saturday,” he said. Season 43 of ABC’s 20/20 premieres tonight from 9-11pm on ABC.
