Final portrait of John and Yoko is on the cover of Rolling Stone
After the shocking assassination of John Lennon thousands of mourners gathered spontaneously outside his and Yoko Onos Central Park West apartment building the Dakota.Tens of thousands more gathered six days later in New York Liverpool and other world cities to honor Yokos request for a silent 10-minute vigil in Johns memory.Radio airwaves were saturated with Beatles songs during the weeks that followed as well as with Johns most recent recordings one of which(Just Like) Starting Overbecame a posthumous 1 hit in late December.
By late January the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and the release of the American hostages in Iran had pushed accounts of Lennons death and the massive public response to it from newspaper headlines.Then on January 22 1981 Rolling Stone magazines John Lennon tribute issue hit newsstands featuring a cover photograph of a naked John Lennon curled up in a fetal embrace of a fully clothed Yoko Ono.The iconic Annie Liebowitz portrait would become the definitive image of perhaps the most photographed married couple in music history.The now-famous photograph of John and Yoko is all the more poignant for having been taken on the morning of December 8 1980 just twelve hours before Lennons death.
Sent by Rolling Stone to capture an image of Lennon alone for a planned upcoming cover Liebowitz had to negotiate the issue with John.Liebowitz recalled years later that Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner never told me what to do but this time he did.He told me Please get me some pictures without [Yoko].
Then I walk in and the first thing [Lennon] says to me is I want to be with her.An angry Liebowitz reluctantly agreed to Johns request and the image she captured proved to be one of her most famousone that Lennon told her on the spot had captured [his] relationship with Yoko perfectly.While the famous Rolling Stone image is sometimes called the final photograph of Lennon it is in fact only the final portrait of him and Yoko together.The final photo of John was taken a few hours after Liebowitzs by a fan waiting outside the Dakota.
That photo captured John immediately after signing an autograph for Mark David Chapman the man who would shoot him dead some six hour later.
