John Lennon Death: What Did Paul McCartney Say When John Lennon Died?

McCartney explained that after learning of Lennon’s death, he returned home to be with his family.

He said: “We just went home. We just looked at all the news on the telly, and we sat there with all the kids, just crying all evening.”

“I couldn’t handle it. Really”, he said.

John Lennon was killed on December 8, 1980. The singer and guitarist from The Beatles was murdered outside his home, The Dakota, in New York City by a deranged fan.

The 40-year-old left behind two children and his wife, Yoko Ono.

But the man who had been his friend since he was a teenager, Paul McCartney, was equally as bereft.

McCartney recalled:

“What happened was we heard the news [of Lennon’s death] that morning and, strangely enough, all of us… the three Beatles, friends of John’s… all of us reacted in the same way. Separately.

“Everyone just went to work that day. All of us. Nobody could stay home with that news. We all had to go to work and be with people we knew. Couldn’t bear it. We just had to keep going. So I went in and did a day’s work in a kind of shock.

“And as I was coming out of the studio later, there was a reporter, and as we were driving away, he just stuck the microphone in the window and shouted: ‘What do you think about John’s death?’ I had just finished a whole day in shock and I said: ‘It’s a drag.’

“I meant drag in the heaviest sense of the word, you know: ‘It’s a DRAG.’ But, you know, when you look at that in print, it says: ‘Yes, it’s a drag.’ Matter of fact.”