I don't like to be one of those ghouls who loves parsing every inch of John Lennon's assassination, but one of the stranger things I feel people haven't made a bigger deal out of is the fact that if Mark David Chapman hadn't gotten a chance to murder him, his plan was to take a pop at David Bowie the next night....
which would have had him sitting in the same row as John Lennon:On December 9th, 1980, David Bowie stepped out onto the stage at New York’s Booth Theatre to perform The Elephant Man. There were three empty seats in the front row.
The empty seats belonged to Lennon, Yoko Ono and the murderer Mark David Chapman. “I was second on his list,” Bowie later said. “Chapman had a front-row ticket to The Elephant Man the next night. John and Yoko were supposed to sit front-row for that show too. So the night after John was killed there were three empty seats in the front row.”
It is a harrowing vignette of the tragedy that befell the world less than 24 hours before Bowie emerged onto the stage in an attempt to entertain the shell-shocked people of New York once more. For ‘The Starman’, things were even more visceral that night, given his connection to the deceased and the fact that fate could’ve decreed that he was actually on the receiving end of Chapman’s wrath in place of his friend.
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