It was 30 years ago today

Yet, it feels like yesterday, that John Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman on Dec. 8, 1980.

Our tribute footage flashes back to 1966, when the Beatles arrived in Toronto for the only Canadian stop on their final tour as a band. At the airport, in front of the hotel and later, at Maple Leaf Gardens, it was Beatlemania. 33,000 fans came together for two shows that day. Girls braved barbed-wire, sobbed, fainted and screamed themselves hoarse, prompting at least one police officer to use his bullets as ear plugs!

John Lennon returned to Canada in May, 1969, with new wife, Yoko Ono, and her five-year-old daughter, Kyoko. Two months earlier, the couple had staged a successful honeymoon “bed-in” for peace, in Amsterdam. They repeated their protest at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where they invited then-Prime-Minister Pierre Trudeau to join them in bed. At the end of that week, John, Yoko and a motley crew of supporters gathered in the suite to record Give Peace a Chance .

"My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all."

— John Lennon