Tag: Classic Rock

John & Yoko live at the Jerry Lewis Telethon/ September 4, 1972

The Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon was a mainstay of our youth. You’d know every fall exactly when Labor Day came around because that was always the day Jerry Lewis held his annual fundraiser for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Coincidentally this was also held the day before school started up again in the fall.  For 24 hours that telethon dominated our local broadcast, featuring musical acts, celebrities and others all called together for the cause.

Four days after his monumental One on One concert in Madison Square Garden, and a year after George Harrison’s historic Concert for Bangladesh, coincidentally also at the Garden. The couple’s association with Yuppie radicals like Abbie Hoffman & Jerry Rubin brought the FBI to focus an investigation on them and their suspected plans to disrupt the National Republican Convention scheduled for August 21-23, 1972, in Miami Beach FL, the same city where the Democratic Convention was held that year..

Although Hoffman & Rubin were in love with the idea, John & Yoko had no part in any such plans, and the convention went on despite anti-Vietnam War protests on August 22. John & Yoko would face deportation in 1972, based on a past marijuana charge in the UK. While Yoko was granted permanent resident status in 1973. John was ordered to get out. Such was the backdrop to this seminal performance.

The 1972 Muscular Dystrophy Telethon was broadcast from New York City’s Americana Hotel on 7th Avenue. Jerry Lewis began his intro: “Ladies & gentlemen, presenting, and I’m proud to present, two of the most unusual people in all the world, and I don’t mean just in the world of entertainment. They fit no patterns, meet no standards except the standard of excellence. Ladies & gentlemen, John Lennon & Yoko!”

They were joined for the last time by their unofficial backing band, Elephant’s Memory. John sported a faint mustache & beard as he segued into another heartfelt performance of “Imagine”. John couldn’t do a bad version, and here, on keyboard instead of piano it has more of an ethereal tone. He was joined by the saxman on the first bridge, which always brings a bit of soul to any song.

And no, I won’t be excluding Yoko from this. Introducing the second number, she said, “John & I love this country very much and we’re very happy that we’re still here.” This led to “Now or Never” a peace song from her upcoming LP Approximately Infinite Universe. Apparently she was trying it out on a live audience before committing the song to vinyl, just as they’d done with ‘Cold Turkey” in 1969.  There was no screaming this time, instead taking a turn at a folksy style, again highlighted by a saxophone backing.

Next, John praised Jerry as “a great comedian–I wish he never grew up!” He closed with a reggae version of “Give Peace a Chance”, just as they had at the evening show for the One on One concerts. “This is how they do it in Jamaica!” John called, inviting the audience to sing along. This was at a time when most Americans hadn’t had much exposure to reggae. Bob Marley & the Wailers breakthrough in America, Catch a Fire, would not be released until 1973. Johnny Nash’s hit “I Can See Clearly Now” wouldn’t begin to chart until October 1972, the month following this performance.

This would be the last time he performed “Give Peace a Chance”. The sax certainly livened things up, but it didn’t quite hold up to the standard version offered up three years in Toronto. To their credit, the audience seemed charged up throughout the show. While Yoko encouraged viewers to give, John shouted “no more war!” Jerry Lewis joined in with a trumpet to dance with John & Yoko onstage. Even John joins in with the shouts for “money money money!”

Jerry led the audience in a call for an encore: “John, Yoko, John, Yoko!” But as has often been said of Elvis, they had already left the building. Once he realized they weren’t coming back, Jerry covered himself admirably. “I would suspect that John Lennon is probably one of the wisest showmen I’ve ever met,” he said. “He knows what he’s doing. He did two things tonight. He, one, came here to help, the primary purpose of his visit. And two, he meant to say something. I think he did both these things. He has split. Let’s thank him very much.” This was met with the appropriate applause.

Sidebar: Hot Chocolate Covers ‘Give Peace a Chance’

Years before they dropped hits like “You Sexy Thing” and “Every 1′ a Winner”, the Caribbean-British band Hot Chocolate recorded their first single, a reggae version of ‘Give Peace a Chance” where they changed some of the lyrics. One problem, though: then-band leader Errol Brown was told he needed permission.

Brown probably never expected John Lennon to approve, but when Apple Records contacted him, John not only approved but he agreed to release their version on Apple. Recording as the Hot Chocolate Band, their only single on the Apple label was released in October 1969.

The Apple connection fell apart with the Beatles’ breakup, but this interpretation might be where John got the idea to perform reggae versions of “Give Peace a Chance” at both the One on One concerts and the Jerry Lewis telethon.

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/john-lennon/give-peace-a-chance

Two months later in November 1972, Richard Nixon won re-election by a landslide. In April 1973 John appealed his deportation order and with Yoko, declared a new conceptual country, Nutopia with the slogan, “No land, no boundaries, no passports, only people…No laws other than cosmic.” His Lost Weekend was not far off.

In May of 1972 John & Yoko moved from their Bank Street apartment to their lifelong residence at the Dakota. John’s appearance on the Jerry Lewis Telethon would be his last public performance for the next two years, his last with Elephant’s Memory and in fact his last live appearance with Yoko. The Lennon’s Peace campaign had effectively been stymied by the Nixon Administration’s paranoid efforts to get John deported. The legal fight would consume the next couple of years of John & Yoko’s lives.

John Lennon battled the deportation proceedings until October 8, 1975, when the deportation attempt was barred. In what would become the foundation for DACA, a Court of Appeals stated: “the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds.”3 Leon Wildes’ strategy had worked, he successfully demonstrated that just because the government could deport someone did not mean there was an obligation to deport the individual. In 1976, Lennon became a permanent resident.

Immigration Show: John Lennon’s Immigration Case for DREAMers

Jerry Lewis hosted his first MDA telethon on September 4, 1966. He would continue to serve in that capacity from 1968 to 2010, raising 2.45 billion dollars for the MDA. The telethons continued, with other hosts, until 2012. Jerry passed away on August 20, 2017, aged 91 years.

https://madelinex.com/2017/09/04/john-yoko-bring-peace-to-jerry-lewis-labor-day-telethon/

Availability: Officially John Lennon’s performance on the Jerry Lewis Telethon has never been up for release, but that’s never stopped bootleggers. One source is a 1996 item, John Lennon-Telecasts (JL-517-CD), label unknown. This collects his performances on David Frost, Dick Cavett & Mike Douglas in 1972, including the Jerry Lewis program.

The concert can be found on several YouTube channels. We also have more options on DVD, again via bootleg. As far as listing every relevant bootleg, this is in no way to be considered inclusive. The Complete Live Lennon Tapes (misterclaudel 4637577, c. 2006) may be true to its word. Along with Jerry Lewis, it contains performances from the Rock & Roll Circus, the Fillmore East with Frank Zappa, the John Sinclair benefit, David Frost, the Attica State benefit (without Yoko), Mike Douglas, Dick Cavett, Madison Square Garden with Elton John, the Old Grey Whistle, A Salute to Sir Lew Grade, as well as seven tracks from the evening One on One concert.

From HMC’s TMOQ Gazette series comes John Lennon-Holy Grails, Upgrades & Reconstructions Vol. 1 (TMOQ Gazette HMC 042), which among other items, includes news footage from the Bryant Park Peace rally, as well as two versions of the Labor Day Telethon, in color and B&W.

Among the curiosities on The John Lennon Anthology, on CD 2: New York City. While Track 20 is labelled “Jerry Lewis Telethon”, all it offers is Jerry Lewis’ call for an encore & his gracious speech once he realizes they were gone.

The John Sinclair Freedom Rally, December 10, 1971, Ann Arbor, Michigan

D-010 John Sicnlaire Ten for Two

 

Available On: “The Luck of the Irish” and “John Sinclair” were anthologized twice, first on The John Lennon Anthology, CD 1’Ascot’ (1998); and later on John Lennon: Acoustic (2004).

The concert film, Ten For Two: The John Sinclair Benefit, may never see official commercial release. Previous attempts have met with opposition from Yoko Ono’s attorney. At times it has been free to view on YouTube, though one never knows when it might be yanked again.

 

Clips from Ten for Two opened the 2006 documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon, which chronicled the Nixon Administration’s campaign of harassment against the Lennons.

Everything changed with this performance. The show John and Yoko had done several months before with Frank Zappa had been pure spontaneity from inception to stage. The rally in support of activist John Sinclair was provocative to the powers that be, and the powers shoved back. This show put John Lennon firmly on Richard Nixon’s radar and incepted the four-year immigration battle to eject John forcibly from U.S. shores. Consequently it could be said to be the first stone pitched that inevitably led to his hiatus from music and an end to activism on both their parts.

 

Only four months had passed between the John Sinclair Freedom Rally and the Concert for Bangladesh initiated and hosted by fellow Beatle George Harrison. There was a world of difference between these two events. The Bangladesh shows were a warm and welcoming charitable event that set the standard for all rock benefits to come. The Freedom Rally was a political, even radical reaction against injustice.

Given that, it was still one of those events where music could still make a difference, could literally open doors to freedom, before the music industry eviscerated itself in our times.

 

Likewise, some Presidents improve with time, the more you read about them; sometimes their achievements overshadow the man’s myriad personal flaws and sins. Richard Nixon, to be sure, is not one of those men.

 

Beginning in 1968, poet and activist John Sinclair from Flint, Michigan pulled together a rumply band of associates to form the White Panther Party, cofounded with Pun Plamondon and his wife Leni Sinclair. The Party’s basic ideology was anti-racist, anti-capitalist as well as “fighting for a clean planet and the freedom of political prisoners”.

 

Among his associates were a group of young musicians, soon to be known as the MC5. (They released one album under his management, the classic live disc Kick Out the Jams in 1969, before Sinclair had his own problems to deal with). In 1969 Sinclair was arrested after offering two joints to an undercover narc and sentenced to ten years in prison. The severity of the sentence led to many counterculture protests, leading to this rally, which drew 15,000 people to Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

ten for two orig. poster

The rally featured as many speeches as it had musical performances, from firebrands such as Black Panther Bobby Searle, Alan Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis and others.  Among the many performers featured in the film Ten for Two were Ann Arbor’s own locals The Up, Bob Segar doing a raw, classic rendition of “Oh Carol” as well as jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp with trombonist Roswell Rudd (Nov. 17, 1935-Dec. 21, 2017).

 

Phil Ochs (who committed suicide five years later) offered an eerily prescient monologue before performing “Here’s To the State of Richard Nixon”, a song about Nixon’s future that could be held up as a mirror facing the Trump era. The most worrisome aspect of the anti-Nixon feeling at this concert was that Tricky Dick got re-elected by a landslide a year later, despite people knowing what the man was like and the terrible things he’d done In Cambodia and Vietnam.

 

A phone call from Sinclair in prison was intercut in the Ten For Two film with shots of the prison yard and the prison interior. Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen stepped up next to perform “Hot Rod Lincoln”. Then Sinclair’s wife Leni took the stage, bringing on the big guns: Sinclair’s mother, Elsie. “I can tell you young people, you can teach more to your parents than your parents can teach you.”

 

21-year-old Stevie Wonder took center stage to sing “For Once in My Life”. Now it’s scenes such as this that make these films like a time machine. it is so strange to see Stevie Wonder so young, so trim again. “This song goes out to any of the undercover agents who might be out in the audience,” he said by way of introducing the next number, “Somebody’s Watching You”. In closing he sang “Heaven Help Us All.”

JC Ten for two Stevie Wonder

David Peel and the Lower East Side came on with a satirical number, “The Ballad of Bob Dylan”, followed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono at 3 am in the morning. Peel and band stayed on as John’s backing group. This was John and Yoko truly unplugged, all acoustic. None of the songs they would perform that night had been committed to vinyl; all of them were new to the John Sinclair rallygoers. All four would appear six months later on Sometime in New York City, by which time certain songs would no longer be applicable.

 

Both John and Yoko wore black leather jackets and red undershirts, and they began with “Attica State”. “It was conceived on my birthday,” John said. “We adlibbed it, then we finished it off.”

 

The genesis of “Attica State” could be laid at John’s 31st Birthday party on October 9th, only two months prior to this event. After the opening of Yoko’s art exhibition This Is Not Here at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, a party was held at a nearby hotel. Composition of the song began before the party. All the guests joined in for a drunken all-star singalong captured on tape, like most of John and Yoko’s activities. Ringo Starr was a much better singer than anyone else at the party, his voice carrying much clearer–and less drunk, perhaps.

Married singer musicians Yoko Ono and John Lennon (1940 – 1980) perform at the ‘Free John Now’ rally at Crisler Arena , Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 10, 1971. Political activist Jerry Rubin (1938 – 1998) (center, rear) plays bongos with them. The rally was in support of imprisoned White Panther leader John Sinclair. (Photo by David Fenton/Getty Images)

“Attica State” wasn’t much on the bootlegged tape, mostly the ‘Attica State’ tagline repeated over and over, like he was pulling the song out of thin air. There at Ann Arbor, John and Yoko harmonized while John was on acoustic guitar and Yoko accompanied him on a bongo drum tucked under her arm. They went right into “The Luck of the Irish”, which was as good or better than the studio version yet to come.

 

Yoko took over for “Sisters O Sisters”. “I wrote this song day before yesterday for (our) sisters in Ann Arbor, Michigan,” as Yoko put it. For the first time in a live performance we could hear what a gorgeous voice Yoko has–when she’s not shrieking. After that number, John commented, “We came here not only to help John and to spotlight what’s going on, but also to show and to say to all of you, that uh, apathy isn’t it, and that we can do something. OK, so flower power didn’t work, so what? We start again.”

john and yoko at ann-arbor

John went electric for a bluesy slide guitar performance of “John Sinclair”, a lesser anthem in the vein of “Power to the People” that closed the show. This time, the gloves were off. He got the judge’s name wrong, but it’s all in the lyrics. Line by line it was a crucifixion; each line was an accusation. The strings twanged as he laid bare the sins of the State crushing down on one man for a minor infraction, and the crowd ate it up. That night John and Yoko left the stage on top and on message.

Ironically the song became irrelevant before it was officially recorded. Three days after the rally John Sinclair was released from prison, after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the state’s marijuana statutes were unconstitutional.

His case against the government for illegal wiretapping led to a monumental Supreme Court ruling, United States vs U.S. District Court (1972), which prohibited the U.S. government’s use of domestic wiretaps without a warrant.

Eventually Sinclair left the U.S.  and moved to Amsterdam, where he continues to record and write. Since 2005 he’s hosted The John Sinclair Radio Show and other programming on his own radio station, Radio Free Amsterdam. For John Lennon, his troubles were only beginning…

 

–The MC5 and John Sinclair: The Rock & Roll Revolution Began in Detroit at PleaseKillMe.com:

https://pleasekillme.com/detroit-mc5-john-sinclair/#:~:text=John%20Sinclair%2C%20a%20born%20leader%20and%20naturally%20charismatic%2C,of%20both%20the%20White%20and%20Black%20Panther%20parties.

–Why ‘Ten for Two’ is the John Lennon-Yoko Ono MusicDoc You Haven’t Seen at Lifersthemovie.com:

Why “Ten For Two” is the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Music Doc You Haven’t Seen

–John Sinclair-the Beatles Bible:

John Sinclair

–Imdb entry for Ten For Two: the John Sinclair Freedom Rally:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318115/

–The Ann Arbor Chronocle: The Day a Beatle Came to Twon, from 2009:

https://annarborchronicle.com/2009/12/27/the-day-a-beatle-came-to-town/index.html

 

Instant Karma 1970

john top of pops 1

I think I begged my first grade school teacher to take me to the record store to get this single. Funnily enough I was unaware at the time that John had shaved his head. At the beginning of that year he and Yoko was vacationing in Aalborg, Denmark to be with Yoko’s daughter Kyoko, which was where the young girl was living with Yoko’s second husband Tony Cox and his new wife Melinde.

For reasons unknown, possibly to keep up the profile with their peace campaign, John and Yoko cropped their hair the shortest it’d ever be in John’s adult life. On February 4th,  1970, they swapped their shorn locks for a pair of Muhammed Ali’s boxing shorts, which they said they intended to auction off to raise money for peace. That’s the crew cut you’ll see in their Top of the Pops gig.

John was mostly quiescent as far as live appearances go in 1970. That’s okay, he’d make up for it in 1971. He was continuing the peace campaign he and Yoko had begun at the Amsterdam bed-in the year before. He was also undergoing primal scream therapy with Dr. Janovich. This would inevitably led to the quality and intensity of his masterpiece John Lennon Plastic Ono Band.

“Instant Karma” was recorded in a single night, January 27, 1970, in a single nine-hour session. The producer was Phil Spector, and this led to a long-standing working relationship between him and John and George as well. This would also lead to Spector invitation to remix the Let It Be album.

“It was great, ’cause I wrote it in the morning on the piano, like I said many times, and I went to the office and I sang it. I thought, ‘Hell, let’s do it,’ and we booked the studio. And Phil came in, he said, ‘How do you want it?’ I said, ‘You know, 1950 but now.’ And he said ‘Right,’ and boom, I did it in just about three goes. He played it back, and there it was. I said, ‘A bit more bass,’ that’s all. And off we went. See, Phil doesn’t fuss about with fuckin’ stereo or all the bullshit. Just ‘Did it sound alright? Let’s have it.’ It doesn’t matter whether something’s prominent or not prominent. If it sounds good to you as a layman or as a human, take it. Don’t bother whether this is like that or the quality of this. That suits me fine.”

-from Lennon Remembers, Jann S. Wenner

John recruited George Harrison on lead guitar, Billy Preston on electric piano, Alan White driving the thundering drums & Klaus Voorman as bass man. John provided acoustic guitar on the single. The mass chorale and handclaps closing the single was provided by Yoko and the patrons from Hatchetts, a local London nightclub.

On Feb. 11 1970, the Plastic Ono Band taped two versions of “Instant Karma” for an appearance on the BBC program Top of the Pops, for later broadcast on Feb. 12 and 19th, respectively. Technically , this was not a live performance apart from the actual appearance of the band. Actually it wasn’t even the same band.

John sang a new vocal on top of a single-track vocal and instrumentation from the January 27th EMI recording session. The prime difference between the two versions being that in one Yoko would be seen knitting, while in the second she was holding cue cards. John sat in and sang behind piano while Yoko did her things, blindfolded with a sanitary towel, beside it. Neither George nor Preston were present. BBC DJ BP Fallon mimicked sitting in on bass, Mal Evans in a business suit was on tambourine, along with actual bass player Klaus Voorman. The first version with Yoko knitting was broadcast Feb. 11 while the second was transmitted on Feb. 19th, the following week.

john top of pops 2

For the cue card performance John bangs on the piano in a denim jacket with a “People For Peace” band wrapped on arm while go-go dancers frolic in the background. (By the way, the cards say ‘smile’, ‘peace’, ‘love’ ‘hope’ and ‘breathe’. With reverb over the microphone he delivers a very intense vocal, gritting his teeth for the final verses while Klaus and BP mime on bass.

Available on: It’s hard NOT to find this on home video. The ‘cue card’ version appeared on The John Lennon Video Collection VHS from October 1992. The ‘knitting’ performance shows up most on DVD, first on Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon, a 2003 set accompanying the CD of the same name. Apparently for this collection, they changed the original audio track, replacing the live vocal with the clean studio track. This version was also released on Power to the People: the Hits, the CD/DVD Experience Edition from 2010.

john lennon vid coll     lennon legend.jpg2    john power

Beatles Bible Instant Karma link:

Instant Karma!

 

Live Peace in Toronto, Sept. 13, 1969

Toronto poster rock-roll-revival-1969

“We got this phone call on a Friday night that there was a rock ‘n’ roll revival show in Toronto with a 100,000 audience, or whatever it was, and that Chuck was going to be there and Jerry Lee and all the great rockers that were still living, and Bo Diddly, and supposedly the Doors were top of the bill. They were inviting us as king and queen to preside over it, not play–but I didn’t hear that bit. I said, “Just give me time to get a band together,” and we went the next morning.” 

–John Lennon, 1969

Well, almost. Toronto promoter John Brower was the man who made this historic phone call. But while everyone else had convened at Leeds Airport the following morning, John and Yoko were still in bed, and guitarist Eric Clapton apparently was unaware of the plan. He soon received a call from Brower: “Eric, you may not remember me, but I’m the promoter who lost $20,000 on your Blind Faith show last month. Please call John Lennon, and tell him he must do this or I will get on a plane, come to his house, and live with him, because I will be ruined.”

Toronto Clapton live_peace

For this show John had collared a handful of people he knew. Eric Clapton had played the classic guitar line on George Harrison’s song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on The White Album the year before, as well as providing lead guitar for John’s performance nine months earlier at the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. Klaus Voormann he’d known since the Beatles’ days rocking Hamburg at the Kaiserkeller club, as well as designing the album cover for Revolver, for which he won a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts. Klaus became an accomplished cover artist and from 1966 to 1969 was bassist for Manfred Mann.

Toronto Alan White

At seventeen years age, Alan White chose music over technical school and toured with Billy Fury’s Gamblers and Griffin, the band where John Lennon saw him in a club. At first White disbelieved the call he got from John, thinking he was a prankster, but luckily chose to accept the invitation to play. In 1972 he joined Yes as their permanent drummer.

Toronto PlasticOnoBandKlausJohnEricTorontoFlight69

(Clapton, Lennon & Voorman on the plane to Toronto, 1969)

John reluctantly crawled out of bed. Long story short, they arrived backstage around 10 p.m. and waited in their dressing room before they were announced by guest emcee Kim Foley at midnight. I can’t imagine the kick this concert must’ve been for John, and nerve wracking, since he’d be following on from the idols who’d inspired him to play rock and roll. Actually, I can imagine, since John said as much to Jann Wenner in his historic Rolling Stone interview in 1970:

“I just threw up for hours until I went on. I nearly threw up in ‘Cold Turkey’–I had a review in Rolling Stone about the film of it–which I haven’t seen yet, and they’re saying, ‘I was this and that’. And I was throwing up nearly in the number. I could hardly sing any of them, I was full of shit.”

The Doors headlined the one-day event at the Varsity Stadium of Toronto University. The Toronto Rock and Roll Festival included an all-star lineup featuring legends Bo Diddly, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, plus Jr. Walker and the All-Stars. Among the up-and-comers were relative unknowns like Alice Cooper and Chicago Transit Authority, as well as lesser known acts such as Cat Mothers and the All Night Newsboys, Doug Kershaw, Screaming Lord Sutch, Nucleus, Milkwood, Tony Joe White and Whiskey Howl.

It’s not often noted but the other performers were also having a good time. At this point only fifteen years had passed since the birth of rock and roll, and a lot of these guys were relatively young. While this may sound strange to the young people of today, by the standards of the 1960’s rock crowd, they were ancient. The oldest artist was Bo Diddly at age 41, followed by Little Richard at 37; both Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis clocked in at a youthful 34. Chuck Berry was 43 but he could still play and duckwalk. Yeah, at my age I say people that age are still in diapers. What would that say about John Lennon, who was less than one month away from his 29th birthday?

Toronto card Kim Foley introJohn stepped in front of a live audience for the first time in three years and said, “We’re just going to do some numbers we know, you know, because we’ve never played together before.” And thar’s how the Plastic Ono Band was born.

While he might have pulled this band out of his ass, and the total rehearsal time encompassed their flight from London to Toronto, they put on a decent performance. They started off with the classics–“Blue Suede Shoes”, “Money” and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy”. This would be the second and last time John would perform “Yer Blues” live, again with Clapton as lead guitar, and boy does he love that fuzz guitar.

Toronto performance

Then John cut in and said, “This is a song about pain”, before launching into the live debut of “Cold Turkey”. John had not officially recorded the song yet; that would come eight nights later on September 25 at EMI Studios. And thus began a pattern of performing a song live before he’d committed it to vinyl, as he would with his later song “John Sinclair”. It’s not all that unusual; Pink Floyd auditioned future songs from Dark Side of the Moon for months before sitting down to record that classic album. The band managed to hash their way through, though the moaning and shrieking at the end of the upcoming single would be remarkably abbreviated tonight.

Yoko…ah Yoko does her usual performance art wailing. “This is what we really came here for,” John said as he led the audience through a loose rendition of “Give Peace a Chance.”

Toronto lennon

Then it was Yoko’s turn. For the first two tunes she’d laid on stage in a white bag. Well, now the cat was out of the bag. “Don’t Worry Kyoko” was mercifully short at 4:18 minutes, though it might have felt longer. For her second number, “John, John (Let’s Hope for Peace)”, Clapton grooved on a single riff while Yoko inflicted new dimensions of pain for 12:39 minutes. To be fair the keening was at least tolerable while supported by John’s guitar feedback.

“At the end of “John, John”, all the boys placed their guitars against the speakers of their amps and walked to the back of the stage. Because they had already started the feedback process, the sound continued while John, Klaus, Alan and Eric grouped together and lit ciggies. Then I went on and led them off-stage. Finally I walked on again and switched off their amps one by one.”-

-Mal Evans

Toronto grop photo POB2

(Group photo of the Plastic Ono Band, 1969)

Toronto was a turning point for John. It gave him the confidence to step beyond the outsized shadow of the Beatles. On the plane ride over he’d already confided to Allen Klein that he was leaving the group. A week after the festival, John told the group, “I want a divorce.”

 

the Toronto Dreams Project Historical Ephemera blog:

http://torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-toronto-helped-break-up-beatles.html

Beatles Bible entry on the Toronto Festival:

Plastic Ono Band live at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival

Available on: On September 25, on the eve of the release of Abbey Road, the actual final album by the Beatles, John mixed the tapes of the Toronto concert into stereo at EMI Studios. These were taken to Apple by Geoff Emerick. The album cover was gorgeous in its simplicity, a single puffy cloud on a sky-blue backdrop. Live Peace in Toronto 1969, the first record by the Plastic Ono Band, was released on December 12, 1969.

Toronto LivePeaceCover    R-522067-1521967993-3235.jpeg

An early version of “John, John” could be heard at the beginning of “Amsterdam”, which is a collage of musical interludes and dialogue taken from their first bed-in earlier in 1969. That track takes up the entire second side of John & Yoko’s Wedding Album, released October 20, 1969.

Famed filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker was on hand to record most of the concert, released in 1971 as Sweet Toronto. Then at one early screening Janis Joplin called out during a song by Chuck Berry, “Keep On Rockin’!”, which became the title of the 1973 version without the John & Yoko sequences. The full film would not be seen again until its re-release in 1988 for television and home video as John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band Live in Toronto ’69 by Shout Factory.

 

Mikes’ latest book, FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS, is available at amazon.com.

f & d cover

Mike’s Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA

https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Michael-Robbins/e/B00CMHSMYA

Elton John a perspective

elton-john-eyewear-bb13-beat-2019-billboard-1548

“Rocket Man ” was the first Elton John song that I fell in love with. It wasn’t even mine, my brother Kenny bought it, god rest his soul. The first single I bought on my own was “Daniel”, which I traded away. I guess I was disappointed at the time because it wasn’t a rocket like lot of his stuff was. Today I can say, “you IDIOT, why would you give that record away? It was a great song!” Maybe I share Elton’s lack of judgement; in his recent book Me, he admits that he thought “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me ” was a terrible song: funny how things will look so different in retrospect.

elton-john-rocket-man-1972-15    elton john daniel

He was fortunate to have ‘come out ‘ in 1967, the very year that the UK struck down its law making homosexuality illegal. Or we should say he was Found out by his boss Long John Baldry: “Oh come on, don’t you know you’re gay?”(or words to that effect).

It never bothered me that Elton was bi or gay or whatever. I just loved the music, his preferences were his own business. Gay wasn’t a thing people talked about when I was growing up, at least not around me, so I didn’t have a chance to be indoctrinated by anybody’s paranoid ravings. It’s just funny now. For instance I always liked Queen from the beginning and I never got the gay reference in their very name. Didn’t know, didn’t care. Those fellas could still rock.

Elton’s early records came out on the Uni label, a division of MCA Records, which is how his early singles like “Rocket Man ” looked like that in America but by the time “Daniel ” came along everything was on that black MCA label.

Oddly enough the songs I listened to first weren’t actually sung by Elton. “Lady Samantha” was a song I loved and picked up on my dad’s Three Dog Night record from 1969, ‘Suitable For Framing “. I remember we were at his cabin in Lake Land Village,  a development over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge near Allyn, Washington. Three Dog Night was also the first band I heard doing “Your Song ” on an album I got for Christmas of 1971, “Golden Biscuits “. Elton’s version was already a year old by then.

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Of course he was also notable for announcing that he was retiring, and then coming right out of retirement a few months later. For some reason retirement just didn’t seem to take with Elton. The first time he said that was 1976 or ’77: didn’t last long.  He’d be in a slump for a while but that was okay: he’d give himself a jumpstart like his live Melbourne shows in ’86 or ‘The Lion King ‘ soundtrack.

Maybe I also liked Elton because he wore glasses.  So did John Denver but see the thing was, in the 1970s glasses were not sexy. I always wore glasses and I was never good at sports at any level of schooling. If you wore glasses, you were a four eyes: if you couldn’t play ball, you  were a faggot–sorry, their words.

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Elton wore ’em, so did John Lennon. Not only that but Elton made them a fashion statement.  He had a gift for flamboyance unmatched in the rock world,  which is saying something considering it was par for the course with acts like David Bowie and KISS on the loose. I always appreciated Elton’s music and his example, and I thought I’d say so now.

The foregoing was inspired by Elton John ‘s 2019 biography Me, published by Henry Holt and Company.

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