Tag: Yoko Ono

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.

John plays “Jealous Guy” to a lost Japanese couple

There are a couple of eyewitness versions to this story, a little-known incident that took place in Japan during John Lennon’s years as a homebody. Clearly neither he nor Yoko were entirely housebound in those five years. They were out and about, just not making records at that point. I’ll try to present the version I like best. In all the nine years since he first conceived this song in Rishikesh, India, John had never played it live. And the one time he did, it was to an unwitting audience.

After winning his appeal to stay in the United States, John & Yoko visited Japan at least three times before his passing, beginning with a 1977 trip that lasted from May to October of that year. Yoko’s parents were upper class people who had a summer home in Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture. During a stay at Tokyo’s Okura Hotel in 1977, while Yoko was visiting her family, John and his friend Elliot Mintz were lounging around in the presidential suite when an elderly couple evidently took the elevator to the wrong floor.

This couple has never been identified as anything other than an ‘elderly couple’. I’d love to know who they were, although at this point, only their relatives would know for sure.   They wandered in and sat down, apparently thinking they were in a lounge bar. John found this entertaining and as Mintz related, he began to play “Jealous Guy” on his acoustic guitar.

The couple sat and listened for a few minutes before walking back to the elevator and going, which left John and Mintz in fits of laughter. “It was the only time I think he ever performed for a party of two,” Mintz wrote. “They did not leave a tip.”

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g00979/

Karuizawa, Japan: In the Footsteps of John Lennon

John & Yoko in Japan, c. 1971
John Lennon in an electronica shop, c. 1979

A History of David Frost and John Lennon, 1967-1972

-The Frost Programme, Sept. 29 & Oct. 4, 1967

–Frost on Saturday, Aug. 24, 1968, repeated on The Best of Frost, May 18, 1969

–The David Frost Show, June 10, 1969/ July 10, 1969 & Dec. 16, 1971/ Jan. 13, 1972

As a talk show host David Frost was not a flamboyant fellow, but he was intuitive and could tease your dirty secrets out without making you uncomfortable. That’s probably what made his interviews with Richard Nixon so effective. While his name is intimately associated with the Beatles, as a band they put in an appearance on only one occasion. That would be for the world premiere of the extraordinary promotional clip for “Hey Jude” on Frost on Sunday on September 8, 1968. In order to maintain the illusion of a live appearance, Frost taped some clips at Twickenham Film Studios where he seemingly introduces the band.

By this time Paul McCartney had already made three appearances on one iteration or more of the Frost Show, the first as far back as April 1964, while they were neck deep in the filming of their first film, A Hard Day’s Night. Ringo showed up twice in 1969 & 1970; George Harrison appeared once in 1971 alongside Ravi Shankar, while he & John had expounded on Transcendental Meditation on two episodes back in 1967.

GEORGE: Your actions – whatever they are – are your actions. It’s all about your attitude toward other people. If you treat them good, they’ll do the same; if you hit them in the face, they’ll probably do the same thing. And that’s not much to do with religion. Action and reaction, that’s the thing Christ was saying. Whatever you do, you get it back.

JOHN: It’s the same in the whole universe, in all religions. It’s just opening your mind to see that. Buddha was groovy, you know. And Jesus was all right. It’s exactly the same thing.

https://www.beatlesbible.com/1967/09/29/television-the-frost-programme/

https://tmhome.com/experiences/interview-lennon-and-harrison-on-meditation/

John & Yoko made their first appearance as a couple one month after the premiere of “Hey Jude”, on the fourth edition of the latest iteration, Frost on Saturday on August 24, 1968, recorded live from Wembley Studios on London Weekend Television. while he was still a Beatle. The other guests included singer Blossom Dearie and satirist Stan Freberg. This interview took place two days after Ringo had left the group, during the sessions for The White Album; in fact it was also the day after the group had carried on and recorded all of “Back in the USSR”, without Ringo.

On this occasion the couple arrived in black clothes with small white badges on their lapels. They discussed their art project “You Are Here’, basically an unfinished art piece that invited people to participate.

Yoko Ono: “Usually people think in vicarious terms, they think ‘Somebody’s there,’ ‘John Lennon’s there,’ or somebody. But it’s not that. YOU are the one who’s here, and so in art, usually art gives something that’s an object and says ‘This is art,’ you know, but instead of that, art exists in people. It’s people’s art, and so we don’t believe in just making something and completing it and giving it to people, we like people to participate. All the pieces are unfinished and they have to be finished by people.”

Further on John elaborated, “The thing is, there’s no such thing as sculpture or art or anything, it’s just a bit of – it’s just words, you know, and actually saying everything is art. We’re all art, art is just a tag, like a journalist’s tag, but artists believe it. But sculpture is anything you care to name. This is sculpture: us sitting here, this is a happening, we are here, this is art, but yeah, if you gave that to a child, he wouldn’t have any preconceived ideas, so you wouldn’t have to say ‘This is sculpture’ or ‘This is a broken cup’, you’d say ‘There’s that – there’s glue, what do you do? You stick it together’.”

 Other examples were Hammer a Nail In. Frost didn’t always get it when they talked about ‘vibrations’ or art in general, which was probably where most proper people were at in 1968. As someone with an odd imagination I found John’s comments on art insightful, and his sense of humor was as joyful to experience as ever. He was intuitive enough to connect his piece to the first time John met Yoko at the Indica Gallery in 1966, this may be the first time John told the story of how he met Yoko to an audience and how they connected over art.

Frost: I know this is a terrible condemnation of you, but I just felt like a man hammering in a nail.

Lennon: Winner! I felt like one hammering it in on TV.

 Frost: Well in fact, because this is interesting, the thing with the nails for instance, it was banging the nail in – that the two of you found that you agreed on art and so on.

They also had a long discussion of their film “Smile”, wherein John just stares into the camera. When three minutes get stretched into one hour, one can see how much the facial expression changes.

Ono: Well, we’re not trying to explain, John. We’re just trying to communicate. And communication itself is art and art is communication. And so that, erm, people are getting so intelligent that you don’t have to explain too much, all you have to do is just touch each other, just shake hands, and so this is a way of touching each other.


 Interestingly, as the credits roll “Hey Jude” is playing. John joins into the coda and encourages the audience to join in as the episode ends. The interview was so intriguing it was repeated on a highlights series, The Best of Frost, which was transmitted in some regions by LWT on late night Sunday, May 18, 1969.

Link: Beatles Bible,

https://www.beatlesbible.com/1968/08/24/television-john-lennon-yoko-ono-frost-on-saturday/

https://dangerousminds.net/comments/john_yoko_discussing_art_on_david_frosts_show_1968

By this time Frost had become a host of some repute. In 1969 he launched a weekly TV series in the United States, The David Frost Show, produced for the Westinghouse group for syndication. This involved Frost flying back and forth across the Atlantic every week holding down this series as well as his LWT series in England. On June 14 John & Yoko filmed a pre-taped sequence for the July 10, 1969 segment at Stonebridge Park Studios, where the previous December they’d participated in the Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus. Other guests included actors John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara & Julie London.

Lennon: What’s Bagism? It’s like a tag for what we all do, we’re all in a bag, you know, and we realized that we came from two bags – I was in this pop bag going round and round in my little clique and she was in her little avant-garde clique going round and round and you’re in your little tele clique and they’re in their…you know? And we all sort of come out and look at each other every now and then, but we don’t communicate. We all intellectualize about how there is no barrier between art, music, poetry… but we’re still all – ‘I’m a rock and roller’, ‘He’s a poet’. So we just came up with the word so you would ask us what bagism is – And we’d say we’re all in a bag, baby!

John’s first act was to throw acorns into the audience, calling them “acorns for peace”. John came in full Gandalf mustache & beard, and a blindingly white suit; Yoko was still in black. They came to discuss their peace campaign and bagism. John also held up a copy of Unfinished Music 2: Life With the Lions, playing snippets from ‘Cambridge 1968″ & “No Bed for Beatle John”. Yoko gave Frost a ‘box of smiles’; when he opened it he found a mirror inside that reflected back his own smile. Two Virgins was also discussed; Frost joked that the price tag had been placed in a ‘strategic place’.

Lennon: We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks, you know, the only way to get people aware that peace is possible and – It isn’t just inevitable to have violence, not just war, all forms of violence. People just accept it and think ‘Oh, they did it’, or ‘Harold Wilson did it’ or ‘Nixon did it’, they’re always scapegoating people. It isn’t Nixon’s fault, we’re all responsible for everything that goes on, you know, we’re all responsible for Biafra and Hitler and everything. So we’re just saying ‘SELL PEACE’. Anybody interested in peace – just stick it in the window, it’s simple but it lets somebody else know that you want peace too, because you feel alone if you’re the only one thinking ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was peace and nobody was getting killed’. So advertise yourself that you’re for peace if you believe in it.

Links: https://www.beatlesbible.com/1969/06/14/television-john-lennon-yoko-ono-david-frost-show/

http://www.beatlelinks.net/forums/showthread.php?p=372840

John’s fifth & final appearance on a David Frost program was taped December 16, 1971 for later syndication, about a week after the Ann Arbor benefit for John Sinclair, & a day before his appearance at eh Apollo Theater. John is still in his black leather jacket. After Frost introduced John & Yoko he said we are in for a musical treat. They were joined onstage by David Peel & the Lower East Side for a rendering of Peel’s “The Ballad of New York City”, a simply folksy tune with John on a tea chest bass.

David Peel had served two years in the U.S. Army, around 1960. He was stationed in Alaska, which is kind of funny, because that was where my Dad served as a radio operator in the late 1950’s. John Lennon befriended Peel in 1971 when his band was performing in New York’s Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Peel had joined John & Yoko at the Ann Arbor benefit on December 10, 1971, and less than a week later, joined the pair again on this segment of The David Frost Show.

Both songs that Peel performed on this show would appear four months later on his third album, The Pope Smokes Dope (released April 17, 1972 on Apple Records). John produced the album as well as provided background vocals with Yoko Ono. The album managed to offend almost everybody, subsequently being banned in most of the world expect the United States, Canada & Japan.

This would be John’s first live appearance on U.S. TV as a solo artist. Joined by Yoko, Jerry Rubin & David Peel & company, he would perform “Attica State”, a bit of “Luck of the Irish” “Sisters, O Sisters” & “John Sinclair”, closing with Peel’s “The Hippie From New York City”.

Once more these were all acoustic performances. John & Yoko harmonized on “Attica State”. Yoko, in a green pullover sweater & blue jean, was multi-tasking, tapping a bongo while holding a lyrics sheet, which John refers back to. It was a problem he’d had in the Beatles too; he always had a hard time remembering the words to the songs he wrote himself. While he & the Lower East Side performed on the edge of the stage, a man in a red felt cowboy hat in the back was tossing paper airplanes over their heads.

After the song Frost invited members of the audience into a discussion about a fairer penal system. At one point a middle-aged couple questioned whether the Lennons were glorifying the prisoners in their song.

Yoko performed ‘Sisters, O Sisters”, then joined Frost for a multi-pointed discussion, including her struggle against discrimination of women, a realization that the public always listens to famous people, and the belief that communication is the key to peace. The pair then invited Chief Lion of the Onondaga tribe onstage for a discussion about plans for the New York State Department of Transportation to expand a highway through tribal land. A short film clip was shown with John & Yoko joining in the Onondaga protest.

Six days after their appearance at the Ann Arbor benefit, John & Yoko & the Lower East side performed “John Sinclair” in a more intimate setting. Yoko’s bongo was more perceptible, and John threw in a few variations to the tune: “Bring him home to his wife and kids/ We did!/ They gave him ten for two/ What else can the whole world do?/ Got to got to got to got…set him free/ Free!”

After the song, John talks about their part in the protest to free John Sinclair and their fight for peace. Finally, everyone stands as David Peel & the Lower East Side perform “The Hippie From New York City”, with John & Yoko standing in back. Again it is an acoustic version of a song about ‘a cockroach & Mayor Lindsey’ with bongos & flute.

Show would be broadcast a month later on January 13, 1972, on ABC-TV.

Links:  https://www.paleycenter.org/collection/item/?item=T:60182

https://retronewser.com/2021/12/16/john-lennon-yoko-ono-tape-fractious-appearance-on-the-david-frost-show/

David Peel died in a veteran’s hospital, April 6, 2017.

David Frost passed away on Saturday, August 31, 2013, at the ripe age of 74.

Available on: Seven surviving segments, including John & Yoko’s appearance from 1968, are included on a two-disc DVD set, Frost on Saturday (1968), released by Network, October 4, 2010. Sadly, this seems to only be available in Region 2, i.e., Europe, Japan & the Middle East. There may not be any official release of the Lennon’s other appearances on DVD.

Unofficially, there is at least one bootleg I’m aware of, now. John Lennon Live & Sessions 1971-1972, a two-CD program featuring rehearsals as well as the Tea for Two Rally, The Attica State benefit at the Apollo & all the songs from his last David Frost segment, taped on December 16, 1971, plus 0music from TV appearances on Aquarius & the Mike Douglas Show.

On a different bootleg, THE BEATLES: MOVIES AND MEDITATION 1967 VOL. 4, a 90 Mn. DVD. Among random Magical Mystery Tour home movies & How I Won the War premiere clips, there is also John & George’s two appearances on The Frost Programme on September 29 & October 4, 1967, although only the second program is presented complete.

John Lennon live at the Apollo, December 17, 1971

John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the crowd at The Apollo Theatre for the Attica Benefit in NYC. December 17, 1971. © Bob Gruen / http://www.bobgruen.com Please contact Bob Gruen’s studio to purchase a print or license this photo. email: info@bobgruen.com Image #: R-433

In approximately six weeks from this writing, it will be the 50th anniversary of John Lennon’s concert appearance at the Apollo Theatre on December 17, 1971. Granted it was a very short set (three songs, and one of them was Yoko’s), but this performance was unplugged decades before that term was coined. It was just John & Yoko and his band on the edge of the stage, accompanied by nothing but Yoko’s bongo and their guitars.

December 1971 was a busy month for the Lennons. Only the week before they had performed at the John Sinclair Freedom Rally in Ann Arbor, Michigan before heading back to New York City. The day before his Apollo appearance, in fact, on December 16, they’d taped an episode of The David Frost Show, joined by David Peel and the Lower East Side band. This wouldn’t be broadcast however, until a month later, well into January 1972.

The show was captured on 16mm film, and also completely ignored by mainstream media.  The only reports would come from Harlem’s local Amsterdam News. Aretha Franklin also performed at this benefit for the families of the prisoners shot in the Attica Prison riot in September of that year. Joining John & Yoko were counterculture activist Jerry Rubin, Chris Osbourne and Eddie Mattau. What they were about to offer were three songs that wouldn’t see the light of day until the release of John & Yoko’s Sometime In New York City six months later on June 12, 1972.

“I’d like to say it’s an honor and a pleasure to be here at the Apollo, and for the reasons that we’re all here,” John began. “Yoko is gonna sing a number that she wrote about her sisters.” The show begins with her offering of a beautiful version of “Sisters, O Sisters.” For once Yoko’s voice is gorgeous, as are the harmonies she shares with John on chorus. Next up is “Attica State”, a song John began composing at his 31st birthday party. The lyrics are strident but softened somewhat by the acoustic guitars, and the slide guitar adds a bit of flavor.

“Thank you,” John said, three times actually. “Some of you might wonder what I’m doing here with no drummers and no, nothing like that, but as you might  know I lost me old band or I left it. I’m putting an electric band together, it’s not ready yet and these things like this keep coming up so I have to just busk it. So I’m gonna sing a song you might know. Its called “Imagine”. This may be the most sincere performance of John’s classic, and may quite possibly be better than the official studio version. The acoustic guitar seems deeper somehow than the piano on the original; Yoko’s bongo is not intrusive this time. It’s hard to listen to this song now, since that was one of the numbers they played at my brother Eddie’s funeral in 2018. But sometimes you just got to.

Ironically, Mark David Chapman was sent to Attica Correctional Facility after he shot John in 1980.

Available: John Lennon’s two songs, “Attica State” & “Imagine”, have seen release first on John Lennon Anthology (November 1998), CD 2-New York City. “Imagine” was subsequently re-issued on John Lennon Acoustic (November 2004). Insofar as I know, Yoko’s live version of ‘Sisters, O Sisters remains unreleased.

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

 

John & Yoko Live with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East, June 6,1971

Available On: Side 2 of the Live Jam disc included with Sometime in New York City, released in the U.S. on June 12, 1972. This performance was subsequently issued, with an alternate mix, on disc one, “A Typical Day On the Road, Part 1”, of Frank Zappa’s 2-CD live set, Playground Psychotics, originally released in 1992 on Zappa’s Barking Pumpkin label; it was re-released on Ryodisc in 1995.

Frank_Zappa_-_Fillmore_East-June_1971 john-lennon-sometime-in-new-york-city playground psych

The performance was captured on 16 mm film and insofar as I know, has not been officially released on video.

 

It comes out that people like me have to save themselves, because we get fucking kicked! Nobody says it! Zappa’s there screaming, “Look at me, I’m a genius, for fuck’s sake, what do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do and who I am and don’t dare fuckin’ criticize my work like that! You who don’t know anything about it!” Fucking bullshit! I know what Zappa’s going through! And a half! I’m just coming out of it now, just fuckin’ hell, I’ve been in school again, I’ve had teachers ticking me off and marking my work! Fuck you all! If nobody can recognize what I am, fuck ’em!

-John on recognizing himself as a genius at age 9, Lennon Remembers, New Edition, Jann S. Wenner, @ 2000 Verso/Rolling Stone Press, originally published in 1971

 

The Mothers of Invention were much like John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, in that their membership fluctuated, and in fact they had disbanded in 1969. The Mothers had only recently reunited in 1971, not long before the John and Yoko set. Both bands were also led by men with distinctive absurd artistic tendencies.

zappa and mothers

This session had its genesis in an interview with the Lennons by Village Voice writer Howard Smith on his WPLJ-FM show. Smith was off to interview Frank Zappa (Dec. 21, 1940–Dec. 4, 1993) next and asked if John would like to come along, and naturally he said yes.

Zappa recalled, “A journalist in New York City woke me up–knocked on the door and is standing there with a tape recorder and goes, ‘Frank, I’d like to introduce you to John Lennon’, you know, waiting for me to gasp and fall on the floor. And I said, ‘Well, okay. Come on in.’

                “And we sat around and talked, and I think the first thing he said to me was, ‘You’re not as ugly as I thought you would be,’ So anyway, I thought he had a pretty good sense of humor so I invited him to come down and jam with us at the Fillmore East. We had already booked in a recording truck because we were making the Live at the Fillmore album at the time.”

The track listing may be confusing, so I’ll lay them both out to be sorted. On John’s Live Jam disc, included with his 1972 LP Sometime in New York City, it goes “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go)”, “Jamrag”, Scumbag” and ‘Au”. The alternate mix on Zappa’s Playground Psychotics (1994) lists them as “Well”; “Say Please” & “Aaawk”, a double renaming of “Jamrag”, which was a cover of Zappa’s tune “King Kong”; “Scumbag” and “A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono”.

This was one of the last concerts to be held at the Fillmore East. After only three years of groundbreaking concerts, the venue closed on June 27, 1971. Fillmore East–June 1971 was released Aug. 1971, two months after John’s encore appearance; yet the encore wasn’t included on this album; instead it would be saved for Playground Psychotics.

The audience must have been surprised when John and Yoko stepped out for the encore, John in an off-white suit and black guitar. “This is a song I used to sing when I was at the Cavern in Liverpool. I haven’t done it since,” John said by way of introductions.

john and zappa 1

The only tune that kept true to the performance in either mix was “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go)”, a 1958 hit by the Olympics. Well, at least it proved that John could carry a blues song. The only detraction was Yoko’s wailing after every line of every verse. She seemed to be on a one-track mind that night; all she managed to offer was the same wail.

(Ironically the live cover of ‘Well (Baby Please Don’t Go)” was released decades before the studio version saw daylight on the John Lennon Anthology and the smaller compilation Wonsaponatime in 1998.)

 

“Jamrag” was where they were sued by Zappa because they stole the melody to his song “King Kong”. That song was composed in 1967. Zappa and the Mothers had been performing it in concert throughout 1968, where it quickly became a concert favorite. It was finally committed to vinyl on 1969’s Uncle Meat as an 18 minute-plus track. I gotta credit the Mothers for stamina in keeping up the rhythm for 18 minutes.

(P.S.–‘jamrag’ was British slang for a sanitary napkin. Sorry, TMFI)

Basically, in this venue, it was John and Yoko screaming back and forth, with Zappa jerking his middle finger up, eliciting even more shrieks. It actually had to get a minute and a half into it before it approaches anything constituting a melody. Don Preston gives a prominent keyboard solo, but Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan’s vocals had been turned down on the Live Jam mix…as well as Yoko’s cat-killer wailing, ironically.

john and zappa 2

On Playground Psychotics, “Jamrag” gets split up into “Say Please” and “Aaawk”, still with no mention of “King Kong”, though Zappa had every opportunity to do so on his own CD. Perhaps he was hoping to avoid any more lawsuits, or he had no interest in stirring up any more hornet’s nests. Who knows? The “Aaawk” section brings forward the guitars. Zappa probably renamed that part ’cause that’s what Yoko’s screeching sounds like halfway through the song.

“Scumbag” was a long jam consisting of John calling out two words over and over–with less Yoko. Literally, as partway in someone rushes onstage to drape Yoko in a bag, from which she wails on unimpeded.

Halfway through, Zappa breaks the Fourth Wall, calling to the audience, “Hey listen! I don’t know if you can tell what the words are to this song but there’s only two words and I’d like you to sing along ’cause it’s real easy, anyone who comes to the Fillmore East can sing this song. The name of the song is “Scum Bag”, OK, and all you gotta sing is ‘Scum Bag!” All right brothers and sisters, let’s hear it for the Scum Bag!”

 

That bleeds over into the last number, “Au”. On Playground Psychotics, the last number in John’s show was retitled, appropriately enough, “A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono”. Zappa and the Mothers exited the stage while John bent over the loudspeakers and left his guitar spewing feedback over the crowd, whose cheers had been scrubbed from the Live Jam. Yoko’s siren wouldn’t come in until two minutes in, and thankfully the feedback almost–but not quite–drowns her out.

Finally, when the noise is over, everyone comes back onstage to say goodnight. “I’d like to thank Frank for having us on,” John says. “Yeah, he’s the greatest,” Yoko adds.

 

“After they had sat in with us, an arrangement was made that we would both have access to the tapes…He wanted to release it with his mix, and I had the right to release it with my mix–so that’s how that one section came about. The bad part is, there’s a song that I wrote called ‘King Kong’ which we played that night, and I don’t know whether it was Yoko’s idea or John’s idea, but they changed the name of the song to ‘Jamrag’, gave themselves writing and publishing credit on it, stuck it on an album and never paid me. It was obviously not a jam session–it’s got a melody, it’s got a bass line, it’s obviously an organized song. Little bit disappointing. I’ve never released my version of the mixes of that night.”

Do you ever intend to?      

“One day yeah–but it would be drastically different because there were things that were edited out of their version and certain words that were being sung that were removed because of the editorial slant that they wanted to apply to the material and I have a slightly different viewpoint on it.    

–Zappa recalls on The Frank Zappa Interview Picture Disc, Baktabak CD CBAK 4012/ UK 1985, interviewer unknown, transcribed by Robert Moore; interview conducted c. 1984

 

This was probably the second-fastest turnaround between the performance of a live show and its release since Live Peace in Toronto, barely a year after the session. The show was fine, of course; what went into the mix on the Live Jam LP wasn’t the Lennons’ finest moment. Technically it was supposed to be a ‘free’ bonus disc, except that it was given a separate catalogue number which pushed up the price of the total album package. As Zappa said, he got the raw end of the deal.

john and frank live-jam

When it comes to mixes, I have to give this one to Zappa. Well, the audience was brought forward significantly. Zappa’s vocals and Jim Pons’ bass are more audible I believe on Zappa’s mix than on the Live Jam. At times it seems Zappa and the Mothers had been erased altogether from the Live Jam version.

 

Interestingly, Sometime in New York City was the last LP to carry the Plastic Ono Band name, as the Nixon Administration had already taken up its campaign of government harassment against the Lennons.

 

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/john-lennon-frank-zappa-fillmore-east/

http://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/The_Frank_Zappa_Interview_Picture_Disk,_pt.2

 

 

 

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

Yoko & John Coffin Car at First International Feminist Conference 1973

gettyimages-1171054033-612x612

This is one of those things you stumble onto in researching another topic. To wit, I was looking for stuff on John & Yoko’s collaborations in the 1970’s, before the legendary Lost Weekemd; I don’t recall exactly what I was looking for, but in my searches came across this reference. Yoko Ono was invited to speak at the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard University in Cambridge Massachusetts on June 3, 1973. She spoke of how her role in society as a woman, as a person in general was reductive because she was seen only in her role as John Lennon’s spouse.

I say this is interesting because I had to piece what little I’ve shared together from bits and crumbs. If you want to find out about the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard in June 1973, well, good luck. There is practically NO information. It’s as though the Phyllis Schlaflys of the world collaborated to erase all traces of that gathering. Luckily we have at least part of her speech preserved as bonus tracks on the reissue of Yoko’s 1973 album Feeling the Space. After her speech she sang “Coffin Car” with John as backing musician, and well, let’s let Yoko herself explain:

This disc has all the songs from Feeling The Space and songs which were dropped from it to make it into a single album. In June of ’73, I was invited by the National Organization of Women to their International Women’s Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was asked to give a concert there for the Sisters. John and I took this very seriously. I made a booklet of my songs and statements specially for the occasion and carried copies of them with me. John carried his guitar. He was to be my band. The conference was incredibly memorable for both of us. I never will forget how all the women at the concert suddenly stood up and joined me in singing the chorus of WOMAN POWER. Their power at that moment was so strong that it stopped the video camera from running! Our photographer did not know why his flashbulb suddenly did not work. Things like that happened a few times in my life. This was one of them. During the conference, when some sisters gathered to have coffee, I met a woman who had come from Middle America. She said she had left her husband and her children and was not intending to go back to them. She was a sweet girl with large frightened eyes. Those eyes have seen stuff  our mothers never taught us to be part of the deal in life, I thought. I asked her how she felt. She said she missed her children, and sometimes she heard them crying in her dreams, but she felt okay because she knew her husband was not bad to her kids. She also said she was having a hard time finding a job because she had no skills. A classic case. That was how ANGRY YOUNG WOMAN came to me. John and I visited Salem, Massachusetts. on our way home from the conference. We went to a house where a witch was believed to have lived. It turned out she had not been a witch but a doctor (of course!) and her beautiful, clean but rather austere house seemed appropriate to have once encased an astute and intellectual mind. We went up the hill where she, supposedly, had been burnt on a cross. The grass on the hill seemed dry and flattened out by kids playing baseball. We walked through the main streets of the town. It was a summer evening, the high ceilinged shops, probably built in the 30’s, were closed, and the shadows of street lamps were long on the dusty pavement, with not many people around. John and I felt as though we were walking in the town of The Visit, an old Ingrid Bergman film, where all the factories were closed because of the anger of one woman who had sought justice. We walked for a while and then went back to our car where our driver, Peter, was waiting. I was very touched by our visit and wrote the song WOMAN OF SALEM. When I started to sing the song in the studio, a musician pointed out that in my lyrics I had referred to the time as being 1692 and that I should probably change the date since Salem would not have existed then. He must be right, I thought.
But I decided not to touch the lyrics because the song had come to me
like an automatic writing. “The song could be about Salem in England-if
there was such a place,” I said to the musician. My first vision of the
song was quite vivid. A woman sat in a darkish room, at a table under a
window from which the morning light was coming through and you could
hear the birds chirping amongst the summer green. Then I was the woman
quietly closing her diary. Anyway, it was a symbolic song. If the time
was a bit off – even a century or so – it didn’t really matter. I was
going to push it through with that and I did. I don’t know why I didn’t
think of checking the year, which would have been an easy thing to do.
Had I simply been stubborn for being told of my possible mistake? An unsettling feeling had lingered at the time and then it was forgotten.
It was only last year, ’91, I found out that in the year 1992, Salem
would be observing the 300th anniversary of it’s 1692 trials! With ANGRY
YOUNG WOMAN in my pocket and the other songs I took to the International
Women’s Conference, I felt it was time for me to go into the studio
again. I felt I had to get a new set of musicians for the kind of sound
I had in mind. So I hired session guys with jazz backgrounds. The first
day I walked into the studio, I noticed there was some nervous tension.
To break the ice, I suggested we do a jam to get to know each other.
That’s how IT’S BEEN VERY HARD was made. It was the first take of the
first day. They didn’t know me from Adam. I think the song shows how
brilliant these musicians were. From then on we were like a family. That
summer, John and I moved to the Dakota. Some of the Sisters from the
Conference visited us in our new apartment. A woman representative from
Norway taught John how to type. So John said he would be playing with
his newfound toy, the typewriter, while I made the album- and he did (it
was the beginning of Skywriting By Word Of Mouth). Every day John waited
for me to bring back a rough remix of what I had done that day. He
started to say he wanted to play on a couple of my songs. “You should
call me in when you’re ready, just like you would call in a session
guitarist and I’ll come and play.” I knew I could not get a better
guitarist than John for WOMAN POWER. So I called him in for that-like he
said. He did an overdub guitar on WOMAN POWER and SHE HITS BACK that
afternoon. Sean’s friends, who heard WOMAN POWER for the first time in
the 90s, say this track sounds contemporary. John would have been
pleased to hear that. One day I came home and heard John playing a
beautiful song which was later to become STEEL AND GLASS. “It’s great
that you’re doing this (recording) because now I feel like I want to go
in and make mine,” he said. After Feeling The Space was done, John went
into the studio and made Mind Games with the same musicians.

taken from http://imaginepeace.com/archives/6364

notes from Yoko Ono’s Onobox, 1992 6-disc collection from Rykodisc

More Yoko at Genius lyrics:

https://genius.com/Yoko-ono-i-learned-to-stutter-coffin-car-lyrics?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=2f365bcf99eeb2bddf6091ca820e2da8d325da6b-1581476197-0-AZ8FoeJ8zSYZp38KVfuBEiwOV_LRuokkKR3tVzXCvvWLqSp_x_FLSszT9_br6pwhg4YFcP2SkfkWEZJuQxkbN6uSWYAV_FsSucHc2-V_rLX2TbkqGew1TZNVfywJJeyseUxAWHNPxEgjhMIUWjypa6yZl6ucMMCoQJw2w7vt5p27JTh50WMCpZwPIShLHBkZ2FJ-v8Xf46ALN5XoeAElMTV_RRyD6TeqVyq99esCDXcP3IT_gWQ5wphWZzCQHgNVt7O_eNp34l3mEQ8ELcQhS_rzNLXlNgLr0vJNOWL_a2Juh7WwK_5FKAlyQkd0L4axeG0j_5kVuF61FJsDyPgqbbXkGNkx-GyXWtR8YTOva7zDvdq4TNW_pSez8Ath_GEqW67iqCuqe_Bm8N82ovi11vc

While john is setting up the amp…

What happened to me was that I was living as an artist and, who had relative freedom as a woman and was considered the bitch in the society. Since I met John, I was upgraded into a witch and I was…and I think that that’s very flattering Anyway, what I learned from being with john is that the society solely treated me as a woman, as a woman who belonged to a man who is one of the most powerful people in our generation, and some of his closest friends told me that probably I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should give up my work and that way I’ll be happy

And I got those advises, I was luck, I was over thirty and it was too late for me to change

But still, still, this is one thing I want to say, sisters, because, with the wish that you know
You’re not alone, i…because the whole society started to attack me and the whole society wished me dead, I started accumulating a tremendous amount of guilt complex and in result of that I started to stutter. and I consider myself a very eloquent woman and also an attractive woman all my life and suddenly, because I was associated to john, that was considered an ugly woman, ugly jap, who took your monument or something away from you
And that’s when I realised how hard it is for woman, if I can start to stutter, being a strong woman and having lived thirty years by then, learn to stutter in three years of being treated as such, it is a very hard road. Now the next song is called coffin car and this is a song that I observed in myself and also in many sisters who are riding on coffin cars…

I appreciate Yoko’s comments and may we all take them to heart.

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Available on: The studio track “Coffin Car” first appeared on Yoko’s N1973 album Feeling the Space with the Plastic Ono Band, Apple SW-3412. John Lennon is billed as ‘John O’ Cean’ in the credits. He provides guitar on “Woman Power” & “She Hits Back”, as well as backing vocals on “Men, Men, Men”. Oddly enough, coming as it did on the verge of the Lost Weekend, this was released around the same time as John’s Mind Games.

It was twice reissued, first on Rykodisc in the UK and Japan; two of the bonus tracks were taken from her appearance at the First Feminist Conference in 1973, “I Learned to Stutter” & “Coffin Car”. For the 2017 reissue in the U.S. & Europe it appeared on the Secretly Canadian & Chimera label.

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 15, 1969 Peace for Christmas at the Lyceum Ballroom, London

From December 2 to the 12th, George Harrison made his first stage appearance outside the confines of the Beatles when he sat in as an anonymous member of Delaney & Bonnie’s tour, alongside Eric Clapton who’d persuaded George to join in on what would be a enjoyable and fulfilling concert experience.

Is it a coincidence that every time John Lennon performed “Cold Turkey” live, in 1969 anyway, Eric Clapton was on hand to reprise his epic guitar riff? Organized to benefit UNICEF, John pulled together a larger Plastic Ono Band in just under 48 hours.  The other acts performing included the Hot Chocolate Band, the Pioneers, the Rascals, Jimmy Cliff and Black Velvet.

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George was also present, the first time that two Beatles had appeared on a stage together since 1966. And if George had wanted to fade into the background, he succeeded as his guitar was barely perceptible amongst all the other gathered artists that day who included John, Yoko, George, Eric, Klaus Voormann, the incomparable Bobby Keys, Billy Preston, Keith Moon, Alan White, Jim Gordon and Delaney & Bonnie. John would later to refer to this gathering as the Plastic Ono Supergroup. “Cold Turkey” had already become a concert favorite for John, this being the second time he’d performed it live. It’s a respectable reproduction of his terrifying single, though the screams don’t reach the same drug-fever pitch until the six-minute mark.

john lennion lyceum 1969

Next up is Yoko with “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow”. This is an exercise in dissonance. If I were a child and my mother sang this to me, I would be very frightened. Before the song begins she’s crying “John! I love you! Britain! You killed Hanratty, you murderer!” (James Hanratty (4 October 1936 – 4 April 1962), also known as the A6 Murderer, was a British criminal who was one of the final eight people in the UK to be executed before capital punishment was effectively abolished. c/o Wikipedia)

One harsh riff settles into a groove over the usual screaming, interspersed with Yoko wailing “Kyoko! Don’t Cry!”, with too few horns to accentuate her cat-like shrieking. Fifteen minutes they had to endure which only ended because the drummers sped up in a desperate attempt to end the song. Unfortunately the band raced along to keep up as well, so it still dragged on until John wound it up with his guitar blaring feedback from a speaker.

Beatles Bible: Plastic Ono Band Live at Lyceum 1969:

Plastic Ono Band live at Lyceum Ballroom, London

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Available on: Side One of the Live Jam LP included with Some Time in New York City

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Release date: June 1972

Remixed with Overdub in New York, 1971 by Geoff Emerick, with Nicky Hopkins on electric piano, replacing the original organ track. (P.S. the original performance of “Don’t Worry Kyoko ran for 40 minutes but it was trimmed down to 15 minutes for the album release. Emerick was forced to change reels during the song, and there are three edits evident in the Live Jam version. )

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

Mike’s Amazon page:

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