John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s “Power to the People”
The Legendary August 30, 1972 One-to-One Concerts Finally Get Their Just Due on CD – Sort Of
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
“The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order."
– Adolf Hitler, Hamburg, Germany, 1932; quoted by Yoko Ono, One-to-One Concerts, New York City, August 30, 1972
On August 30, 1972, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the New York-based Left-wing political band Elephant’s Memory gave two concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. These were the only full-scale concerts Lennon ever gave between the breakup of The Beatles in April 1970 and his murder in December 1980. Ironically, Lennon had actually been the first Beatle to perform live on his own. Even before the breakup he’d played as part of the Rolling Stones’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus” in 1968 (with a band called “The Dirty Mac” that featured himself, Ono, Israeli classical violinist Ivry Gitlis, Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards on bass, and Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell); the Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Festival in 1969; and as a member of Ono’s band in a “Concert of Natural Music” at Cambridge University, also in 1969.
Though Lennon was dead-set against The Beatles performing live again – one of the issues that broke up the band was that Paul McCartney wanted to go back on the road and Lennon didn’t – he occasionally popped up on stage in the early 1970’s. In 1971 he joined Frank Zappa on stage at the Fillmore East in New York City for an encore, included as side four of his 1972 album Some Time in New York City, and his final live performance was as part of an encore for Elton John’s concert, also at Madison Square Garden, on November 28, 1974.
Elton John had dared Lennon to join him on stage during the recording session for Lennon’s song “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” on which John guested on piano, and Lennon had said, “Only if ‘Whatever Gets You Through the Night’ gets to the top of the U.S. charts.’” Much to Lennon’s surprise, it did – none of Lennon’s previous solo singles had – so Lennon went through with his commitment. He and John played three songs together: “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (John had covered it and made it a hit single), and “I Saw Her Standing There,” which Lennon introduced as a song by “an old estranged fiancé of mine … called Paul.”
The One-to-One concerts came about at the urging of ABC-TV newscaster Geraldo Rivera, who like many aging radicals from the 1960’s and 1970’s has moved Right over time and become a Donald Trump groupie. In 1972 Rivera wanted to raise money for the Willowbrook Hospital for Retarded Children in upstate New York, and he hit on the idea of putting on a major benefit with Lennon and Ono as the headliners and Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Melanie, and the 1950’s rock revival group Sha Na Na as the opening acts. Lennon had the idea of professionally recording and filming the concert, and releasing it as a benefit project along the lines of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971.
Alas, Lennon abandoned this idea after the infamous fiasco of Harrison’s Bangladesh concert. Because Allen Klein, Lennon’s and Harrison’s manager, had so badly screwed up the financial arrangements for the Bangladesh concert, both the British and American governments made more from it in taxes than the Bangladeshi government did. You can hear an oblique reference to this in the evening show of the One-to-One concerts. Introducing the song “Imagine,” Lennon rather cynically expresses the hope that some of the money from the concerts will actually get to the kids at Willowbrook.
During the 1970’s various bits of the One-to-One Concerts emerged on bootleg LP’s and cassettes. Some were taken from the evening concert, some from the afternoon concert, and some from both. One of the most spectacular recordings from these concerts was the version of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” from the afternoon show. John is so overcome by his rage at the world’s sexism that as the song closes, when he repeats the line “We make her paint her face and dance,” instead of singing the whole line he just says, “Dance/Dance/Dance/Dance/Dance.” I’d heard this version on a poor-quality bootleg tape and I’ve been waiting for years to hear it in good sound.
Sean Sacrifices His Dad’s Legacy on the Altar of Political Correctness
Alas, I’ll have to keep waiting and I may never get to hear it at all. That’s because Sean Ono Lennon, John’s and Yoko’s son, has decided for reasons of political correctness run amok to delete “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” from all the official releases of the One-to-One concerts under the name Power to the People: the single CD containing Sean’s idea of the best tracks from the two concerts; the two-CD set containing the afternoon show on disc one and the evening show on disc two; and the all-out nine-CD deluxe box containing both shows, the Some Time in New York City album John and Yoko had just released, and various other goodies.
This is a cultural tragedy on a par with the suppression of Mel Brooks’s comic masterpiece Blazing Saddles (1974) for its frequent use of what’s commonly and cutesily called “the ‘N’-word.” Brooks rightly has pointed out that every time the word “nigger” appears in Blazing Saddles, it’s a joke and the butts of the jokes are the racist white characters who use that word as an expression of their belief that Blacks are subhuman. The phrase “Woman is the nigger of the world” was coined by Yoko, and one YouTube contributor has cited John as saying that he felt his song hadn’t done justice to her title.
“Woman Is the Nigger of the World” was important enough to John that he put it on Shaved Fish, the one Lennon compilation released during his lifetime and with his involvement, though intriguingly he cut one chorus from the song for the Shaved Fish version. The words he deleted were, “We make her bear and raise our children/And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen/We tell her home is the only place she should be/Then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend.” Given the shabby way he treated his first wife, Cynthia Powell, and left her to raise their son Julian as a single mother, maybe that verse hit too close to home.
A number of people have gone online and said they were so shocked by the P.C. suppression of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” that they weren’t going to buy Power to the People. That was my first reaction, though eventually I relented. After pricing the various versions on Amazon.com – the single CD at $18, the two-CD set at $30, and the nine-CD box at $240 – I decided to bypass the big box because, though it contained a few mildly interesting items (like the initial Ann Arbor, Michigan version of the song “John Sinclair,” which John played on a National metal guitar like the one Delta blues musicians used in the 1920’s and which sounded even more like traditional blues than the one on Some Time in New York City, and a jam session with another great 1960’s artist who died too soon, Phil Ochs), I didn’t think it was worth the investment.
Instead, my compromise was to order the two-CD version and also buy the CD of Some Time in New York City to make sure I’d have at least one version of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” I’m glad I did, because even in truncated form (Sean’s edit omitted not only “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” but the original single’s B-side, Yoko’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” a great mix of politically conscious lyrics and 1950’s girl-group rock which when I first heard it I called, “Gloria Steinem Meets The Shirelles”), the two One-to-One concerts are both energy rushes throughout and among the most stunning parts of Lennon’s truncated legacy as a solo artist.
A Digression: Yoko’s Musical Masterpieces
One of the most curious aspects of the early-1970’s period in the careers of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was that she was making much better music than he was. While he was putting out mediocre albums like Some Time in New York City and Mind Games, she was making two album-length masterpieces, Approximately Infinite Universe (1972) and Feeling the Space (1973). In 2017 a reissue label called Secretly Canadian did welcome re-releases of six albums featuring Yoko: Two Virgins, Life with the Lions, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space. I can’t recommend the last two highly enough. (Marc Masters’ review of Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space can be read at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-fly-approximately-infinite-universe-feeling-the-space/.)
Yoko made a huge strategic mistake by presenting herself musically with her most forbiddingly avant-garde singing and composing. The first record of hers I heard was “Cambridge 1969,” an improvised jam session recorded at a concert at Cambridge University with John on feedback guitar, John Tchicai and John Stanley on saxes, and The Beatles’ road manager, Malcolm Evans, with an alarm clock that ticked away throughout the performance. The whole event was called “A Concert of Natural Music,” but the Down Beat reviewer called it “some of the most unnatural music I’ve ever heard in my life.” He compared it to a previous Ono performance in 1968 with avant-garde jazz great Ornette Coleman and said that at least that time Yoko’s vocal sounds were recognizably those of an orgasm. On “Cambridge 1969” she just screamed start to finish.
For the morbidly curious, “Cambridge 1969” is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtdDU1tdoFU&list=RDEtdDU1tdoFU&start_radio=1. One thing I hadn’t known about the performance until I watched it there was that the song went on for another hour after the part in which John and Yoko appeared, in which Tchicai and Stanley continued on and turned it into an extended free-form instrumental jam. I got it when it came out on Life with the Lions, with a second side of bits and pieces paying tribute to the baby John and Yoko had just lost when she miscarried. That gave me a longtime allergy to Yoko’s music and led me to join in on all the sexist jokes about her, including one I made up myself: “They say love is blind. John and Yoko are proving that it’s deaf, too.”
My first intimation that Yoko Ono could do normal-sounding pop music came in 1973, when I bought John Lennon’s single “Happy Christmas/War Is Over.” The B-side was Yoko’s “Listen, the Snow Is Falling,” a beautiful, innocent children’s ballad based on the traditional “The Riddle Song.” But I didn’t follow up that interest and I didn’t hear any more of Yoko’s normal music until the Double Fantasy album, which alternated John’s and Yoko’s songs, came out in November 1980, three weeks before Lennon was killed.
Not long after Lennon’s death, I got a couple of used singles from Ono: “Midsummer New York” b/w “Mrs. Lennon” from Fly and “Death of Samantha” b/w “Yang Yang” from Approximately Infinite Universe. I was stunned by both of them. “Midsummer New York” was an obvious rewrite of Mae Boren Axton’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” which in 1956 had become Elvis Presley’s first nationwide hit (and first release on a major label, RCA Victor), but the literal terror with which Yoko injected her new lyrics (“The whole world is shaking, it’s shaking, it’s shaking”) and her use of extended vocalism as a spice rather than the main course I found intensely moving. The flip side, “Mrs. Lennon,” was a macabre and eerie anticipation of the tragedy of Lennon’s murder:
“Husband John extended his hand,
Extended his hand to his wife,
But he finds, suddenly he finds,
That he has no hands.”
“Death of Samantha,” Yoko’s second single release from Approximately Infinite Universe, seemed even more premonitory:
“People say I’m cool, yeah, I’m such a cool chick, baby
Every day I thank God that I’m such a cool chick, baby
When I’m on the phone, I thank God
My voice sounds smooth and clear, without a trace of tears
When I’m at work, I thank God
I have the smile my mom used to say lit the day.
But something inside me, something inside me died that day.”
When I first heard this in early 1981, with the psychic wounds from the murder of John Lennon still raw in my soul, I couldn’t help but wonder, “How did she know?” It wasn’t until I read Donald Brackett’s 2022 biography Yoko Ono: An Artful Life that I found out the “something inside me” that “died that day” hadn’t been an eerie anticipation of her husband’s murder, but one of the skuzziest things he ever did to her. In November 1972, responding to Richard Nixon’s overwhelming landslide re-election, John had taken another woman into his and Yoko’s bedroom and fucked her, making as much noise as possible. Their guests put on a Bob Dylan album and cranked up the volume to drown out, as much as possible, John’s in-your-face adultery.
I was so moved by these two singles that I ordered collectors’ copies of the Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space LP’s. They struck me as two of the finest rock albums ever made by a woman artist. In fact, in the late 1980’s I regarded them as two of the seven best albums ever made by women, along with Patti Smith’s Horses and Easter (which, by the way, contains a song called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger”), Chryssie Hynde and The Pretenders’ Pretenders and Learning to Crawl, and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope. After I read Brackett’s biography I ordered the Secretly Canadian CD reissues of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space and found them as great as ever.
I also learned that Feeling the Space had originally been intended as a two-record set, like Approximately Infinite Universe, and a concept album about feminism and women’s equality. The Secretly Canadian CD of Feeling the Space contains some of the deleted songs as bonus tracks, as well as an intriguing version of the song “Coffin Car” recorded live at the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard University in 1973. Considerably starker than the one on Feeling the Space – it just features Yoko singing and playing piano and discreet rhythm guitar by Lennon – it was prefaced with an extended stage rap in which Yoko expressed her frustrations at the way the world saw her and John as a couple and how that reflected the oppression of all women. Marc Masters quoted a bit of it in the above-cited Pitchfork.com review, but it deserves to be read in full:
“What happened to me was I was living as an artist and had relative freedom as a woman, and was considered a bitch in this society. Since I met John, I was ‘upgraded’ into a witch, and I think that’s very flattering. Anyway, what I learned from being with John is that the society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man, a man who is one of the most powerful people in our generation. And some of his closest friends told me I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should probably give up my work, and that way I’ll be happy. And I got those advices, and I was lucky I was over 30 and it was too late for me to change. But still, still, this is one thing I want to say to the sisters, because I really wish you to know that you are not alone. Because the whole society started to attack me, the whole society wished me dead, I started to accumulate a tremendous amount of guilt complex, and as a result of that I started to stutter. And I’ve considered myself a very eloquent woman, and also an attractive woman, all my life. And suddenly, because I was associated with John, I was considered an ugly woman, an ‘ugly Jap,’ who took your monument, or something, away from you. And that’s when I realized how hard it is for women. If I can start to stutter, being a strong woman, and having lived 30 years by then, learned 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 it’s a song that I observed in myself and also in many sisters who are riding in coffin cars.”
Hearing the One-to-One Concerts Today
For John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the One-to-One concerts on August 30, 1972 were among the artistic high points of their relationship. Backed by the excellent band Elephant’s Memory, who also played on Some Time in New York City and Approximately Infinite Universe, the concerts – or at least some of John’s songs – had previously been released on an LP and cassette in 1986 as a single album. At least this edition included “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” though it deleted Yoko’s screaming background vocals from Lennon’s cover of the Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller song “Hound Dog,” which he performed as a tribute to Elvis. (John and Yoko had attended Elvis’s big concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City a few months before, and John had treated it as almost a religious experience.)
One surprise from the current release was that Yoko performed one of the songs she would later release on Approximately Infinite Universe, “Move On Fast,” during the concerts. It’s hard to escape the impression, listening to Some Time in New York City and Approximately Infinite Universe back to back, that Yoko was saving her best material for her own album. Another surprise is on the song “Born in a Prison,” in which Yoko sang lead and John sang backup on both Some Time in New York City and the concerts. John was supposed to join Yoko on the choruses, but he was unable to blend his voice with hers effectively – and for those who immediately assume, “That’s because Yoko couldn’t sing,” she’s in tune and on pitch and he’s the one who can’t keep up with her. The mismatch is even worse on the live versions than it was on the studio album.
The set list on both concerts was the same except for the final song, which appears only on the evening show: an extended jam on “Give Peace a Chance” that lasts 10 minutes and 40 seconds. This is prefaced by Yoko reading the quote from Adolf Hitler that started this article, which had been rediscovered in the late 1960’s by American peace activists who noted the similarities between Hitler’s and Richard Nixon’s “Law and Order” rhetoric. Indeed, when I was playing the One-to-One concert CD for my husband Charles, when Yoko did her song “We’re All Water” and began it, “There may not be much difference/Between Richard Nixon and Hitler/If we see them naked,” he interjected, “Actually there’s a very big difference.”
With what’s going on in the U.S. today, I’ve often called Nixon the Jekyll-and-Hyde President. Jekyll-Nixon actually tried to do some things that would have been good for the country. He signed into law all the big environmental protection laws, including the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, that current President Donald Trump is doing his best to destroy. Jekyll-Nixon seriously proposed a national health insurance plan that would have covered more people than the one eventually enacted under Barack Obama, and also proposed a guaranteed national income. Hyde-Nixon kept the Viet Nam War going four years longer than it should have, and authorized a political scorched-earth campaign against his opponents that included the Watergate break-in and a number of other so-called “dirty tricks.”
By contrast, Donald Trump is just a monster, a profoundly psychopathic person whose only motivations for wanting to be U.S. President were to increase his bank balance and soothe his easily bruised ego. Looking back on the last 60 years in American history, we can see the increasing authoritarianism of Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and now Trump. The words Yoko quoted from Hitler – “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. … [T]he Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without” – sound far more like Trump’s rhetoric than Nixon’s, and listening to them now is especially chilling in the middle of Trump’s attempt to turn America from an imperfect republic to a nation ruled by a strongman with absolute power.
The One-to-One concerts today stand as a testament to the power of John Lennon and Yoko Ono as artistic collaborators. Given that they came right after their most politically conscious album, Some Time in New York City, they are soaked in early-1970’s Leftism, some of which dates rather badly while other aspects seem all too relevant today. Though Sean Ono Lennon has regrettably joined today’s “cancel culture” in deleting one of the most impassioned and insightful songs his father ever wrote, what we have is still very much worth buying, playing, and cherishing.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan
“The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might and the Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without. We need law and order. Yes without law and order our nation cannot survive. Elect us and we shall restore law and order."
– Adolf Hitler, Hamburg, Germany, 1932; quoted by Yoko Ono, One-to-One Concerts, New York City, August 30, 1972
On August 30, 1972, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the New York-based Left-wing political band Elephant’s Memory gave two concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City. These were the only full-scale concerts Lennon ever gave between the breakup of The Beatles in April 1970 and his murder in December 1980. Ironically, Lennon had actually been the first Beatle to perform live on his own. Even before the breakup he’d played as part of the Rolling Stones’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus” in 1968 (with a band called “The Dirty Mac” that featured himself, Ono, Israeli classical violinist Ivry Gitlis, Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards on bass, and Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell); the Toronto Rock ‘n’ Roll Festival in 1969; and as a member of Ono’s band in a “Concert of Natural Music” at Cambridge University, also in 1969.
Though Lennon was dead-set against The Beatles performing live again – one of the issues that broke up the band was that Paul McCartney wanted to go back on the road and Lennon didn’t – he occasionally popped up on stage in the early 1970’s. In 1971 he joined Frank Zappa on stage at the Fillmore East in New York City for an encore, included as side four of his 1972 album Some Time in New York City, and his final live performance was as part of an encore for Elton John’s concert, also at Madison Square Garden, on November 28, 1974.
Elton John had dared Lennon to join him on stage during the recording session for Lennon’s song “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” on which John guested on piano, and Lennon had said, “Only if ‘Whatever Gets You Through the Night’ gets to the top of the U.S. charts.’” Much to Lennon’s surprise, it did – none of Lennon’s previous solo singles had – so Lennon went through with his commitment. He and John played three songs together: “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (John had covered it and made it a hit single), and “I Saw Her Standing There,” which Lennon introduced as a song by “an old estranged fiancé of mine … called Paul.”
The One-to-One concerts came about at the urging of ABC-TV newscaster Geraldo Rivera, who like many aging radicals from the 1960’s and 1970’s has moved Right over time and become a Donald Trump groupie. In 1972 Rivera wanted to raise money for the Willowbrook Hospital for Retarded Children in upstate New York, and he hit on the idea of putting on a major benefit with Lennon and Ono as the headliners and Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, Melanie, and the 1950’s rock revival group Sha Na Na as the opening acts. Lennon had the idea of professionally recording and filming the concert, and releasing it as a benefit project along the lines of George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971.
Alas, Lennon abandoned this idea after the infamous fiasco of Harrison’s Bangladesh concert. Because Allen Klein, Lennon’s and Harrison’s manager, had so badly screwed up the financial arrangements for the Bangladesh concert, both the British and American governments made more from it in taxes than the Bangladeshi government did. You can hear an oblique reference to this in the evening show of the One-to-One concerts. Introducing the song “Imagine,” Lennon rather cynically expresses the hope that some of the money from the concerts will actually get to the kids at Willowbrook.
During the 1970’s various bits of the One-to-One Concerts emerged on bootleg LP’s and cassettes. Some were taken from the evening concert, some from the afternoon concert, and some from both. One of the most spectacular recordings from these concerts was the version of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” from the afternoon show. John is so overcome by his rage at the world’s sexism that as the song closes, when he repeats the line “We make her paint her face and dance,” instead of singing the whole line he just says, “Dance/Dance/Dance/Dance/Dance.” I’d heard this version on a poor-quality bootleg tape and I’ve been waiting for years to hear it in good sound.
Sean Sacrifices His Dad’s Legacy on the Altar of Political Correctness
Alas, I’ll have to keep waiting and I may never get to hear it at all. That’s because Sean Ono Lennon, John’s and Yoko’s son, has decided for reasons of political correctness run amok to delete “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” from all the official releases of the One-to-One concerts under the name Power to the People: the single CD containing Sean’s idea of the best tracks from the two concerts; the two-CD set containing the afternoon show on disc one and the evening show on disc two; and the all-out nine-CD deluxe box containing both shows, the Some Time in New York City album John and Yoko had just released, and various other goodies.
This is a cultural tragedy on a par with the suppression of Mel Brooks’s comic masterpiece Blazing Saddles (1974) for its frequent use of what’s commonly and cutesily called “the ‘N’-word.” Brooks rightly has pointed out that every time the word “nigger” appears in Blazing Saddles, it’s a joke and the butts of the jokes are the racist white characters who use that word as an expression of their belief that Blacks are subhuman. The phrase “Woman is the nigger of the world” was coined by Yoko, and one YouTube contributor has cited John as saying that he felt his song hadn’t done justice to her title.
“Woman Is the Nigger of the World” was important enough to John that he put it on Shaved Fish, the one Lennon compilation released during his lifetime and with his involvement, though intriguingly he cut one chorus from the song for the Shaved Fish version. The words he deleted were, “We make her bear and raise our children/And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen/We tell her home is the only place she should be/Then we complain that she's too unworldly to be our friend.” Given the shabby way he treated his first wife, Cynthia Powell, and left her to raise their son Julian as a single mother, maybe that verse hit too close to home.
A number of people have gone online and said they were so shocked by the P.C. suppression of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” that they weren’t going to buy Power to the People. That was my first reaction, though eventually I relented. After pricing the various versions on Amazon.com – the single CD at $18, the two-CD set at $30, and the nine-CD box at $240 – I decided to bypass the big box because, though it contained a few mildly interesting items (like the initial Ann Arbor, Michigan version of the song “John Sinclair,” which John played on a National metal guitar like the one Delta blues musicians used in the 1920’s and which sounded even more like traditional blues than the one on Some Time in New York City, and a jam session with another great 1960’s artist who died too soon, Phil Ochs), I didn’t think it was worth the investment.
Instead, my compromise was to order the two-CD version and also buy the CD of Some Time in New York City to make sure I’d have at least one version of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” I’m glad I did, because even in truncated form (Sean’s edit omitted not only “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” but the original single’s B-side, Yoko’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” a great mix of politically conscious lyrics and 1950’s girl-group rock which when I first heard it I called, “Gloria Steinem Meets The Shirelles”), the two One-to-One concerts are both energy rushes throughout and among the most stunning parts of Lennon’s truncated legacy as a solo artist.
A Digression: Yoko’s Musical Masterpieces
One of the most curious aspects of the early-1970’s period in the careers of John Lennon and Yoko Ono was that she was making much better music than he was. While he was putting out mediocre albums like Some Time in New York City and Mind Games, she was making two album-length masterpieces, Approximately Infinite Universe (1972) and Feeling the Space (1973). In 2017 a reissue label called Secretly Canadian did welcome re-releases of six albums featuring Yoko: Two Virgins, Life with the Lions, Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space. I can’t recommend the last two highly enough. (Marc Masters’ review of Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space can be read at https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-fly-approximately-infinite-universe-feeling-the-space/.)
Yoko made a huge strategic mistake by presenting herself musically with her most forbiddingly avant-garde singing and composing. The first record of hers I heard was “Cambridge 1969,” an improvised jam session recorded at a concert at Cambridge University with John on feedback guitar, John Tchicai and John Stanley on saxes, and The Beatles’ road manager, Malcolm Evans, with an alarm clock that ticked away throughout the performance. The whole event was called “A Concert of Natural Music,” but the Down Beat reviewer called it “some of the most unnatural music I’ve ever heard in my life.” He compared it to a previous Ono performance in 1968 with avant-garde jazz great Ornette Coleman and said that at least that time Yoko’s vocal sounds were recognizably those of an orgasm. On “Cambridge 1969” she just screamed start to finish.
For the morbidly curious, “Cambridge 1969” is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtdDU1tdoFU&list=RDEtdDU1tdoFU&start_radio=1. One thing I hadn’t known about the performance until I watched it there was that the song went on for another hour after the part in which John and Yoko appeared, in which Tchicai and Stanley continued on and turned it into an extended free-form instrumental jam. I got it when it came out on Life with the Lions, with a second side of bits and pieces paying tribute to the baby John and Yoko had just lost when she miscarried. That gave me a longtime allergy to Yoko’s music and led me to join in on all the sexist jokes about her, including one I made up myself: “They say love is blind. John and Yoko are proving that it’s deaf, too.”
My first intimation that Yoko Ono could do normal-sounding pop music came in 1973, when I bought John Lennon’s single “Happy Christmas/War Is Over.” The B-side was Yoko’s “Listen, the Snow Is Falling,” a beautiful, innocent children’s ballad based on the traditional “The Riddle Song.” But I didn’t follow up that interest and I didn’t hear any more of Yoko’s normal music until the Double Fantasy album, which alternated John’s and Yoko’s songs, came out in November 1980, three weeks before Lennon was killed.
Not long after Lennon’s death, I got a couple of used singles from Ono: “Midsummer New York” b/w “Mrs. Lennon” from Fly and “Death of Samantha” b/w “Yang Yang” from Approximately Infinite Universe. I was stunned by both of them. “Midsummer New York” was an obvious rewrite of Mae Boren Axton’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” which in 1956 had become Elvis Presley’s first nationwide hit (and first release on a major label, RCA Victor), but the literal terror with which Yoko injected her new lyrics (“The whole world is shaking, it’s shaking, it’s shaking”) and her use of extended vocalism as a spice rather than the main course I found intensely moving. The flip side, “Mrs. Lennon,” was a macabre and eerie anticipation of the tragedy of Lennon’s murder:
“Husband John extended his hand,
Extended his hand to his wife,
But he finds, suddenly he finds,
That he has no hands.”
“Death of Samantha,” Yoko’s second single release from Approximately Infinite Universe, seemed even more premonitory:
“People say I’m cool, yeah, I’m such a cool chick, baby
Every day I thank God that I’m such a cool chick, baby
When I’m on the phone, I thank God
My voice sounds smooth and clear, without a trace of tears
When I’m at work, I thank God
I have the smile my mom used to say lit the day.
But something inside me, something inside me died that day.”
When I first heard this in early 1981, with the psychic wounds from the murder of John Lennon still raw in my soul, I couldn’t help but wonder, “How did she know?” It wasn’t until I read Donald Brackett’s 2022 biography Yoko Ono: An Artful Life that I found out the “something inside me” that “died that day” hadn’t been an eerie anticipation of her husband’s murder, but one of the skuzziest things he ever did to her. In November 1972, responding to Richard Nixon’s overwhelming landslide re-election, John had taken another woman into his and Yoko’s bedroom and fucked her, making as much noise as possible. Their guests put on a Bob Dylan album and cranked up the volume to drown out, as much as possible, John’s in-your-face adultery.
I was so moved by these two singles that I ordered collectors’ copies of the Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space LP’s. They struck me as two of the finest rock albums ever made by a woman artist. In fact, in the late 1980’s I regarded them as two of the seven best albums ever made by women, along with Patti Smith’s Horses and Easter (which, by the way, contains a song called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger”), Chryssie Hynde and The Pretenders’ Pretenders and Learning to Crawl, and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Kaleidoscope. After I read Brackett’s biography I ordered the Secretly Canadian CD reissues of Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, Fly, Approximately Infinite Universe, and Feeling the Space and found them as great as ever.
I also learned that Feeling the Space had originally been intended as a two-record set, like Approximately Infinite Universe, and a concept album about feminism and women’s equality. The Secretly Canadian CD of Feeling the Space contains some of the deleted songs as bonus tracks, as well as an intriguing version of the song “Coffin Car” recorded live at the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard University in 1973. Considerably starker than the one on Feeling the Space – it just features Yoko singing and playing piano and discreet rhythm guitar by Lennon – it was prefaced with an extended stage rap in which Yoko expressed her frustrations at the way the world saw her and John as a couple and how that reflected the oppression of all women. Marc Masters quoted a bit of it in the above-cited Pitchfork.com review, but it deserves to be read in full:
“What happened to me was I was living as an artist and had relative freedom as a woman, and was considered a bitch in this society. Since I met John, I was ‘upgraded’ into a witch, and I think that’s very flattering. Anyway, what I learned from being with John is that the society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man, a man who is one of the most powerful people in our generation. And some of his closest friends told me I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should probably give up my work, and that way I’ll be happy. And I got those advices, and I was lucky I was over 30 and it was too late for me to change. But still, still, this is one thing I want to say to the sisters, because I really wish you to know that you are not alone. Because the whole society started to attack me, the whole society wished me dead, I started to accumulate a tremendous amount of guilt complex, and as a result of that I started to stutter. And I’ve considered myself a very eloquent woman, and also an attractive woman, all my life. And suddenly, because I was associated with John, I was considered an ugly woman, an ‘ugly Jap,’ who took your monument, or something, away from you. And that’s when I realized how hard it is for women. If I can start to stutter, being a strong woman, and having lived 30 years by then, learned 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 it’s a song that I observed in myself and also in many sisters who are riding in coffin cars.”
Hearing the One-to-One Concerts Today
For John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the One-to-One concerts on August 30, 1972 were among the artistic high points of their relationship. Backed by the excellent band Elephant’s Memory, who also played on Some Time in New York City and Approximately Infinite Universe, the concerts – or at least some of John’s songs – had previously been released on an LP and cassette in 1986 as a single album. At least this edition included “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” though it deleted Yoko’s screaming background vocals from Lennon’s cover of the Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller song “Hound Dog,” which he performed as a tribute to Elvis. (John and Yoko had attended Elvis’s big concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City a few months before, and John had treated it as almost a religious experience.)
One surprise from the current release was that Yoko performed one of the songs she would later release on Approximately Infinite Universe, “Move On Fast,” during the concerts. It’s hard to escape the impression, listening to Some Time in New York City and Approximately Infinite Universe back to back, that Yoko was saving her best material for her own album. Another surprise is on the song “Born in a Prison,” in which Yoko sang lead and John sang backup on both Some Time in New York City and the concerts. John was supposed to join Yoko on the choruses, but he was unable to blend his voice with hers effectively – and for those who immediately assume, “That’s because Yoko couldn’t sing,” she’s in tune and on pitch and he’s the one who can’t keep up with her. The mismatch is even worse on the live versions than it was on the studio album.
The set list on both concerts was the same except for the final song, which appears only on the evening show: an extended jam on “Give Peace a Chance” that lasts 10 minutes and 40 seconds. This is prefaced by Yoko reading the quote from Adolf Hitler that started this article, which had been rediscovered in the late 1960’s by American peace activists who noted the similarities between Hitler’s and Richard Nixon’s “Law and Order” rhetoric. Indeed, when I was playing the One-to-One concert CD for my husband Charles, when Yoko did her song “We’re All Water” and began it, “There may not be much difference/Between Richard Nixon and Hitler/If we see them naked,” he interjected, “Actually there’s a very big difference.”
With what’s going on in the U.S. today, I’ve often called Nixon the Jekyll-and-Hyde President. Jekyll-Nixon actually tried to do some things that would have been good for the country. He signed into law all the big environmental protection laws, including the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, that current President Donald Trump is doing his best to destroy. Jekyll-Nixon seriously proposed a national health insurance plan that would have covered more people than the one eventually enacted under Barack Obama, and also proposed a guaranteed national income. Hyde-Nixon kept the Viet Nam War going four years longer than it should have, and authorized a political scorched-earth campaign against his opponents that included the Watergate break-in and a number of other so-called “dirty tricks.”
By contrast, Donald Trump is just a monster, a profoundly psychopathic person whose only motivations for wanting to be U.S. President were to increase his bank balance and soothe his easily bruised ego. Looking back on the last 60 years in American history, we can see the increasing authoritarianism of Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and now Trump. The words Yoko quoted from Hitler – “The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. … [T]he Republic is in danger. Yes, danger from within and without” – sound far more like Trump’s rhetoric than Nixon’s, and listening to them now is especially chilling in the middle of Trump’s attempt to turn America from an imperfect republic to a nation ruled by a strongman with absolute power.
The One-to-One concerts today stand as a testament to the power of John Lennon and Yoko Ono as artistic collaborators. Given that they came right after their most politically conscious album, Some Time in New York City, they are soaked in early-1970’s Leftism, some of which dates rather badly while other aspects seem all too relevant today. Though Sean Ono Lennon has regrettably joined today’s “cancel culture” in deleting one of the most impassioned and insightful songs his father ever wrote, what we have is still very much worth buying, playing, and cherishing.
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