(The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection) Ben Urish, Ken Bielen-The Words and Music of John Lennon-Praeger (2007) (4 page)

it was largely and to some degree unfairly dismissed as totally self-indulgent. It

remains, though, the least interesting of their three avant-garde albums.

The rolling sTones rock and roll circus

With the White Album released, The Beatles made a promotional film

for the single “Hey Jude” / “Revolution.” This led to them discussing what

The Ballad of John and Yoko, Late 1968 to Early 1970    7

would eventually become the
Get Back
sessions. Meanwhile, Lennon and

Ono rehearsed and filmed a segment for
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll

Circus,
a concert film made up of various British rock acts performing in a circus

setting with the Rolling Stones hosting and capping off the show. Lennon’s

impromptu band was called The Dirty Mac and included Eric Clapton, who

took part in The Beatles’ recent recording sessions and who would work with

Lennon fairly regularly for the next year.3

They ripped through a passionate version of Lennon’s “Yer Blues” from

the White Album, and then a fast-paced jam featuring Ono, tentatively titled

“Her Blues” and later titled “Whole Lotta Yoko.”4 Had the film been released

in 1969 as originally planned, it would have furthered Lennon’s stance as a

performer away from The Beatles, clarified The Beatles’ dissolving nature,

and showcased Lennon and Ono’s artistic partnership for a much larger audi-

ence than their joint albums received. However, the film was unreleased for

decades, by which point it was a time capsule and curio, though no less

welcome for being so.

life wiTh The lions

The couple’s next collaboration,
Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the

Lions,
is more varied, more successful, and yet slightly more derivative than

Two Virgins
in that it utilizes ideas from the Fluxus art collective of which

Yoko had been part. The title makes a pun on the old British radio program

Life with the Lyons
starring performers Ben Lyons and his wife Bebe Daniels,

and is a wry commentary on the media circus in which Lennon and Ono

found themselves embroiled at the time. The back cover is the now-famous

photo of their arrest on drug charges, and the front cover set the tone for

the album—Ono is pictured in her hospital bed (shortly after she suffered

the first of three miscarriages) with Lennon leaning on cushions at her side

on the floor.

The album opens with a live recording titled “Cambridge 1969” docu-

menting Lennon’s second professional non-Beatles music performance since

their formation. Since the
Rock and Roll Circus
performances of “Yer Blues”

and “Whole Lotta Yoko” would remain unreleased for another quarter cen-

tury, this was the first available on-record public performance of Lennon’s

free-form guitar playing. It was more assured and developed than it was in

its formative stage on
Two Virgins.
The focus, however, is on Ono’s vocals;

Lennon’s work, unexpected and fascinating, remains in support and coun-

terpoint to her efforts. Other musicians join in eventually, and the effect is to

clarify Lennon and Ono’s work in juxtaposition to them.

“No Bed for Beatle John” follows and is the standout track on the album.

It begins quietly as Ono reads / chants / sings newspaper articles detailing

her hospitalization and the scandal over
Two Virgins.
Soon, Lennon joins in

a whispery semi-falsetto voice performing a news article about his and his

8    The Words and Music of John Lennon

first wife Cynthia’s divorce. Lennon’s voice is in the background of Ono’s as

a harmonic countermelody of sorts. The simple fun of the appealing idea is

countered by the mournful tones of the vocals, and the pair’s erratic phrasing

that undercuts the rational structure of the news reports. The effect is uneasy

and disconcerting; yet, as “unfinished” music, it is assumed that the listener

is encouraged to grab some reading material and chant along, perhaps chang-

ing the overall effect.

Intriguingly, in a bootleg recording from The Beatles’
Get Back
sessions

of January 1969, a couple of months after “No Bed for Beatle John” was

recorded, Lennon and the band jam to “Good Rockin’ Tonight” singing the

lyrics of “I heard the news” while Paul McCartney reads a negative news-

paper account of The Beatles’ recent exploits. This does not appear to be a

conscious development of the idea, but rather both Lennon and McCartney

engaging in a little passive-aggressive communication. A humorous variation

of the idea is included in the
John Lennon Anthology
set that was released in

1998. Lennon imitates Bob Dylan by reading newspaper passages in a Dylan-

esque voice while accompanying himself on guitar.

Next is “Baby’s Heartbeat,” which is a fuzzy-sounding loop of the heart-

beat of their unborn and ultimately miscarried child. It becomes trance-like,

in an odd parallel to the ending of Lennon’s Beatle track “I Want You (She’s

So Heavy)” released on the
Abbey Road
album five months later. In shock-

ing similarity to that track, it ends startlingly and abruptly. Knowledge of the

miscarriage layers this track and the next one, “ Two Minutes of Silence, ”

with palpable sorrow.

“ Two Minutes of Silence” might more accurately have been titled “Two

Minutes of Ambient Sounds Wherever You Are” and has its roots in similar

works, notably by Ono’s fellow Fluxus member John Cage.5 But coming as it

does after “Baby’s Heartbeat,” the listener cannot help but contemplate the

pain of the expectant parents’ loss. Lennon’s drive for sheer personal honesty

in his artistic endeavors would expand and become clearer in the next year as

The Beatles broke up and he began his post-Beatles career. The simple and

direct emotional stillness is very powerful, and even more poignant when

one considers Ono’s public remembrance for Lennon after his killing was a

request for 10 minutes of silence.

The album finishes with “Radio Play,” which consists of a radio being played

as if it were a musical instrument. It is turned on and off, and the tuning dial

is spun at random. We hear spoken words, occasional fragments of music, and

sometimes just static, whines, and whistles. As with other such Lennon and Ono

pieces, background noises can be discerned, adding various layers of sound.

“Give Peace a chance”

At the end of May 1969, The Beatles’ single “The Ballad of John and

Yoko” was released. The lyric was a short musical account of and Lennon’s

The Ballad of John and Yoko, Late 1968 to Early 1970    9

editorial on the couple’s recent newsmaking exploits. Lennon’s wish for

documenting and explaining his activities had often been veiled in previous

Beatles songs. But the group’s time in India, coupled with Ono’s influ-

ence, helped Lennon to become more comfortable with seeing his life,

ideas, thoughts, and activities as direct rather than indirect sources for his

art. Communicating his current personal emotional and philosophical states

became the prime aspect of his artistic agenda, as formatively evidenced by

such earlier Lennon Beatles numbers as “All You Need Is Love” and “Revo-

lution.” Lennon pursued this not only in his experimental albums with Ono,

but, as noted, in his more mainstream songs as well. “The Ballad of John

and Yoko” is one of the most explicit examples of this exploration. Interest-

ingly, only two of The Beatles, McCartney and Lennon, play on the track.

Despite the lack of airplay—due to the song containing the line, “Christ,

you know it ain’t easy” in the refrain—the single was a top-10 hit in the

United States for the band.

Five weeks after the release of “The Ballad of John and Yoko” came the

first non-Beatles single released by a Beatle, which provided further evidence

that the group was fracturing and that Lennon’s artistic goals were shifting.

It was credited as a Lennon-McCartney composition, though McCartney

had no hand in its creation. It also had only two Beatles playing on it, this

time Lennon and Starr, and was credited to the Plastic Ono Band, the public

having never encountered The Dirty Mac. The song was the protest anthem

“Give Peace a Chance,” purposely designed by Lennon to supplement or

even supplant “We Shall Overcome” as a popular song of solidarity and war

protest.6

The Plastic Ono Band became the moniker for Lennon’s musical efforts

for almost the next three years and was basically the name of whomever he

rounded up to create the group at that particular time. It was not a fixed

group, even if Lennon did draw from a pool of regulars. To counter Lennon’s

frustrations with The Beatles as a near magical entity, he simultaneously

declared that the Plastic Ono Band was both a band with no members and

a band where all who heard of it were the members; the band was “concep-

tual.” Publicity material for the band included plastic boxes with instruments

and recording equipment in them, declaring the packaging and equipment

to be the band itself.

“Give Peace a Chance” was composed and recorded in the couple’s

hotel room in Montreal as they staged a bed-in protest for peace. A crowd

of visitors, including several counterculture notables (Timothy Leary,

Abbie Hoffman, and Tom Smothers among them), clapped along and

sang the chorus while Lennon verbally exhorted them (“Everybody now,

c’mon ... you won’t get it unless you want it!”) through the tune. Later, in

the studio, Lennon had Starr strengthen the rhythm, sometimes creating

a sound eerily similar to a heartbeat, and added some singers to sweeten

the chorus.7

10    The Words and Music of John Lennon

The calculated simplicity of the song worked and still does. The verses are

a quick flurry of multisyllabic terms that “Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout,” which

jumble together almost into insensibility, whereupon they are replaced with

the simple statement of the chorus, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

The chorus is the message, but that is not all the song has going for it. The

humor and cleverness of the song’s construction is evident on the verses as

Lennon’s wordplay reduces the initially serious sounding terms into less and

less important topics, sometimes finishing with nonsense and non sequiturs

such as “bishops, fishops, rabbis, pop eyes, and bye bye, bye byes.” In the live

performance of the song a few months later in Toronto, Lennon dismisses

the verses’ importance. And as a sing-along chant, perhaps this is so. But

as a song, the way Lennon says what he does supports and illuminates the

message the song seeks to impart. The song ends with Lennon saying “OK,

beautiful, yeah!” along with the assembly cheering and applauding.

The flip side is a song featuring Ono’s vocals on her own composition,

“Remember Love,” accompanied only by Lennon’s finger-picking guitar

work. The song is a yearning number of pure nursery rhyme innocence

and simplicity, not at all like the other harsh vocalizations Ono had so far

produced.

“Give Peace a Chance” is so well known that it is hard to see it as contro-

versial, yet it was and still has the power to antagonize. Despite the fact that

it was the first musical offering of a (more or less) solo Beatle and carried the

Lennon-McCartney composition credit, the single was controversial enough

in the United States to only briefly make it to number 14 on the pop chart.

wedding album

The third of the couple’s nonrock albums was of a piece with the previous

two. The packaging was an attempt to include the public in on the wedding,

complete with photos, a copy of the wedding certificate, a photo of a piece of

wedding cake, and news clippings of their activities. This recording consisted

of Lennon and Ono calling out each other’s names in various ways (angry,

sad, fearful, teasing, etc.) accompanied by their amplified heartbeats for one

entire album side, and a sound collage of interviews and mundane snippets

(such as ordering room service) from their bed-in titled “Amsterdam” on

side two.

The first side, then, expands on the concept of “Baby’s Heartbeat” and

combines it with the well-known Stan Freberg novelty single from 1951,

“John and Marsha.” Here, the duo’s heartbeats are heard as rhythm back-

ground, and Lennon and Ono recite each other’s names for the entire side of

the album—as long as the technology of the time allowed without a break.

In context, it represents the blending and unity of the couple. It sounds as if

Lennon is intermittently crunching an apple, which might be seen as both a

sly comment on The Beatles production company Apple Records and / or a

The Ballad of John and Yoko, Late 1968 to Early 1970    11

continuation of the Garden of Eden theme introduced on
Two Virgins.
Or,

perhaps he was just hungry.

A section of the piece turned up on Ono’s 12-inch promotional single for