Concert appearances by John following the dissolution of The Beatles can be counted on the fingers of one hand. George was first off the mark with his 1971 show to relieve suffering in Bangladesh, by which he single-handedly invented the concept of the big rock charity show, and Paul wasn’t far behind with Wings, starting small and winding up in arenas. Ringo bided his time before launching his All Starr Band, a good-time supergroup with changing personnel and repertoire that enabled old timers to strut their stuff in the autumn of their years.
John, on the other hand, seemed strangely reluctant to set foot on stage, perhaps due to stage fright, perhaps because stage appearance might jeopardise his uncertain immigration status in the US, perhaps because he simply couldn’t be bothered. In August of 1972, however, he topped the bill at what was called the One To One concerts, afternoon and evening shows at Madison Square Garden in New York that attracted 20,000 each, all for charity.
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Backed by New York rockers Elephant’s Memory – christened for the occasion The Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band and augmented by Yoko, drummer Jim Keltner and a second bass player – John’s sets at these shows were filmed and while various clips of varying length have been shown over the years, the whole show – or most of it – has now been turned into a 90-minute movie, the upgrading process overseen by a team headed by Sean, his son. I watched it last week at the Addlestone Light Cinema near Chertsey, a wonderful picture house where the comfy seats are huge and recline, alongside five others in a screening room that could have housed 100 or more.
It was not clear whether I was watching the afternoon or evening performance and it may be that what was up on the occasionally split screen was what the producers considered to be the superior song renditions from both. Either way, it was clear that John meant business. He’d put the Elephant guys through their paces over the preceding days and, in his dirty jeans, military shirt and cowboy boots, he’s the generalissimo at the head of a small revolutionary army intent on getting across an agitprop agenda in line with his soon to be released Some Time In New York City LP.
As the world knows, Some Time… was neither an artistic nor a commercial success, its strident lyrics about feminism, racism, Irish troubles and the Attica prison riots set to fairly basic rock and roll that somehow never reached the musical standards we expected from John, this despite production from Phil Spector who was watching over the recording process at the Garden. Nevertheless, Elephant’s Memory played with plenty of heart, especially saxophonist Stan Bronstein, who soloed prodigiously, and, to lesser extent, guitarist Wayne Gabriel. Keltner was no doubt brought on board to ensure that everyone kept proper time.
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Yoko played an electric piano and gamely sang four songs in her customary shrieking style, a bit squeaky on the top notes, her braless chest leaving little to the imagination behind a white top adding to the rather curious nature of her unorthodox musical approach. “Open your box, open your trousers, open your sex, open your legs,” she yelled during ‘Open Your Box’, the B-side of John’s ‘Power To The People’, adding that it was banned in the USA. Not surprising really. Her other songs were equally uncompromising.
But it was John they’d all come to see and he doesn’t disappoint, even if many of the songs he sang from the upcoming Sometime In… were unfamiliar to the enthusiastic audience. For all but one he played a reddish-brown Gibson Melody Maker guitar worn high on his chest, Beatles-style, probably the same one I clocked on the sofa in the house he was occupying in LA in November of 1973, switching to a Gibson Thunderbird to play bottleneck only on ‘Cold Turkey’. He stuck to rhythm throughout, barring up and down his fretboard which, to some extent, he used as a conductor’s baton to marshal the band. He left the trickier guitar parts to Wayne Gabriel. It was the first (and last) band I’d ever seen with two bass players.
It was telling that ‘Come Together’, from Abbey Road, was rapturously received – before playing it John stated it would be the only nod to his past – and after feeling his disease John sang “over you”, not “over me”. He changed the words in ‘Imagine’, too, referring to the “brotherhood and sisterhood of man”, in keeping with his newfound feminist solidarity. His readings of both ‘Cold Turkey’ and, most especially, ‘Mother’ were incendiary. Before ‘Mother’ he instructed Keltner to “keep it steady” and you could have heard a pin drop in the Garden as John intoned ‘Mother, you had me but I never had you,’ his throat searing vocals screeched as if his life depended on it. I also rather liked ‘New York City’, played at the start as an update to the 1969 Beatle travelogue song ‘Ballad Of John And Yoko’, and he certainly enjoyed himself on ‘Hound Dog’, the penultimate number of his set.
The combined cast of thousands – acts who’d played before John for about five hours if contemporary accounts are to be believed – came on stage to join in ‘Give Peace A Chance’, played at John’s insistence with a reggae rhythm. Among them were Stevie Wonder, Melanie, Roberta Flack, members of Sha Na Na, Spector, David Peel, Alan Ginsberg and the girls from a New York band called Teenage Lust whom I would befriend during my New York stint two years later. Realising that the melee was getting out of hand, John and Yoko disappeared from the stage without taking a final bow, their contribution over.
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At times during the film the camera focuses exclusively on John, his face filling the screen to the extent that you can make out the individual hairs of his sideburns, his slightly pinched nose and the strong lenses in his tinted granny glasses. His command of the stage is absolute and if this footage was scrutinised by Nixon’s henchmen they would have detected the extraordinary intensity of John’s performance, communicated to an adoring crowd that, should he have wished, would have followed him anywhere, not least the Capitol Building in Washington DC, to protest against the iniquities of American’s ruling elite. It’s no wonder they wanted to chuck him out.
(Screen grabs courtesy of Lisa Pettibone, aka Mrs C.)
