You can buy 'Remember - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Music Of John Lennon and Yoko Ono' in e-book form by clicking here!
"Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band"
(Apple, December 11th 1970)
Why?/Why Not?/Greenfield Morning I
Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City// AOS/Touch Me/Paper Shoes
CD Bonus Tracks: Open Your
Box/Something More Abstract/The South Wind
"Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???????!!!!!!!!"
Recorded
alongside Lennon's 'Plastic Ono Band' masterpiece with the same band along for
the ride (Klaus and Ringo, with Lennon playing some of the snarliest and wild
guitar of his career) 'Yoko/Plastic Ono Band' comes with the same cover, the
same mindset, the same primal screaming - but it doesn't possess the words.
This is probably the only solo album of Yoko's canon that sounds the way people
assume all her records do - later records will either return to her love of the
avant garde (Fly') or show a sudden grasp of the potentials of rock and roll
(especially the 1950s sound she probably discovered through her husband's
record collection - it's worth remembering that Yoko had little interest in
music till meeting Lennon and had had very little exposure in her Japanese
childhood - most of what she's done in her career had been 'conceptual art').
This record however is pure screaming at different speeds and in different
moods, with Yoko clearly responding to Professor Janov's 'primal scream'
therapy in a much more instinctive, guttural way than her husband's more
thoughtful processing.
Like many a Yoko record some of this works
really well and some of it doesn't, this time with all the better tracks at the
start. The frenetic six minute 'Why?'
is pronounced 'WWWHHHYYYYY?????!!!!!' and features one of the most OTT
performances of Yoko's career as her vocals and Lennon's unhinged guitar make a
far better case for the pair's unity than 'Two Virgins'. The song acted as a
rather good accompaniment to John's single 'Mother' (the two probably have a
lot in common as regards their source, with Yoko left feeling every bit as hurt
and abandoned by her parents as John was by his). Yoko then cleverly slows this
jam down to a crawl for the slower ten minute 'Why Not?' which features Lennon fooling round with
a slide guitar part as Ringo and Klaus keep the beat hard and funky. So far so
playful, but 'Greenfield
Morning' is one of the scariest and deepest avant garde songs in Yoko's
portfolio, a worrying ride through madness and grief across six wailed minutes
that sound like a CSN choral record playing at the wrong speed and was clearly
inspired by her 1969 miscarriage. The idea was lifted by Yoko from a tape of a
George-and-Ringo jam that no one's been able to identify yet but seems to
involve a sped-up sitar and some powerful drumming played backwards (was it a
home tape?) Overall side one is perhaps the most convincing audio verite
release bearing either John or Yoko's name and proves to be remarkably powerful
considering it's simply made up of screaming and badly played guitar, full of
the energy of punk with the concept of something a tad deeper.
Over
on side two, however, things don't look so good. 'AOS' is awful, Yoko simply repeating her 'Don't
Worry Kyoko' scream as Ornette Colman tries to ignore what's happening and
improvise his own licks on trumpet. Recorded live in February 1968, just at the
point when the Lennons were going out, it shows how much Yoko still had to
learn at the time and seems an awful lot longer than the seven minute running
time! 'Touch Me' (not
the rather pleasant pop song Yoko will record in 1981) is just a lesser woman's
'Why?' and features far more random screaming which suddenly ends for no
apparent reason with the sound of a tree falling over (or perhaps it's meant to
be the listener after all this noise?!) Americans apparently needing to be
protected from Yoko's line 'open your legs!' in case it corrupted them got this
track on the back of John's 'Power To The People' single instead of 'Open Your
Box'. The seven minute 'Paper
Shoes' is better, but doesn't involve much imagination from Yoko as she
simply mixes together various sound effects of trains passing by in all sorts
of directions (the train will go on to be a major symbol in Yoko's work,
becoming either handmade or mechanical depending on her mood, as they transport
things cerebrally as well as physically; here though it just sounds like a
modern sound effects recording all jumbled up and badly stitched back together
again). Yoko possibly intended the rather odd title to reflect her memories of
travelling from Japan to America penniless, without even affording proper
shoes, though without any lyrics or any message on the LP it's all just
conjecture on our part (though ;let's be honest that's never stopped us
before!) Side two ends up being the
worst example of audio verite released under John or Yoko's name, making even
'The Wedding Album' look interesting and
'Two Virgins' look like fun.
What
on earth do you make of an album like that? Well, one thing you can do is
ignore the second half of the album entirely and instead buy the CD which
offers three far more convincing outtakes from the sessions as a sort of
'alternate ending'. Our old friend 'Open Your Box' (the B-side of 'Power To The People' and
re-recorded for 'Fly') is turned from a three minute rocker into an edgier and
creepier seven minute version where Lennon hits a rich guitar groove. The 47
second 'Something More
Abstract' is just a bit of humming between takes, with Lennon quickly
trying to play it on guitar, but largely failing as Ringo admits defeat in a
heavy peal of cymbals. Finally the sixteen minute 'South Wind' points the way forward to 'Fly'
as Yoko screams, barks, purrs and meows here way through an improvisation with
only an unusual sound John's just discovered on his guitar for company. It's
more interesting than half the record, though it goes on at least fourteen
minutes too long! Overall, though, the CD of 'Yoko/Plastic Ono Band' really
embellishes the original album and proves that there's some thought gone into
Yoko's creativity along with the instinctive screaming. If you already hate Yoko
then this album probably won't change your opinion (though 'Approximately
Infinite Universe' just might), but if you have an open enough mind and don't
mind ending up with a rather deaf ear then this album has a lot to offer, in
its opening trilogy at least. Hopefully not all the people who bought this
album by accident thinking it was the 'John/Plastic Ono Band' album were too
disappointed (the records have very similar covers, the only difference being
Yoko having her head in John's lap not the other way around and there is no
title given on the sleeve, just the spine!) Like Lennon's set this record also
features Yoko aged five on the back cover, with her worried wide brown eyes
already hinting at her inner turmoil though the rest of her is smiling.
(Apple, September 20th 1971)
Midsummer New York/Mind Train//Mind
Holes/Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)/Mrs
Lennon/Hirake/Toilet Piece-Unknown/O'Wind (Body Is The Scar Of Your
Mind)//Airmale/Don't Count The Waves/You//Fly/Telephone Piece
CD Bonus Tracks: Between The Takes/Will
You Touch Me?
"Checking
the sky to see if there's no clouds - if there's no crowds then it must be
alright"
Though again recorded back to back with a Lennon LP
('Imagine'), this time around the pair were heading into very different
creative territory, though both are loosely linked with the theme of
'imagination'. Whereas Lennon tries to work out his remaining issues while
throwing in some reflections on life in the outer world, Yoko is more
interested in journeying inside the mind, exploring all sorts of different
musical avenues as they take her fancy. The curious title and many of the songs
comes from the side of Yoko's art that was taking up much of her time across
1971 - films - with Yoko the director of all sorts of unlikely avant garde
oddities in this period such as the memorable
'Up Your Legs Forever' (featuring several guest stars' behinds),
Apothesis (in which lots of balloons are dropped from one big hot air balloon),
'Smile' (in which Lennon does just that, slowed from fifteen seconds to some 75
minutes) 'Rape' (in which a terrified girl who quite genuinely doesn't know why
she'd being filmed gets pursued by a cameraman who just won't stop), 'Erection'
(not what you think - it's a building demolition shown backwards in slow
motion) and 'Self Portrait' (exactly
what you think, which despite the name was shot by Yoko and features more of
Lennon that you will ever need to see - before you go looking for it we advise
you to book your counselling sessions in first, you'll need them!) Perhaps
Yoko's weirdest project though was 'Fly' - nothing rude or provocative there
you might think but you'd be wrong for the 'fly' (actually around 200 of them)
explores the nude body of a sleeping woman - pretty fly for an avant garde girl
and guy. 'Fifty Shades Of Fly' anyone? The title track, in which Yoko imagines
she is the fly, provided the soundtrack for that film and indeed many of the
songs here were either used in or intended for Yoko's other projects.
The result is something of a mess, with many of the
lengthy songs needing a good edit and many of the superior shorter songs
sounding like they should have gone on for longer, but many of Yoko's most
famous solo moments come from this album for a reason and as usual there are a
few tracks that really stand out. 'Midsummer New York' for instance is a terrific rock song that
makes good use of a funky rock and roll groove and is one of her greatest
songs. Perhaps not realising the Lennons will soon be making New York their
permanent home Yoko is struck on a holiday visit there about how overwhelming
her old home city now seems - her heart beats in terror as the sidewalks seem
to tremble and soon everything is shaking. The backing band have clearly got
'Shake Rattle and Roll' in mind and they conjure up a nasty relentless hard
rock groove that Yoko desperately coos, wails and screams her way past without
success. The seventeen minute 'Mind
Train' is even better, as Yoko again uses the train as a metaphor for a
relentlessly moving object exploring the unknown. There aren't many lyrics to
this one, as two Yokos criss-cross each other with the line 'mind train running
through my mind' as if holding a conversation with each other as Lennon's slide
guitar and some funky Klaus Voormann bass get increasingly carried away.
On side two 'Mind Holes' is an atmospheric but ultimately rather
dull bit of psychedelic singing over a strummed acoustic guitar that would have
fitted right in on the similarly spacey 'Yellow Submarine' film soundtrack (Sea
Of Mind Holes?) The definitive version of Yoko's mantra 'Don't Worry Kyoko' comes next as Yoko borrows
one of Lennons' favourite phrases for a more personal use as she tells her
missing daughter ('abducted' by her dad Anthony Cox - Yoko won't meet her again
until the 1990s) from afar not to 'worry' and that her mum will come and find
her somehow, to the sound of a demented Chuck Berry-style riff. Next up is the
gorgeous, fragile piano ballad 'Mrs
Lennon' in which Yoko borrows her husband's 'Imagine' sound and feels
sorry for herself as she laments how she lost her 'silver spoon' (her family
used to be rich back in Japan before the second world war) and speaks out
against the Vietnam War ('Half our children are always killed you know'). The
track is impressively solemn and Yoko is an impressive pianist- thankfully of
all the many sounds Yoko tries out across this album it's this one she'll
return to most often across her next record and masterpiece 'Approximately
Infinite Universe'. 'Hirake'
(loose translation 'a collection of power across various societies') is
effectively another re-recording of 'Open Your Box' (already released as B-side
to 'Power To The People') with the 'censored' verse added back in ('Open your
trousers, open your skirt, open your legs, open your thighs!' which becomes
open your houses, open your church, open your lakes and open your eyes' on the
single!) The track then ends suddenly with the flushing of 'Toilet Piece' for thirty
seconds which isn't one of Yoko's more inventive ideas. Nor is 'O Wind (Body Is
The Scar Of The Mind)' which is more Yoko wailing, this time over session
drummer Jim Keltner playing tabla.
Side three is one of the longest twenty minutes of
my life and is by far the least convincing quarter of the record. It starts
with the wobbly atonal noise of 'Airmale' which lasts for a full eleven minutes of garbled
nonsense, with picked guitar and piano strings making for a most unsettling
noise underneath Yoko's vocal din. The song is the only soundtrack to Yoko's
film 'Erection', though what it has to do with a house magically ending upright
again after being demolished I'm not quite sure. The creepy 'Don't Count The Waves'
features Yoko having fun in the echo chamber and sound effects cupboard at
Abbey Roads and though the opening is striking it goes on far too long. The
nine minute 'You' is
just a continuation of the last track but performed slightly faster, with a
curious rattled electronic effect that sounds like a time portal is being
conjured up or something.
Meanwhile over on side four Yoko is pretending to
be a fly - for a whole 22 minutes. 'Fly' isn't bad actually even if Yoko does seem to think that a
fly sounds very like a horse but she keeps your interest more than some of her
avant garde works (though compared to side three anything would sound good!)
The record ends with 'Telephone
Piece' is a surprisingly old-fashioned phone ringing for a full 37
seconds before Ono picks up and says 'hello this is Yoko!' (was this planned
and especially recorded? I have a wonderful image of Yoko sitting round with
her engineers back in the Lennon's Scot house waiting for the phone to ring!)
This CD adds a couple of bits of ephemera - the brief 'Between The Takes' (which is just an
improvised scream over an even rougher sounding jam than usual) and the rather
lovely demo of 'Will You Touch
Me?', a song that sounds all sweetness and light here with Lennon
charmingly whistling along which will be transformed beyond all recognition for
the sinister re-reading on 'Season Of Glass' in 1981.
Overall 'Fly' is an inventive and playful LP
although inevitably given the piecemeal way it was made it's a very
inconsistent one, with very little worth listening to across side three or four
at all. Yoko is clearly looking round for inspiration now that she's used rock
and roll in an avant garde setting and is preparing to match Lennon at his own
game ('Mrs Lennon' especially sounds like Yoko trying to reach out to her
husband's natural style). Yoko isn't quite there yet, although 'Fly' is a
highly fascinating stepping stone towards making the most of that style and
will prove to be a valuable step forward to the discovery of 'songwriting' as
opposed to 'idea writing' on 'Universe'. However in many ways it's a shame that
Yoko will never be quite this adventurous again, with the slow funky groove of
'Mind Train' especially welcome and quite unlike anything else any other artist
would ever think of putting together. Unfortunately though no one else but Yoko
would spend 22 minutes of their life being a fly or warbling uncomfortably over
an unlistenable backing as she does for the entire side three. Our solution is
to find this record cheap and get rid of the second disc altogether and then
'Fly' really does fly, rather than plummet.
Yoko
Ono "Approximately Infinite Universe"
(Apple, January 8th 1973)
(First published as 'AAA 'Core' Review
#54' in July 2008)
Yang Yang/Death Of Samantha/I Want My Love To Rest Tonight/ What Did I
Do?!?/Have You Seen A Horizon Lately?// Approximately Infinite Universe/Peter
The Dealer/Song For John/Catman (The Rosies Are Coming)/What A Bastard The
World Is/Waiting For The Sunrise//I Felt Like Smashing My Face In A Clear Glass
Window/Winter Song/Kite Song/What A Mess/ Shirinkatta (I Didn’t Know)/Air
Talk//I Have A Woman Inside My Soul/Move On Fast/Now Or Never/Is Winter Here To
Stay?/Looking Over From My Hotel Window
"Nothing's
gonnna last, so take a bit of grass and move on - fast!"
ONE of the Ono-Lennons
spent most of 1972 crafting away on a cracking double album, chock-full of
staggering pioneering songs that covered a ridiculous array of styles the
performer had been painstakingly learning over the past four or so years after
being cast into the deep end of an alien art world, forsaking their amateur
status to drill a bunch of session musos at the top of their game and end up, a
few months later, with the best release of their career. For once in the pair’s
career, that someone wasn’t Beatle John. While Mind Games revealed a
tired, drained performer going through the motions (in Lennon’s own dismissive
words that year ‘it’s just another record, going round like any other record
does’), Yoko was working on easily the best songs of her career, a staggeringly
brave yet undeniably beautiful and listenable album that’s actually a better
best-of than any of the Yoko compilations out on the market, featuring nearly
all of the best songs of the misunderstood avent gardist’s career. And yes, I
do mean songs. Yoko’s early sound-effects-and-squawking experiments like Fly
and the Yoko/Plastic Ono Band album are badly under-rated and have their
share of good ideas if you’re in the right mood for them, but in truth their
off-the-wall subject matters and guttural screams were only ever going to be
enjoyed by a minority audience. Universe really is an ‘album’ though, to
be enjoyed by approximately everybody – true it has an underlying feminist
theme that shapes nearly all of the songs and makes this record an uncomfortable
listen for some, but even these are challenging anthems written in the rock
idiom rather than the rather empty sloganeering you might remember from Yoko’s
contributions to John’s B-sides of the period (not Listen The Snow Is
Falling, though, that’s just class). This album even has cohesion on it’s
side, with a similar but not-so-similar-they-sound-the-same atmosphere running
through most of the songs, a bunch of America’s best session musicians fully
devoted (for once) to making Yoko sound good and a glorious production sheen
that finishes the job.
It really is all
Yoko’s work too – every song is hers and there are no co-writes, although
Lennon naturally features on a couple of tracks (As an interesting
note, Yoko dedicates this album to ‘John – my favourite member of the second
sex’ and that’s sums up their relationship at the time pretty well – if this
album can be read as genuine comment on their marriage (and Yoko drops enough
hints that these songs are at least partly autobiographical) then Mrs Lennon
seems unable to decide whether to strangle John or give him a great big hug
half the time. The ‘lost weekend’ separation is only 18 months away and you can
hear quite a bit of that growing tension on this record – although Yoko still
admires and respects Lennon enough to use him as a producer (you can hear him
talk at the end of Kite Song for instance), as a guitarist (Move On
Fast), as a pianist (What A Mess, with Lennon’s goonish cry of
‘boogie woogie’ at the beginning) and as a harmony singer (I Want My Love To
Rest Tonight). Lennon always reckoned that Yoko’s Japanese background was
a good preparation for rock music (Japan’s most traditional art-form, the
haiku, is a short and fractured poem and is in a sense the three-minute rock
song of the poetry world) and the two fully-fledged rock-adrenalin basic bursts
where Yoko really lets herself go are two of the album’s best songs. But it’s
the glorious ballads, unwinding tunes and complex lyrics that make this album
the great little masterpiece that it is, a staggering achievement from someone
who had never actually made a ‘proper’ album of songs before and this
double-set reveals more attention-to-detail and sophistication on each
listening. Indeed, has there ever been two stranger back-to-back albums than Fly
and Universe? Sacrificing weird sound effects, bizarre screaming and
confrontational backing tracks, Universe gains by delivering tight,
concise songs, detailed lyrics that tell us of how Yoko is screaming inside but
can’t get anybody to listen and confrontational songs played to tight backing
tracks that pack a punch now, never mind back in 1973 when female performers
just weren’t meant to be able to do this sort of thing (grace Slick and a few
others aside). Not a bad swap, and unlike many experimenters who ’find’
’proper’ music from Frank Zappa to Tiny Tim, any accusations of Yoko ‘going
soft’ simply go out the window when you read almost any of the lyrics from this
album.
This double set is,
you see, pretty revealing about Yoko’s personal feelings, reflecting not only
on her growing unease at her marriage to John but also her troubled childhood
growing up in Japan, her confused relationships with the parents she hardly
knew, her regret at losing custody of her daughter Kyoko to her former husband
Anthony Cox, her own feelings of outsiderness cut off from her avent garde
world during her time with Lennon and her confusion at being a figure of hate
or at least suspicion for many Beatles fans (Prejudiced Beatles fans still
struggle to take in the idea that John had his choice of just
about any
female he wanted in the 60s and yet he still fell in love with a member of a
different ‘race’. This idea is quite palpably nonsense to our hopefully
slightly more modern and forward thinking age (but then again…), especially as
Lennon wasn’t singing about freedom and equality for nothing in his lyrics of
the day. There were however two more, often overlooked obstacles in the
couple’s relationship. The first is that – despite assumptions to the contrary
– Yoko is Lennon’s elder by seven years and this in a day when split-age
romances were even less common than they are today. The second is that Yoko,
like Lennon, was married when they met (albeit separated from her husband) – in
fact she had been married twice before she met John, which was enough of a
stigma to create a hoo-hah in the late 60s even if she hadn’t fallen in love
with one of the most famous men on the planet. While most fans know about
John’s son Julian (and presumably anybody interested enough to read this
detailed a website knows about John-and-Yoko’s son Sean), many Lennoniacs
forget that for a while John was also an adoptive father to Yoko’s daughter
Kyoko from her second marriage to Tony Cox. However, the couple were going
through their most harrowing period at the time they were meant to be ‘looking
after’ her– ie drugs, broken up Beatles, primal scream therapy and Cold
Turkey – and after a well-publicised car crash that injured the extended
Lennon family of 1969 (was Lennon on drugs at the time he was driving? Probably
not, but something that’s been hinted at in the years since too) Yoko’s former
husband, naturally afraid for his daughter’s safety, got a court to decree that
the Lennons were ‘unfit’ to look after Kyoko.
So far so natural, but Cox was so afraid that
Lennon would come looking for him that he promptly fled, in the eyes of the law
‘kidnapping’ his daughter and starting a new life for them both in mysterious
circumstances. This turn of events must have been hard on Yoko who never saw
her daughter again during her childhood years (Lennon saw equally little of his
son Julian in this period, possibly out of sympathy to Yoko or more probably
guilt and shame at the end of his first marriage) and this fact only added to
the misery felt when Yoko mis-carried the couple’s first baby together, also in
1969 (the pair recorded the baby’s heartbeat for particularly harrowing
listening on the second of their Unfinished Music
Series – Life With The Lions). Many fans have wondered if Yoko lost her
baby because of the couple’s escalating drug use – if so, what with the events
surrounding Kyoko as well, its no wonder that Yoko seems to be opening a
bottomless well of guilt and despair on parts of this album. Thankfully her
personal story—which seems to have only a miniscule chance of happiness on this
album— had two happy endings; the birth of son Sean in 1975 and a sudden
contact from her daughter Kyoko sometime in the 1990s - rumour has it the pair
are much closer nowadays after an edgy start.
Good songwriters need
stress and anxiety in their lives to shake them up and make them question what
is important to them – Yoko was unlucky enough to have more problems than most
during the 70s and in many ways this album is like a two-year-delayed outpouring
of grief in the Lennon/Plastic Ono Band mould, albeit with more melody
and layered production. Yet Yoko is content to show off her warmer side too,
engaging in a couple of delightful upbeat and optimistic songs that could
easily pass as fun-sun-surf period-Beach Boys or the Monkees at their most
care-free.
All that personal
angst and hummable pop songs only accounts for half of this double album
though: sprinkled throughout both discs are several pioneering and brave
feminist anthems. Many of Yoko’s attacks on the male species before and after
this album are simply embarrassing (Women Power on Feeling The Space springs
to mind, which almost rivals the godawful empty ‘girl power’ of the Spice Girls
in its sheer pointlesness . Has anybody else ever come up with a debut single
so stupid and so brazenly artistically bankrupt that they get away with the
chorus line ‘I really really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah’ repeated no less than
four times in a song? And what is it with the promo video for this debut
single—the ‘girls’ manage to insult a homeless person before even singing a
note of their first song?!? (One of them actually aims a kung fu kick at the
tramp while another goes ’ha ha’ - before the spice girls finally get on with
it, walk into a nightclub and sing. Well, do something that vaguely equates to
singing in the loosest sense of the word, anyway). And did you know the Spice
Girls are now knocking on the doors of the top 150 most successful artists ever
(in UK sales terms at least?!?!?!) How the hell did that happen? That’s nearly
the same success rate as the Kinks for goodness sake!! (And they took 40 years
to reach that point). Talk about Wannabees… (Rant over, now back to the
article).* see note 3 - but not quite,
thank God) and like Lennon at his worst Yoko’s sloganeering often makes her
songs feel like hard work rather than showing off her fine feel for melody and
production. On this album, however, there are no such worries – whether being
cute, intelligent, dramatic or downright rude, Yoko backs up her ideas with
some clever arguments and is more than a mite brave in putting such
controversial thoughts in front of an already-dismissive male-dominated rock
audience in the comparatively narrow-minded 1970s. Yoko even burned her bridges
with the few supporters she had in the name of art and her feelings – the
feminist movement dropped her like a brick after hearing Mrs Lennon express
sympathy for her tired-looking husband on I Want My Love To Rest Tonight. Most
Beatles fans who are none the wiser assume that Yoko doesn’t react to their
provocations in public because she’s stupid and none the wiser about their
attacks on her character. In fact Yoko proves her intelligence, bravery and
occasionally her humour several times on this album which – had this album
developed slightly more of a cult following – might have shut them up a bit
quicker (this album is by far Yoko’s best-loved record among her fans but
unfairly she seems to have precious few of those). It’s worth noting her too
that Lennon never addressed anybody else except Yoko as his ‘intellectual
equal’, even McCartney and he wasn’t exactly cowardly or stupid himself.
If Yoko still seems to be having a
surprising struggle with the English language in places (she’d been living in
America quite a while by the time of this record) you can take nothing away
from her vocals on this album – spirited yet accurate, feisty yet warm, most
musicians would give their two front tea-chest basses to sound like this. As
for the backing musicians—Elephants Memory sounded like a mess on the sprawling
Lennon epic Sometime In New York City; here they sound disciplined,
clever and—more than anything else—inspired. Best of all, however, is session
guitarist Wayne Gabriel—Yoko’s most sympathetic of her many musicians
throughout her long career, whose liquid guitar runs do a fair mimic of Yoko’s
reserved but deeply deeply passionate vocals. However, its Yoko herself who is
the star of this record—singing in a second language, writing in an idiom that
was alien to her for most of her life and writing deeply personal songs in the
knowledge that anything she said was going to come in for attack during this
uncomfortable phase of her life, her vision still shines out from this record
loud and clear.
I write this review in the full
knowledge that this double-disc set is quite hard to get hold of by the way –
so please don’t complain that they don’t have the CD on the shelves at Asda or
Morrisons. The only copy I’ve been able to track down formed CD two of Yoko’s Onobox
career history set (luckily the album is near-complete – but only near so
apologies for the two songs that are missing from this review) – so I write no
54 on this list either for the people who are privileged enough to have heard
it already or in the hope that the album will get a decent CD release of its
own one day soon and albums archives fanatics won’t have to mortgage their
houses to hear what I’m raving on about.
Yang Yang is a powerful opener with a gradual build-up
of tension, setting out most of this album’s plus points
from the word go. This song’s Eastern philosophy shares much in common with
George Harrison’s I, Me, Mine in the way it explores the imbalance of
ego without humility for the greater whole (or ‘yang’ without the ‘yin’). Yoko
builds the song to a great height in the second half, reaching an early wrath
of indignation about narrow-minded people who wouldn’t notice the world
changing if it happened right under their noses, which it is—or so she hints.
The song’s military-like precision and pace is counterbalanced by guitarist
Wayne Gabriel’s glorious liquid runs in the right speaker, setting out much of Universe’s
beauty and anger with aplomb and discipline.
Death
Of Samantha quickly shows us the other side of Yoko, a slow melodic and ethereal
low-key ballad which just oozes melancholy. Yoko may hide behind a character in
this song, but this tale about gradually realising you’ve given up your own
identity to live up to someone else’s opinion of yourself is obviously about
Yoko herself. Sung as if in a dream throughout, Yoko’s narrator can no longer
tell the real from the unreal, outwardly thanking and agreeing with the few
people around her who say she is still a ‘cool chick baby’ while inwardly full
of self-doubt and suffering a lack of confidence. Trying to remember how her
smile used to ‘light up’ her mother’s face, she reflects where all that hope
and magic went – deciding that even back in her childhood her smile disappeared
when she was alone and she no longer had to pretend to be someone else for
other people. By the last verse Yoko lets her guard drop, telling us that her
whole demeanour was ‘an accident – a part of growing up’ and an effort not to
get hurt - the drum rolls that build up
after this last admission just before Yoko has to go back to ‘acting’ her cool,
calm self is particularly clever. A great song about facades that would do even
Justin Hayward or Paul Simon proud, Yoko’s vocal is icy-cool in this song,
portraying the strong silent adult she likes to portray herself as in the
press, even while the lyrics point towards the vulnerable helpless child
underneath it all. No wonder Lennon fell head over heels with her – he himself
sang of hiding his true feelings several times in his career and of putting on
a front to ‘help’ cover up the vulnerability he felt in private, despite his
outward toughness. The detached manner of the song, especially the cocktail
lounge laidback jazz feel, works in contrast to Gabriel’s power guitar work,
which pierces the song with razor-blades of sharp emotion throughout., even
while the rest of the band seem to be innocuously laying down this song between
drinks at the bar. Yoko finally drops her icy demeanour for her heartfelt cry
at the song’s end: ‘what to do? What can you do?’, with the feeling of
helplessness that lies at the core of many of the tracks on this album.
I Want My Love To Rest Tonight is genuinely warm,
however, one of several gorgeous ballads Yoko dedicated to her husband in the
70s. Even this early into the album, when Yoko’s feminist oeuvre hasn’t
properly been laid out yet, she’s already questioning her attacks on male
society to some extent- or at least the times when she should use her attacks.
Yoko sees her tired and worn-out husband needs care and to some extent is
undermining her previous stance, reflecting here how her ‘man’ at least cannot
help the way he acts: he’s been programmed down the years by women as to act in
a particular way (As discussed, more than one commentator has pointed out that
Yoko provided the domineering spirit of his carer Aunt Mimi with the warmth and
unconventionality of his real mother. Forgotten by nearly every Lennon
commentator however is the fact that Yoko too always dreamed of a strong but
freedom-loving soul-mate in her early work – a ‘father figure’ who still
retained his childlike innocence throughout his life and far from being
disapproving of Yoko’s craziest, most off-the-wall ideas, positively encouraged
her. Say what you will about Yoko’s talent or Lennon’s for that matter - these
two were well-matched and seemed, at least on the surface, to be exactly the
sort of persons the other had been dreaming about for most of their early life).
Nothing is safe from falling apart on this album, with Yoko painting all the
things she believes in as having flaws—notably, she undermines her own feminist
songs coming up later on this album by giving us this opposite argument first.
It’s interesting to note how similar this song is to several Linda McCartney
records, starting off with solo piano before gradually being joined by an
orchestra and with lyrics showing a toughness behind their sweetness; polar
opposites in other ways they may have been but both songwriting Beatles were
well matched by their chosen partners. If Tonight is strong on ideas,
however, it falls down in the recording: Yoko’s vocals wobble off the note a
few too many times for comfort and her angular melody isn’t quite up to her
other efforts on this album. Still, the song picks up for the group performance
when Lennon joins in the vocals – although the lyric about males being
‘frustrated would-be presidents of the united states’ seems a bit harsh; after
George W Bush I don’t think many males would care to imagine themselves in that
role ever again.
The tempo picks up
again with What Did I Do?, the only instance on this
album of Yoko returning to her 60s screaming, albeit with a song attached
somewhere too. Yoko’s guttural squawks can be hard going over a whole album
it’s true, but Yoko can squeal like no other singer and her wordless piercing
wails are the nearest a singer has ever got to expressing vocally the
out-of-control feedback drone of musicians reaching for the very edge of what
is possible in music. The song, where Elephants Memory do their usual scary
magic by making an innocent 50s rock and roll beat sound scarily unhinged, is
punk three years early, with a primitive but great drum pattern, spiky
guitar-work and a basic lyric about things going wrong. Yoko might start out
talking about how something as trivial as losing belongings has caused her
frantic anxious mood – she herself admits after a few minutes she can’t
remember what she was looking for anyway – but the song takes a sinister turn
in the second verse where her ‘closet’ becomes a place of filed-away memories,
fears and doubts from her past, each with a story she’d rather hide. ‘Closing
the door real fast’, Yoko sets out on a journey across the world looking for
answers, accusing her partner of not helping her along the way, while the angry
rattled out chorus exclaiming variously ‘where is it? where can it be?’ and
‘what did I do?, making for a typical Yoko postscript, half self-questioning
and half accusing.
Have You Seen A Horizon Recently? is a slow bluesy song
with yet more saxophones dreamily skating across a background of rhetorical
questions similar in style to Yoko’s book Grapefruit (extracts of which
she sent everyday to Lennon while he was with the other Beatles and the
Maharishi in India, the point where most commentators believe their
relationship became more than just friends or fellow artists). The song is
interesting without being as ear-catching as it’s more boisterous cousins on
the album, although these lyrics – about the self-induced limits of human
potential and how we keep telling ourselves we’ll never amount to nothing, so
we don’t try – are impressive when you study them in detail.
The title track 'Approximately Infinite Universe'
kicks off the second side with an atmospheric song on the same lines: with an
approximately infinite universe out there to study why does the ‘window of now’
and all its problems keep blocking out eyes to the real questions of life?
These next batch of poetic lyrics also possibly touch on Yoko’s drug
addictions, of how the hundreds of holes in her arms from her injections are
there out of desperation to cover up the ‘hundreds of holes in her head’ and
later ‘the holes in her dreams’. Again, though, Yoko sings these seemingly
autobiographical statements in the third person, as if unable or unwilling to
face up to them being about her true self (many beginning songwriters use this
trick actually, as it’s an easy way of feeling less self-conscious about your
work). The song is again sung by Yoko in a detached monologue-sort-of-way while
the backing band cook up a storm behind her, with wailing saxophones meeting
another exemplary Wayne Gabriel solo, layered with lots of echo as if the
guitarist is having a conversation with himself. The tight drama of the song is
impressive, as is Yoko’s elliptical lyrics which seem to suggest that - despite
the isolation she feels - she takes some comfort from the thought that she is
just one of many millions of beings across the galaxy suffering the same
self-questioning self-destructive fate.
Peter The Dealer is another half-edgy, half-playful song about
Yoko’s drug problems, with Yoko getting annoyed first at her dealer for not
getting to her quickly enough and then at herself for her dependency on him.
The song doesn’t take itself too seriously, especially the arrangement which
lightens the tone by handing the main lick over to a honky-tonk piano, but it’s
more than simple comic parody: the relentless march of the song and its
military tempo gives the song a sinister vibe that suffocates us long before it
reaches the end of it’s relentless march. The lyrics also show Yoko’s
frustration behind some genuinely funny lyrics: the single-line chorus of ‘this
life is a hell of a lot of wasting time’ makes it clear that she can’t function
any more before taking her daily ‘fix’, a sorry state of affairs considering
that it was to ‘fix’ or at least hide from these daily problems that made her
take up the drug in the first place. The song does it’s best to distract us
with its ear-catching swagger and jokey comedic gait, but the bleakness of the
recording as a whole makes it clear that for the ‘inner’ Yoko, this is no
laughing matter. The lyrics feature a third take on the emptiness and smallness
of Yoko’s characters’ lives, juxtaposed against the equally empty but
infinitely bigger universe as a whole: “We count the stars and tell ourselves
this life is a hell of lot of wasting time’. A forgotten, impressive song that
makes a fine riposte to Lennon’s song Dr Robert .
Song For John is another sweet slow ballad without the irony
or biting kick of the other songs on the album, heavy on atmosphere (Yoko playing the piano with the ‘loud’ or
echo pedal full on, with crashing cymbals and added percussion makes for a very
moving sound), but not much in the way of composition. As the title makes
perfectly clear, this funeral-paced ballad is written directly for Lennon and
makes for quite a moving epitaph to the first part of their marriage together,
reflecting first on their shared dreams and desires together and ending with a
rather uncomfortable head-shaking over what they can possibly do together now
they no longer seem to be working as one. There are plenty of Ono-friendly
lyrics in this song, from the images of bare trees blowing sadly in the wind
after being so full of blossom so shortly before to Yoko’s final pause over the
line ’piled up like grapefruits’ - the book that Yoko published in 1968 and
sent several extracts from to Lennon during his stay with the Beatles in India.
(What is it with the Beatles and fruit? They gave us the Apple record label too
of course). Chances are you have to be either John or Yoko to understand most
of the images in this song and unusually for the personal-universal balancing
act the listener is more likely to feel excluded from this track than involved.
Catman (The Rosies Are Coming) goes through some
very strange territory indeed, being Yoko’s biggest feminist anthem on the
record, albeit one that mixes a claws-out chorus, obscene nursery rhymes in the
middle eight and seductive cat-like purrs throughout. The song starts off as a
sarcastic re-write of a typical male-chat-up line, with the female in the
assertive role before telling us that ‘the Rosies are coming to town’ – yet
another of this website’s references to the idea of the ‘rose’ as a modern
female rising out of the dirt of centuries of oppression (see Nuclear
Furniture, review no 88, for a fuller exploration of this theme). A sudden
flurry of drums just as the song seems to be about to fold in on itself leads
us back into more teasing-but-angry territory and onto some lurid sexual
imagery as Yoko recasts the traditional song ‘pattacake, pattacake’ from her
own peculiar perspective (you’ll never hear this rhyme the same way again). An
angular, scratchy brass riff then joins Yoko’s squeals on the song’s fade,
although she’s having a ball with her double-tracked vocals on the rest of the
song. Never mind the fears of selling out, Yoko makes the sentiments of
Lennon’s Woman Is The Nigger Of The World sound positively tame with
this cut. My friend Rosie is back again thinking this song is about her (Lizzie
too for her name-check on the middle-eight) – I give up, this is meant to be a
website not a phone book!
What A Bastard The World Is marks the return of the heartfelt feminist ballad; this character’s
drunken husband goes off partying without her and although she wants to
remonstrate with him she is so afraid of losing him completely that she fakes
being asleep and plays innocent to all that has happened. Married to one of the
album’s greatest tunes – so lovely is the melody line that this song would have
been a huge hit with more mainstream words attached, but that’s not really the
point of the song – this is Yoko, alone at the piano, playing out a whole
role-play in her head of which her partner is completely unaware, thinking she
is still asleep. The song undermines itself with a rather unnecessary coda
(telling us how Joan of Arc could act how she wanted but females of the 1970s
had too much to lose if they kicked up a fuss – a subject already covered
perfectly well by the role-play here) but is otherwise one of the biggest
successes of the record, reflecting first Yoko’s pain and misery, her no
holds-barred anger (‘You jerk! You pig! You scum of the earth! You good for
nothing!’) and eventually her remorse. This song may well be another made-up
tale but, like much of the material on this album, it rings too true to seem
fictional, especially given that Yoko like John in this period believed in
‘art’ reflecting ‘truth’. If so, then this is a scathing attack on Mr Lennon indeed
– pre-facing the known incident that led to the Lost Weekend where a drunken
Lennon ran off with another woman at a Yoko-hosted party, leaving his wife to
gaze wistfully at the floorboards, unwilling to interrupt and chastise her
husband, much to the surprise of her friends who seemed more angry with her
than with John. This song is almost that scenario played out in a song, with
the reserved Yoko wishing that she could raise her temper and get angry for
real—but she’s too scared by this sudden insight into being lonely again to
risk losing her husband completely. Forget the wish-washy songs about family
life that filled up most of Double Fantasy – this is the sound of a real
relationship being played out here, with the Lennon character not coming off at
all well by the song’s end.
Waiting For The Sunrise is another beauty, but one in sharp contrast to the worries of the last
song or indeed most of this album as a whole. Another elliptical set of lyrics
attached to a winning pop tune, this is suddenly Yoko glad to be alive and
eager to experience as much of life as possible, enjoying the time she is
spending with her partner. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also sounds rather
like one of Lennon’s early Beatles songs in its unbridled optimism and
enthusiasm and makes a fine companion also to John’s later-period song about
escaping problems and enjoying life, I’m Steppin’ Out. Yoko ends this
first album on an impressively bouncy note, unable to wait the whole night before experiencing the gorgeous sunlight filtering
into her window from outside. (More worryingly, given that this jolly track
seems to appear out of absolutely nowhere on this record, is this Yoko waiting
for her long dark ‘night’ of problems to be over, dreaming of a time of
’sunrise’ when her difficulties might have disappeared?)
It’s all gone wrong by
side three however. The second album of the double starts with the memorably
titled I Felt Like Smashing
My Face In A Clear Glass Window. Like most of Yoko’s tracks on the
Lennons’ collaboration Sometime In New York City, it shows Yoko had a
great gift for writing 1950s-style rock songs with a sinister edge. Like that
other album, it’s probably Elephants Memory playing here again and they cook up
a great Johnny B Goode-type storm complete with brass backing for Yoko’s song
of teenager-ish frustration at life, trying to get attention from a world of
parents, friends and partners that don’t seem to care if she exists or not. The
song makes it clear that if no-one will take any notice of Yoko’s narrator she
will take up vandalism – venting her anger by smashing up a phone-booth round
the corner and hoping that it will bring her some attention, with even the
wrong sort of attention better for her than being ignored. Most of this song is
obviously fictional – you can’t imagine Yoko smashing up pillar boxes somehow –
yet the pictures of her distant parents who hardly saw her growing up (in the
song her mother is dressed up like an old movie star and her father smells of
alcohol) ring at least partly true and her feelings of having nothing in common
with her peers is probably fairly true as well given the other autobiographical
clues we get in Yoko’s songs and her early work as a foreign left-field artist
scratching out a living in America with works that make even the ‘Tate modern’
prizes sound conservative in their approach. The song is played tongue-in-cheek
for the most part, but in common with most of this album Yoko lets down her
guard in the second half, suddenly singing straight about how alone and isolated
she feels. ‘Is it me that’s going crazy or just the world?’ she sings at one
point – telling how her hopes of receiving love from her parents are always
cruelly dashed and her tale of feeding her birthday cake to her dog when nobody
turns up to her party to share it with her would be hilarious if it wasn’t sung
in such a lonely and hurt way. Like many of the songs on this album, the
impressive backing suggests that Yoko has been borrowing her husband’s Chuck
Berry and early Elvis records, but the spirit is punk rock three years early.
Winter Song is back to Yoko’s prettier style, with a
gorgeously delicate not-really-there melody and some wistful lyrics hoping
that, like the seasons, her bad times will finally pass even if she feels the
ice ‘spreading rapidly’ and the clock representing her patience gradually
‘ticking away’. This song shares much in common with George Harrison’s early
solo work, especially that covered already on this list, being equally quietly
optimistic and full of images of nature always moving on and changing, but
there are two important differences. The first is the lack of religious
references in the song: Yoko’s world is very much man-made and she feels
spiritual debts to no one. The other is the idea that, instead of George’s live-and-let-live
nature, Yoko wishes that all of her fellow human beings will one day disappear
and leave her and John alone to appreciate the world, because from what she
feels from the world at large, only she and John deserve to see the world as it
truly is.
Kite Song is my favourite track on the album, with
typically Ono-ish imagery about trying to hold on to our dreams through life’s
obstacles, using the metaphor of a children’s kite and telling us about when
Yoko was forced to grow up and let it go. The lyrics might be poetic but the
backing track is pure rock and roll, cooking up a terrific storm with a riff
that Lennon himself would have been proud to have written (that’s John on the
overdubbed edgy, spiky guitar by the way). Reflecting on our missed chances in
life, Yoko recounts certain moments in her life when she realised the ‘kite’
was slipping from her grasp, including the time she was in a restaurant trying
to keep up with an impressive crowd despite never understanding the words they
were saying. Yoko’s vocal is at it’s best here, especially at the end of the
track - which has remained impressively together and cohesive for all of this
time - only to suddenly dissolve into near-chaos at the end, with squealing
saxophones, twirling keyboards, rattled drums and screaming guitar all heading
into feedback mode. There’s a stunning alternate take of this song on the six
CD Onobox that might well be superior to the finished version here. Yoko
misses a trick at the end of this slightly different version though – you can
hear her berating her co-producer John in the control room for letting the band
get carried away and messing up a potential take by having the whole band
descend into chaos a bit too early. Lennon’s reply, that it sounded alright to
him, must be the understatement of the year; all in all this is one of this
album’s most stunningly inventive, swinging and original tracks on a stunningly
original album.
What A Mess takes us back to the playful-sinister Yoko,
with an out-of-control piano lick from Lennon (who was never a natural player
of the instrument - there’s quite a few wrong notes at the end of the song!)
and a towering feminist lyric rubbishing the anti-abortion brigade. In truth
this spoof honky-tonk song sounds more than a little bit of a come-down after
the last song and for once Yoko sings the song as if she doesn’t fully believe
what she’s saying, rattling off her complex lyrics at a pace so fast she’s
struggle to imbue pathos into them whatever they were. Yet lyrically this piece
is the cornerstone of the entire album, with Yoko seeking to re-claim back
‘women’s bodies’ from the male domination she sees in the world and this is one
of the bravest, most obscene and at times witty set of words she ever put
together. Yet compared to the personal tale of What A Bastard The World Is
and the sheer glee with which Yoko sings The Rosies Are Coming, this
song feels strangely hollow when heard as a performance rather than read. Yoko’s
feminist anthems always sound much more impressive when related to her personal
story - here telling us that ‘equal is
not equal enough’ without telling us why she feels so strongly or what made her
think these thoughts in the first place is a bit of a lost opportunity. The
lyrics about dealing with ‘phonies’ point the way to Yoko’s later Double
Fantasy song I’m Moving On, suggesting that she might be talking
about Lennon again here (if so, then this description by his wife would seem to
make a mockery of his song Gimme Some Truth and the whole of the Lennon/Plastic
Ono Band LP.
Shirinkatta (I Didn’t Know) is another classy
song, most memorable for its beautiful repetitive piano lick which seems to
sleepwalk its way through Yoko’s head, as if she’s muttering words in her
sleep. This song’s lyrics about miscommunication and not realising the extent
of another person’s (John’s?) hardship is the perfect match for the tune. To
drive home the point about not being able to understand her partner or realise
how ‘in pain’ he was, the song’s only verse is sung in French, Japanese and
some other language (help!) before we finally hear it in English. We don’t
understand what Yoko is saying at first (well, not unless you’re extremely well
versed in European languages at any rate) and by the time we finally realised
what Yoko is saying— I didn’t understand you— we know exactly how the narrator
feels. Yoko sounds tired and weary again here, but still tries to rise to the
occasion by showing support, musically kicking herself for not noticing her
partner’s sorrows by repeating ‘I didn’t know’ several times over.
Air Talk comes next and is one of the lesser spots on
the album. With Yoko again narrating rather than singing over a sprightly
Elephants Memory backing, this is a curious mix of a very retro 50s and rock
and roll groove with some of Yoko’s most obscure and fragmented lyrics. The
basic theme of this song is that two people can never be perfectly in synch
with each other and will always have some part of their make-up that makes them
different from their partner—which is what makes us unique. ‘There is always
air between us’ sings Yoko, no matter how close we are in spirit, with a few
interesting verses about the Lennon’s being brought up in different cultures
and speaking different languages and yet they still seemed very compatible when
Yoko wrote this song, implying that some things about human nature exist across
geographical boundary lines.
Lennon provides one of
the best backing harmonies of his life on the side four opener I Have A Woman Inside My Soul, a decision you’d think
rather strange given this song’s title but no matter. In stark contrast
to the picture of two lovers heading their own sweet ways, the two Ono-Lennons
have rarely sounded as harmonious or as close as they do on this track. Another
slow and dreamy song, this is peculiarly relaxed for an Ono epic. It doesn’t
quite have the beauty or the attack of the other songs on the album, but the
jazzy accompaniment is pretty good even so and Yoko’s latest feminist statement
– trying to understand what her sexes’ place in the world really is, now that
they have more freedom and a little bit more power – is impressive. With more
metaphors taken from nature, Yoko feels as if she is getting a ‘message’ from
the things she is seeing – but can’t work out what that message is. On another
level, this song is Yoko growing up, trying to remember when she became a
‘woman’ rather than a child and when it exactly it was that boys were no longer
with girls. This song is the second-longest track on the album but, far from
overstaying its welcome, its quiet beauty makes you wish it would carry on for
a lot longer than it does.
Move On Fast is the album’s second classic rocker, with
Yoko racing a rasping saxophone to a quick-tempoed finish and putting her
squealing rock voice to it’s best ever use. The song’s punchy lyrics, detailing
how life is best lived in the here and now, are also perfect for a rock song
and the riff itself is a gem, perfectly moulded to Yoko’s vocals at her most
basic. Sounding more punk than punk rockers, Yoko’s screams were never more
suited to a backing track and the saxophones of Elephants Memory and more of
Lennon’s impressive guitar improvisations back her up well. Listen out for yet
more lyrical references to ’infinity’. As the album title implies, time hangs
heavy over this album, with Yoko worried that her problems will carry on
forever—and at the same time aware that all the things that made her happy seem
to have eroded away, willing time to speed up and get this horrible portion of
her life over with. The range of styles on this album is breath-taking and this
song’s juxtaposition after the last track is a masterstroke, being full of
punchy aggressive assertion and confidence in contrast to the last song’s
worries and self-doubt. Another feather in Universe’s multi-coloured
hat.
I could go on about that song all day – but the lyrics have told me to
‘move on fast’ so I will. Now
Or Never is yet another song in contrast, showing off Yoko at her
most lyrical with a very Dylan-like protest folk number about how mankind has
to act now if it wants to solve problems for future generations. The lyrics are
among Yoko’s cleverest, repeating the mantra of several period Lennon songs
with their assertion that ‘dreams we dream alone are only dreams, but dreams we
dream together is reality’. Yoko is also spot-on in her assertion that the 20th
century will go down in history as ‘the century that killed’ – sadly Yoko and
her contemporaries’ efforts to turn it into a ‘century of hope’ never quite
came off, though the Ono-Lennons worked harder for that end and were more
successful than most. Sadly the song has a rather weak tune to go with the
clever lyrics and the recording places rather too much emphasis on Yoko’s voice
(she’s really struggling with her tricky wording here and her efforts at
double-tracking aren’t in the same league as most of her sterling work on this
album). This song is no Give Peace A Chance admittedly, having none of
that song’s gee-this-all-sounds-so-wonderful-I-want-to-join-in spirit, but then
again it’s not as pointless and empty as Lennon’s Power To The People either.
Is Winter Here To Stay? doesn’t quite fit on
the album somehow, having more in common musically with Universe’s follow-up
Feeling The Space’s jazzy flourishes or Yoko/Plastic Ono Band in
the unwelcome return to Yoko’s wordless wails.
This is surprising given that the song’s title could pretty much be the
sub-heading for this album, with fears of darkness hanging around unwanted
forever, with the characters totally helpless in their attempts to shoo their
troubles away. In truth this is even less of an excuse for a song than Yoko’s
previous experimental material, such as flushing toilets or Yoko chanting
‘don’t count da waves’ for 20 minutes over a backing that sounds as if its been
lifted from the soundtrack of a Dr Who episode. The only song on this album to
approach ‘filler’ status, it’s a shame Winter wasn’t booted off the
album altogether – goodness knows this double-album is long and varied enough!
The album then rounds
off, uncomfortably, on its most depressing note with 'Looking Over From My Hotel Window'. Yoko, aged 39, looks from her
hotel window at the seemingly fulfilled and happy people below, wondering why
she isn’t allowed to be like them and, in her own words, ‘wondering whether to
jump off or go to sleep’. Yoko sounds like she’s fed up of the ‘world’s clowns’
image the Lennons had at the time and her spirit has been truly broken by all
her problems. Yoko also feels that stardom – or at least her partner’s stardom
- has cost her dearly, robbing her of her privacy without even giving her the
rock star’s aid of an audience that will listen to what she has to say – if
ever there was a ‘cult’ artist who should never had her work thrust into the
spotlight but should have had it adored by a small core audience built on
word-of-mouth then it was Yoko. The fact that all the attention she craves
comes because of who she married—a big no no for any practicing feminist—and
that most of that attention is critical, full of attacks from people who felt
Yoko was ‘using’ John at a time when probably the opposite was true, and you
begin to see why this is such a depressing song, with Yoko wondering why life
has led her into such a dead-end. Yoko’s couplet focussing on her missing
daughter, then in the hands of her former husband despite many years of
fighting to win her custody back, is particularly moving when you know of
Yoko’s story and it’s easy to imagine her walking to the piano and, unable to
sleep through her grief and guilt, coming up with this simple song. Like much
of the album, though, Yoko sings her lyrics as if she is detached (an effect
helped by the electronics on her voice which make her sound ‘alien’ and
incomprehensible to the world around her), even singing ‘no trace of resentment,
no trace of regret’ in one line although the rest of her paranoid, agonising
lyrics make it clear that she is full of both of these feelings. The only
saving grace for Yoko is the closeness she feels with Lennon – ‘show me your
blood John and I’ll show you mine’ – but even as she sings these words you can
tell Yoko is worried that he too is slipping though her fingers. The sudden end
of the song, with the last words floating away into the ether, makes for a
haunting close to an album that sounds very much like it was Yoko bringing us
up to date with her thoughts come 1973, when Yoko was standing at her
crossroads of her life, wondering what on earth can come out of the gloom to
spur her on. So mournful is this closing song that you half feel like jumping
off the window-ledge with her.
Luckily, her next
batch of albums find Yoko in a comparatively happy state of mind – even the
soliloquy over Lennon’s assassination that dominates Broken Glass (1980)
is comparatively upbeat and at peace with life, thankful for the happy times if
dreading the sad ones to come. Unfortunately for her, Yoko - like many artists,
her husband included - only writes her best material when she is unhappy and
sadly she never approached Approximately Infinite Universe’s casual
brilliance even partly again, happily because life got much better for her.
Yoko gets melancholy again many times over the course of her career but,
generally speaking, its because she’s remembering and re-living the awful
events in this troubled period. Maybe too Yoko’s melancholy fades because she
knows with this album that she’s finally put together a work of art that any
writer or singer would be proud of—Yoko was never going to get the whole world
to love her music, but with this fine album she came as close as she needed to
to prove to her talent to herself. Back
in 1973 many cruel commentators said that John Lennon’s Mind Games album
was a so-so record that finally had Lennon seeing the light by not giving over
half the record to Yoko’s warblings as had happened on Sometime In New York
City and various singles. Actually, the lack of Yoko’s songs on that
album were hardly because Lennon has ‘finally come to his senses’ as many
critics thought – surely it’s far more likely that Yoko would have overshadowed
her spouse if even the worst of these songs had been placed on Mind Games.
Even if Yoko has never approached again the best of this record, well, that’s
OK; most artists haven’t touched the depth, wit, melody and ideas of this album
either. A forgotten treat for
listeners with open minds and open ears Approximately Infinite Universe
covers nearly as much varied ground as the universe itself.
One
of the most obscure albums on this list, your best bet of finding this album is
to get hold of the superlative 6CD Onobox (if you’re feeling committed
that is – this set actually well worth the price and despite its 8 hours
running time has too little, not too much of Yoko’s work, although you might
not play the first ‘screaming’ disc too many times). A note will be added to
the website when (or if!) this album is
ever given a proper CD release. STOP PRESS: Did I really see an advert for this
album on CD via Tesco.net the other day?! I might have been hallucinating
(writing websites like this one will do that to you) but, just in case I
wasn’t, keep your eyes peeled. STOP PRESS YET AGAIN: I’ve managed to track down
a new ‘limited edition’ release of this album on 2 CDs from 1998. Worryingly,
it’s not even reached half of it’s 20,000 release yet in 10 years (mine’s numbered
9000 and something) so it’s not actually as obscure as first thought (bet you
won’t find it in the shops though).
Yoko
Ono "Feeling The Space"
(Apple, November 23rd 1973)
Growing Pain/Yellow Girl (Stand For
Life)/Coffin Car/Woman Of Salem/Run Run Run/If Only//A Thousand Times
Yes/Straight Talk/Angry Young Women/She Hits Back/Woman Power/Men Men Men
CD Bonus Tracks: I Learned To
Stutter-Coffin Car (Live)/Mildred Mildred
"I
came out of the darkness and into my house - the lights were left on but there
was nobody home"
Though
the subtitle credits 'The Plastic Ono Band and Something Entirely Different',
sadly that proves not to be the case. Yoko's follow-up to her best album
'Approximately Infinite Universe' is rushed, misguided and bludgeons the same
points she's just made so subtly on her last LP. This album was the first to be
recorded without John as a key part of her band (although his guitar cameos
on 'Woman Power' and 'She Hits Back') although
Lennon - as an example of all male-kind hangs over this record like a ghost.
Yoko has already tried to work out her differences intelligently across
'Universe' but she's clearly still feeling the rage of betrayal here on a set
of angry songs that are given strangely dispassionate performances (though the
couple are apart by this time, this record sounds as if Yoko has been doing a
lot of listening to the recent 'Mind Games' which features similarly
dispassionate performances of sad and guilty songs). Yoko has clearly worked
hard to sound more conventional on this album, working with 'proper' session
musicians rather than Lennon's friends for the first time and even adding
strings and lush backing tracks. But this just highlights her strangeness:
Yoko's always had a slight problem with natural pronunciation as anyone born to
a foreign tongue will always have but usually that adds to rather than detracts
from the songs. Here, though, presented to us as just another lush balladeer
it's notable just how much Yoko struggles to fit the role she's created for
herself. Her songs appear to come with conventional verse-chorus-middle eight
structures - but again hearing Yoko's revolutionary ideas in this setting makes
them sound more odd than they would in a musically revolutionary setting. Impressive
as the feminist anthems on 'Universe' were, hearing a whole album with nothing
but that point to make (without even the half-retraction of 'I Want My Love To
Rest Tonight' to sound more 'human') is also terribly tiring, as we lose Yoko's
past eclecticism for a series of songs that all say more or less the same thing
(woman = good, man = bad). On 'Universe' those comments came with examples and
motives and several thousand years of injustice behind what Yoko sings- this
album just sounds like Yoko going 'grrrr men!' for about half an hour. The
dedication, for instance, is 'the sisters who died in pain and sorrow for being
unable to survive in a male society'.
It's
as if Yoko has been listening to the feminist movement's 'other' big female
star of the early 1970s (Helen Reddy) who'd just scored a massive hit in 1972
with 'I Am Woman', a track which sounds as if it could have slotted nicely onto
'Universe' and takes the usual 'pretty girl singing a sensitive ballad' format
and turned it on its head. Yoko, after all, is an expert at taking things that
shouldn't work for her and turning them on their head. Only this is a stretch
too far - she's gone so deep into 'mainstream territory' this time that there
are less for fans like me who love her more fringe-based rock to love. By
walking into the lion's den to make her point, Yoko just sounds like all the
other lions, even if she's roaring against not with the pack. Like the sphinx
on the front cover, she's at her best when she's mysterious and unknowable, not
trying to sound like everyone else. The result is probably Yoko's least
convincing album and a surprise after such a strong rise up till now.
'Growing Pain' is the album's strengths and weaknesses together - the melody is
quite lovely, the backing is tighter than usual and the mellotron is a nice
touch - but Yoko doesn't belong in this
world as she returns to the theme of childhood with Yoko a 'battleship frozen
by my mother's anger'. 'Yellow
Girl' is an ugly jazzy song about racism and of an oriental girl always
on 'stand by' until something better comes along. 'Coffin Car' is about the best song on the album, a
sneering power rocker that sighs 'half the world is dead anyway - the other is asleep!'
However this band of session musicians have never been near a rock song in
their loves and though strong as a song this lacks the performance of
'Midsummer New York' or 'Move On Fast'. 'Woman Of Salem' is the start of a favourite Yoko
theme of identifying with witches, specifically those burnt in the middle ages
as 'people rush, waiting for the kill'. Yoko sings most of the song oblivious
to the people's anger but the song ends in an abrupt 'Why why why? Help Help
Help!' answered by 'Must Kill, Must Hang, Must Die!' Again the performance
doesn't make the most of another of the better songs on the album. 'Run Run Run' is a sleepy
ballad that features some truly awful singing and a chorus that sounds as if it
was lifted from Flanagan and Allen song 'Run Rabbit Run'. 'If Only' adds a touch of
blues to Yoko's style bag and seemingly returns to the party where Lennon
betrayed her. Yoko cut her finger the same day and wonders why her mind won't
heal like her body, while remembering how she stuttered when trying to make
casual conversation while her husband was upstairs making love to a stranger
and reflecting that all this time on it's still stuttering. It's a pleasant but
not very memorable song whose melody isn't up to its powerful lyrics.
'A Thousand Times Yes' is a curiously noisy jazz song with another full-on production
where Yoko's best vocal on the album goes unrewarded thanks to the clinical
feel of her surroundings. In the sing Yoko grows up asking 'why?' over and over
but she didn't realise that no one really knew how the world worked and that
the 'aware world' she imagined existed for grown-ups was really one guided by
fear. 'Straight Talk'
is a 'Sometime In New York City' style song with some sloppy jazz playing mixed
with rockabilly as Yoko pleads with the world to communicate with each other
more. 'Angry Young Woman'
is actually quite a philosophical soppy ballad in which Yoko identifies with a
young housewife leaving her children behind for a new life. 'She Hits Back' is a rather
cheesy song with a big grinning musical teeth as Yoko runs through a list of
body parts that don't work any more ('My ears are getting tired of listening
all the time...') 'Woman
Power' is the epic on the album and features some great noisy Lennon
guitar but the lyrics are curiously clichéd and sloganeering compared to the
multi-layered beauty of 'Universe' and the song soon drags under the weight of
its own musical body armour as a full on gospel choir join in too. Yoko then
rounds off with the sarcastic Marilyn Monroe style feminist coo 'Men Men Men'
in which she tells us that 'Johnny is God's little gift, cream and pie' and how
she wants her men 'clever - but not too clever and bad - but not too bad'. A
few more rhymes in the chorus ('I want you to try your rightful position'
doesn't even scan) and a less arch backing would have improved this song
immensely.
The
feeling from that song and indeed from the rest of the album is 'don't make
Yoko angry', but ironically 'Feeling The Space' would have been a lot better if
Yoko had allowed more of her anger to come over in the music. Instead it all
sounds rather contrived and it's a pity so many good ideas get lost because the
backing band are telling things 'straight' without the sarcasm or bitterness of
Yoko's work. The result is a curious and rather ugly LP that will remain a
rather ugly blot on Yoko's solo discography until after Lennon's death. Before
we go, though, the CD adds a couple of interesting tracks - a live version of
'Coffin Car' that's a lot more powerful than it ever was on record and a demo
of 'Mildred Mildred' that will be recorded for 'Season Of Glass' but be left on
the shelf until the 'Onobox' in 1992, which is a shame given the sheer fun of
this simple waltz, with Lennon guesting on guitar and as Mildred's distant
husband Alfred ('Hiya!' he says when Alfred arrives!)
Yoko
Ono "A Story"
(Originally Unreleased, Recorded 1974,
Released As Part Of 'Onobox' in 1992)
(First published as part of 'News,
Views and Music Issue #89' on January 31st 2010)
A Story/Loneliness/Will You Touch Me?/Dogtown/Tomorrow
May Never Come/Yes, I'm A Witch/She Gets Down On Her Knees/It Happened/Winter
Friend/Heartburn Stew/Hard Times Are Over
"Now
I see my car heading for the cliff and I'm desperately looking for the brake,
please don't let it happen to me, I'm not ready to die or live a living
death"
Having covered two of the biggest selling
albums made by the groups on this list, now we get back to normality with one
of the poorest-selling, hard to find albums in the whole AAA back catalogue!
Ironically, of course, I prefer it to both the albums we’ve just covered as
this album – recorded in 1974, locked away in a draw, re-recorded in part in
1981 and then finally seeing the light of day first as part of a 1992 box set
and then as a full album in 1997 – is a delight. ‘Approximately Infinite
Universe’ is a special case, a magical album that contains all of Yoko’s best
work by light years (see review no 54 for why) and should have been a huge
boost to a talented, diversified career– but that album aside, it’s oh so
typical that Yoko’s best work, her most successful attempt to match her caustic
feminist tone with some extraordinarily well crafted songs, has gone unheard by
about 99% of the people who like her work, never mind the public at large. Had
‘A Story’ come out at the time it was intended to – as a close cousin of
husband Lennon’s ‘lost weekend’ albums of ‘Mind Games’ and ‘Walls and Bridges’
(‘A Story’ was recorded somewhere between the two) – then it might well have
become Yoko’s best seller to date. It’s probably no coincidence either that a
handful of tracks from this album in inferior re-recorded form from the 1980s
are on Yoko’s most genuinely successful album ‘Season Of Glass’. As it is, this
is a forgotten gem, albeit it one that’s valued highly by the small percentage
of people who call themselves Yoko Ono fans.
Let’s make one point clear. If you’re new to
Yoko’s work then you probably expect this record to be one long angst-ridden
scream, similar to JohnandYoko’s experimental work on the ‘Two Virgins’ ‘Live
Peace In Toronto’ and disc two of the ‘Sometime In New York City’ LPs. You’d be
wrong, in the years after 1971 at least. In terms of melody Yoko even beats her
husband, seemingly sharing a closer affinity with McCartney in terms of writing
songs that have a clearly definable beginning, middle and end and that sound so
obvious and hummable you’re amazed they haven’t been around for generations.
Where Yoko does sound more like John is the subject matter, as starting with
the ‘Approximately’ album Yoko’s never been afraid to go near subjects lesser
mortals would wince from covering. Think Lennon’s ‘lost weekend’ albums are
harrowing? They’re nothing on the very real heartbreak throughout this album;
the worry felt for the future, the left-turns that come out of nowhere to take
us all by unpleasant surprise from time to time and a very real fear when
facing possible rejection. Yoko even has a chance to show off her rarely heard
sense of humour with the song ‘Yes, I’m A Witch’ which does exactly as the song
suggests! The one reason Yoko isn’t better known - other than for marrying a
Beatle and supposedly breaking up the biggest band on the planet, of course –
is her voice. Western culture is oh so narrow minded, even when it thinks it’s
being wide open to any new thing and what with English being her second subject
Yoko isn’t as fluent on most of these songs as listeners expect her to be. But
if you look past the recording – and the occasional production faux pas – then
‘A Story’ is a rewarding album, right up there with all but the very best
Lennon solo albums.
One other point worth making is how revealing
this album is. Yoko had shied away from revealing her true feelings on 1973’s
‘Feeling The Space’, predecessor to ‘A Story’, perhaps after the flak some of
the more honest songs on ‘Approximately’ received, not least from her feminist
friends in high places who felt that any admission of guilt or sadness was more
ammunition for the anti-feminist movement. Alas, taking that advice resulted in
a truly terrible record, one that’s all about sloganeering and politics without
humanity in a way that made even ‘Sometime In New York City’ sound like it came
from the heart, not the pages of the tabloid press. Despite selling well, Yoko
seems to have gone back top her original intention of writing about her
feelings here, making a record that tells you more about how Yoko was feeling
during the ‘lost weekend’ than we ever learnt from Lennon in three LPs from
that period. How ironic, then, that it’s this album should be titled ‘A Story’
– Yoko is clearly reaching out to make her songs more accessible here than they
had been before and yet never had she put more of herself into her work.
How typical, too, that Yoko was robbed of her
powers of speech just as she was beginning to come out from under Lennon’s
shadow and have something of her own to say. The Beatles’ label Apple was all
but over by early 1974 when this LP was recorded - George Harrison’s ‘Extra
Texture’ record from later on that year is actually Apple’s last ever release –
and, having just broken up with Lennon and missing his support to get the album
pushed through – ‘A Story’ had no chance in the schedules. The few reviewers
who even notice this album are mixed over how ready this album was for release
– one school of thought has the album all waiting and ready to go, with a set
track listing and a rather pertinent front cover picture of a five-year-old
Yoko with a rubber ring round her neck, as if to save her form drowning all
ready to go (it’s also a neat mirror of JohnandYoko’s joint ‘Plastic Ono Band’
primal scream LPs, with a back cover of the pair of them as toddlers). Others
say Yoko never got as far as actually putting the albums’ sessions in any order
– which may be why the running order between 1992 and 1997 (when this album
came out first as CD 6 of the box set ‘Onobox’ and then later as an album in
its own right) changes dramatically. However far ‘A Story’ got, it’s a crying
shame that Lennon couldn’t see past his differences with Yoko to actually get
the album made – he always kept in touch during even the darkest days of his
‘Lost Weekend’ and must have known about Yoko’s album (they were forever playing each other songs
down the phone). Interestingly, Lennon himself comes out of it quite well – just
as John’s work is full of tracks like ‘Bless You’ that sound more apologetic
and romantic than any song written for her during their time together – with
Yoko having vented most of her anger against men in general on ‘Feeling The
Space’ and Lennon in particular on ‘Approximately Infinite Universe’.
One final point to make is that fans will
recognise quite a few of these songs from Yoko’s immediate post-Lennon album
‘Seasons Of Glass’, still her best-selling album to date even if it was mainly
out of sympathy for Yoko’s plight in those dark days of the Winter of 1980-81.
Now, that’s fascinating for fans who know both albums and can compare them side
by side because, even though the arrangements having changed much, the whole
feeling of the two albums are so so different. On ‘A Story’ Lennon is the
absent party, having dropped Yoko and responsibilities for what was effectively
a mid-life crisis, taking up with other women romantically and other men
artistically to fill the void of Yoko while she is left with nothing. On
‘Season Of Glass’ Lennon is again the absent party, but he’s down the end of a
phoneline, being carefully observed by an anxious Yoko wondering where it all
went wrong, but out in the spirit world, taking up with other women and artists
simply because he’s not alive anymore to work with Yoko, while she is – again –
left with nothing. There’s emotion a plenty on both albums, but whereas Yoko’s
feeling sorry for herself a bit on ‘A Story’, picturing herself as the victim
to some extent, she’s simply numb with incomprehension on the later recordings.
It’s not for nothing that Lennon hovers like a ghost on two out of three of
Yoko’s immediate post-1980 recordings for his presence is all over every record
she makes, even now – and yet its ‘A Story’ where his hole is biggest, with
each song a reaction to lost opportunities, mistakes, guilt, anger and remorse
at the fact the pair aren’t as close as they used to be. Closing track ‘Hard
Times Are Over’ is especially powerful in this context – John and Yoko got back
together just months after this recording and Yoko clearly felt that
conciliation was in the air and the song serves a similar service when used as
the closing track of the pair’s ‘comeback’ album Double Fantasy in 1980. Yet in
both cases it’s a cruel blow because we, the modern listener, know how the
album will work itself out, that hard times are indeed over, but only over ‘for
a while’.
The album actually starts with the sound effect
of a train whistling through a station, a clever metaphor for this album being
just another, further stop down Yoko’s musical and actual life journey. The
title track 'A Story'
then comes into life, sounding like an outtake from ‘Approximately’, sharing
that same song’s semi-autobiography and wistful, fragile air, although on that
heavier, rockier album it would no doubt have been used as light relief. In
fact, musically it sounds not unlike the first few Belle and Sebastian albums –
really pretty until you scratch the surface and read the hidden scars between
the lines. A flute melody pulls against some rather cloying strings before some
twinkling pianos float the song away on a cloud. ‘A Story’ is a crucial song
for cementing Yoko’s new post-screaming sound and gets more important yet when
you begin to decipher the lyrics. In many ways its the ultimate John and Yoko
song, starting off in both their childhoods (a big thing with the Ono-Lennons
thanks to their joint primal therapy in 1970), with Yoko brought up in a strict
household where she wasn’t allowed ideas of her own and could only work out her
personality from telling ‘stories’ and John unable to use his intelligence,
finding that the only time people liked him was when he made them laugh. The
pair’s coming together is pictured as the saving for both of them, allowing
them to become the people they always wanted to be but were afraid to. Most
telling is the third verse, when the pair make love for the first time and find
that, rather than leading to sexual bliss, it actually turns into an outpouring
of repressed conversation, covering every subject ‘from the world to the
weather’. John and Yoko gave each other the confidence they each needed to free
themselves, this song seems to be saying, and a huge emotional journey for them
both (‘so many places they travelled’ sighs Yoko at one point). What’s most
noticeable and most moving about this track, though, is that it’s all sung in
the past tense. For Yoko at least, the dream seems to be over at this point in
the LP (things look more hopeful by the end) and the pair really have split for
good. The track is also clearly about John and Yoko, even if they are just a
‘boy’ and a ‘girl’ in this song (common imagery for the pair in Yoko’s songs,
especially on ‘Milk and Honey’). An astonishingly brave and powerful song, then,
its a double shame that a) this song is one of the few from this LP that wasn’t
resurrected for later, better selling LPs and b) that here it’s just a sketch,
a slender two-minute dialogue that could have run for oh so much longer. Still,
it’s a brave and quite astonishing start for the album and one of the two clear
highlights of the record.
‘Loneliness’ takes the ‘story’ up to
the present day, with an ominous bass rumble and a rather dissonant piano riff
sounding like the world splitting apart. Metaphorically, in many ways the world
is in this song, with Yoko at her most worn down and vulnerable vocally,
opening with the line ‘there are many things in life I can endure’, before
telling us that a simple case of being left alone is not one of them. This song
switches gears several times throughout the song, including a bluesy guitar
part from Yoko’s most sympathetic musical collaborator Wayne Gabriel (who is a
major reason for ‘Approximately’s success) and a punchy chorus where Yoko seems
to be trying to fight her way out of her own trap, punching the lines of
‘lo-o-o-o-o-oneli-ness’ over and over like some deranged boxer. Vocally, this
is Yoko’s most hysterical performance on the record, while the performers play
everything calm and tidy behind her (a kind of reverse version of one of Yoko’s
better songs ‘Death Of Samantha’, where she’s the cool chick with a band trying
it’s best to make her melt). Yet on ‘It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)’, where this
short sketchy song sounds much more powerful and heartfelt, its Yoko whose calm
while the band fight out the apocalypse behind her. Hearing both versions back
to back, I have to say I prefer the 1983 version of this song, where the
loneliness seems to stretch out forever, but in either version this is a strong
song that again is pretty close to the bone in terms of its words (even though,
yet again, adding an extra verse or two would have made it better still).
‘Will You
Touch Me?’
started out life as long ago as 1971, where you can hear a sweet little demo by
Yoko with John whistling as an extra on the ‘Fly’ album. This re-recorded band
version from 1974 can’t match up to the innocence of that original and sounds
badly out of place here, more the sort of thing Yoko was including on the back
of Lennon singles such as the B-sides ‘Who Has Seen The Wind?’ and ‘Listen, The
Snow Is Falling’. Not that’s it all bad – Yoko always had a direct way with
words, perhaps because English was always her second language and this song
works in the same way a haiku poem does, letting the listener fill in the gaps
in the words and sentence construction. The most moving part of the song is the
third verse where (I think, because as I write I’m desperately searching for my
copy of ‘Fly’ and haven’t heard it in a while, curse you you stealing CD
pixies!) Yoko has added a bit to her original song, with lines about ‘doors
closing on me’ and how only kindness can open her heart. Heard as a track on
its own, these lines are cloying in the extreme, especially when sung in such a
soppy voice, and yet coming on from the last two tracks the message of this
song is quite moving, another excellent musical metaphor for the hole Yoko
feels in her heart now that John has gone. I could have done without the
ball-room piano, though, or the way Yoko raises her voice to sound like a
little girl, a trick she’ll try again in the even more toe-curling ‘Yes, I’m
Your Angel’.
Amazingly there’s a fourth strong song in a row
– Yoko really did save all her best songs for this album’s first side (barring
one, anyway, as we’ll see in a minute).
‘Dogtown’ really
split reviewers down the middle when it came out on ‘Seasons of Glass’ – to
some, it’s a repetitive not-much-happening song about the dog-eat-dog system
that has been heard many times before and yet to others it’s a masterpiece in
miniature, a very Yoko track that says more in three minutes than most
double-album prog rock LPs. Personally, I side more with the latter crowd, as
this latest song about Yoko as victim is full of some of her classiest lines and
a breathless tune that neatly mirrors Yoko’s words about her ongoing life and
works. Yoko’s narrator can’t sleep, there’s too much buzzing around her head
and she feels she needs to get on in a town where hard work and application are
everything, with the fast patter lyrics and ever restless tune more like a
Gilbert and Sullivan patter song than a rock and pop anthem. Like many tracks
on ‘A Story’, it sounds as if Yoko knows she is being cut off before her time,
that this album will never see the light of day and she is unlikely to get
anyone else to hear her story (she can’t have known for certain the Lennons
would get back together mere months after these recordings). There’s several
mentions of things left unsaid, of letters never sent and songs ‘I meant to
finish all my life’. Admittedly the nagging chorus (‘dog dog dog dog dog dog
dog dogtown!’) lets the song down badly, especially when it seems to be
repeated endlessly and this latest use of Western nursery rhyme as a substitute
for haiku poetry pales badly when compared to the songs on ‘Approximately’
(‘peas porridge in the pot nine years old!’) But there’s another excellent song
at work here, you just have to dig for it. ‘Dogtown’ is yet another song better
known by a re-recording (from ‘Season Of Glass’ once again) which loses out on
a sparser backing but gains by having a much more focussed performance from
Yoko, who clearly knows the song much better than she did in 1974. ‘Dogtown’
sounds badly out of place on the later record, though, amongst the heavier,
more reflective works although strangely it suits the downbeat mood of this
album rather well.
‘Tomorrow May Never Come’ sounds like a much more hopeful song,
opening with a snatch of birdsong suggesting the dawn breaking through a dark
night and this track seemingly takes the same upbeat role on the album as
Approximately’s ‘Have You Seen A Horizon Lately?’ It even has a sort of jaunty
vaudeville feel about it, which makes it pretty much unique in Yoko’s canon.
But the lyrics are again quite lost and lonely, with Yoko making reference to
her passing age (she was 41 when these songs were recording – Lennon was 34),
all the great memories she’s had in her life and her acceptance that they will
probably never pass her way again. ‘Tomorrow May Never Come’ is just a snappy
line for the title here – Yoko is actually afraid of tomorrow happening too
soon for comfort. The chorus bears some resemblance to The Who’s ‘Tommy’ or
perhaps that album’s starting point ‘You Really Got A Hold On Me’ with its
chorus of ‘Reach me! Touch me! Hold me!’ searching for a human connection from
someone, anyone. Yoko’s pulled off this ‘double-layered feeling’ trick several
times in her career – again ‘Death Of Samantha’ is the obvious starting point –
but somehow this song never quite gels, perhaps because for once Yoko is
enthusiastic and upbeat in her vocal, leaving her, the band and the melody at
odds with the words. Not for the first or the last time on this album, it’s
also frustratingly short, more like a demo than a finished product (even as an
11 track album with three bonus tracks, the CD only lasts a skimpy 42 minutes!)
‘Yes, I’m A
Witch’ is a witty riposte from
Yoko who takes all the criticism she’s been given over the years for marrying a
Beatle and somehow ending the world’s favourite group of moptops and telling us
that – yes, actually, you’re right. In many ways this song is a continuation of
the feminist anthems of Yoko’s last two albums, with Yoko addressing her unseen
male partner in a whole range of condescending ways usually reserved by
backwards men from the first half of the 20th century (‘honey ball’
‘sugar cane’ ‘baby doll’ etc) and claiming how she and her sisters can tell
them what to do. This song sounds badly out of place on the album (it’s moved
to the last track on the OnoBox set, where it works better), sounding more like
the confident strutting Yoko of old, convinced that her mission is right and
that changes will be around the corner, sometime somewhere. I prefer it to
frankly all the songs from ‘Feeling The Space’ which cover the same ground as
at least this song has wit and knowingness on its side, but Yoko’s already
covered this ground much better on ‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ and this
song quickly runs out of things to say. It’s still fun to hear Yoko agreeing
with all her critics and adding ‘I don’t care what you say’, as if she’s so
used to people disagreeing with her over everything else, she assumes they’ll
take an opposite view even when she’s on their side! There is a good chorus
line here with the very JohnandYoko idea that every time you cut yourself off
from your feelings a part of you ‘dies’, but alas its not developed fully and
‘Yes I’m A Witch’ is ultimately a song that casts less of a spell than the
other songs here. The song was later
used for a Yoko ‘remix’/’covers’ album, a weird hybrid that shows Yoko being
reclaimed for their own by the 1990s’ young and eccentric scene, although
ironically the new version of the title track is about the worst thing there.
‘She Gets
Down On Her Knees’ is an intriguing, angst-ridden song that instead of finding Yoko
as the victim finds her all but berating herself for causing all her own
problems. Yoko may have taken a leaf out of her ex-partner’s book here, writing
this self-flagellation song in the third person (as in ‘Hey Bulldog’ and ‘Steel
and Glass’ and possibly even ‘How Do You Sleep?’, the great trilogy of songs
where Lennon vents his anger at his own failings). The narrator has so
over-indulged on everything life has to offer (including her own misery) that
her body can’t handle it, leaving her on her knees being sick as her body pays
her mind back for one bad experience too many. Whatever the character does,
though, she can’t rid the feeling of guilt and misery, finding herself automatically
wandering from room to room, looking for things to clean to escape the smell
and memories of her old lover. Like many a song on this album, this track is
given a jolly, almost jaunty melody that jars even more for combining with a
set of such harsh and sarcastic lyrics and the dispassionate way with which
Yoko sings the words makes this track sound totally detached and uncaring – and
thus very powerful. There’s quite a few segments to this song apart from the
nagging chorus line which add great drama to the song, with Yoko slowing the
song down completely as the melody mechanically follows her thoughts ‘up up up’
or ‘down down down’ as she gets on with her household tasks. For once the
re-recorded version of this song (on ‘Season Of Glass’) sounds better, with an
anger and power this earlier version is missing and a much more natural flow
between the many parts.
‘It
Happened’
is another song better known from a re-recording and this time around its the
re-recording that works best, a haunting ballad that again doubles for Lennon’s
spiritual absence in 1974 and his physical absence in 1981. This beautiful song
about unexpected changes in your life and how they knock you backwards at a
time when you are ‘least expecting’ is best heard on the back of Yoko’s ‘Walking
In Thin Ice’ single – the song she and John were working on the day he was
killed – and can bring a tear to even a Yoko-hating Beatle fan’s heart. This
earlier version doesn’t have the same poignancy, but it’s a strong recording
nonetheless, with some more gorgeous Wayne Gabriel guitar and an impressive
riff that seems to know where it’s going until the end of each verse, when it
vainly tinkles around the song’s key, as if trying to find a way back home.
Like many songs on ‘A Story’ this song is very short and would have really
benefitted from more than just the one verse and two choruses (the haiku poetry
being Yoko’s link to the basics of rock and roll thing again, as this happens
with much of Yoko’s work – see review no 54), but it is very moving
nonetheless, with Yoko at her most vulnerable and lost on this song’s few
simple lines.
Magical as that song is, however, it’s ‘Winter Friend’ that’s my
personal favourite on the album. I could, literally, write the whole of this
article around this song there’s so much in it –so feel lucky you’re only
getting two paragraphs! The opening suggests that for the first time in her
career Yoko is going to actively embrace the Japanese culture of her childhood
(she came to New York as a teenager). The sound of four or five Yokos singing
at once in harmony is lovely and a trick I wish Yoko had used more, all held
together by some more excellent guitar work and some synthesiser tricks that
really do sound like some ancient Japanese ballad. But this is no folk song
Yoko’s singing, not a ‘story’ but yet another autobiographical song. Like many
reviewers I’m tempted to see the ‘winter friend’ in this song, the one in pain
that Yoko befriends at the start of the song and enjoys spending time with, as
John (simply because the pair wrote about each other so often and so blatantly)
but as the song gets going it’s made clear that this is an earlier event,
albeit one that mirrors closely Yoko’s relationship with Lennon (possibly it’s about Yoko’s first husband
Tony Cox – the line ‘I had never seen his soul’ reflects some of Yoko’s
comments in interviews on their relationship, as the pair were more artist and
patron than husband and wife). The relationship ends suddenly, though, in
dramatic fashion, with the narrator’s partner cutting himself and using the
blood to tell her a note that things are finally ‘over’ (again, this is another
Yoko songs about the difficulties of communication, with the man finding it
harder to tell her that he is leaving than physically cutting himself).
However, this is only the sudden abrupt end to a relationship that’s been
heading that way for some time, with Yoko telling us that the man was dead
inside his eyes, even when he was trying to pretend things were alright.Yoko
then shifts to the present day, sighing as she asks why she remembers such
unhappy times now and seems to suggest that this song was written at a stage of
Yoko’s life when she feared that past events like this one were happening to
her again. In which case it makes it all the more strange when the chorus line
cuts in that ‘he was a winter friend to me...’ – the whole image of that line
conjures up someone who’ll stay with you through thick and thin, through the
cold hard days of Winter when things go wrong. Yoko seems to be suggesting that
both of her ‘husbands’ (if that’s who this song really is about) are really the
opposite: that her relationships thrive on pulling together through
difficulties and fall apart through boredom and happier times, because the
narrator is so unused to them she doesn’t know how to act or behave. The song
then takes an abrupt left turn halfway through the song, with Yoko in the
present using the album’s ‘journey’ metaphor again for a scene of her in a car,
driving off a cliff as she helplessly looks to ‘reach for the brakes’. This
whole ending passage is exceptional, cutting through the jaunty feel of the
song to seemingly speak from the heart as Yoko half sings half cries the best
line of her career on ‘I’m not ready to die – or live a living death’. As the
other songs on this album make clear,
Yoko doesn’t cope well with loneliness or loss and the thought of going through
such an upheaval in her life so soon after the last one finds her ending this
song pleading with the future not to mimic her past. The song ends the only way
it can on an unresolved minor key question (on the line ‘I’m not ready to
die...’) without the resolution both the narrator and us are clearly looking
for. So ends one of Yoko’s best ever songs (it wins the ‘silver’ award on our forum
of Yoko Ono best songs for instance), one that’s ambitious but easy to follow,
sad but not too caught up in itself and with
wandering melody line that’s so haunting and fragile you wonder how it
ever got to the end of the song without breaking. In short, fabulous and its a
disgrace that this is one of only three songs from this record that Yoko never
re-recorded when this album got shelved.
‘Heartburn
Stew’ can’t compete with the
last track, but it does follow the same trick of looking back to the past to
work out how to cope with your present. Yoko’s narrator is forever disappointed
in this song, which can best be thought of as Yoko’s equivalent of Lennon’s
primal scream song ‘Mother’ without the screaming. As a child Yoko’s exuberance
is slowly eroded away by her parent’s lack of care or love and as an adult,
too, she never gets what she expects from her partners, forever disappointed by
life. The bitterness she feels manifests itself as ‘heartburn’ - not the physical,
I’ve-eaten-too-much-and-my-insides-are-on-fire kind of heartburn, but a cold
and clinical I’ve-not-had-enough kind of pain. This song would be truly
self-indulgent had Yoko written a tune to match her thoughts, but no –
‘Heartburn’ sports the jolliest tune on the record, with Yoko addressing us as
if we’re a younger sibling ‘what can I do with a heartburn, I ask you?’, all
the while keeping her face straight and her voice polite, as if afraid of being
told off for making a fuss. Listen out
for the reference to having indigestible ‘apple jam’, a witty reference to the
fallout from The Beatles and the business shenanigans getting this record made
– Yoko ends up taking her gift and ‘feeding it to the birds’ before poisoning
the family cat. This is another track that Yoko never went back to from this
album, which is a shame because while the song is strong enough the arrangement
here is all rather cold and clinical, with a voice choir that really does fit
the personal vulnerable angst in the song. The backing players also seem to
think this song is a jazzy jaunt like the songs on ‘Feeling The Space’ – and
did I ever tell you how irritating that record is?!
The album ends with its best known track, ‘Hard Times Are Over’, the
song that ended John and Yoko’s ‘comeback’ album ‘Double Fantasy’. On the one
hand, you have to ask why probably Yoko’s weakest song on the album was re-used
when so many better songs were passed over – and yet, in the context of 1980,
this songs makes the perfect sense as a kind of making-up-for-lost time kind of
a track. I’ve never been that keen on the 1980 version – like many on ‘Double
Fantasy’ it seems to have lost its sparkle after one take too many, although
last year’s ‘stripped down’ version suits it rather better – although the 1974
version doesn’t sound awfully better, being more of a demo than a full-blown
song. A sweet little optimistic number, this song is a close cousin of Yoko’s
‘Waiting For The Sunrise’, a track about wanting to start over again and get
right back into the fight of things. In fact, it sounds like the perfect
musical metaphor for sinking back into a comfy armchair after a long and
difficult journey – one that presumably started with the train in the tunnel at
the beginning of the record which has now pulled into a more inhabitable
siding. As a result, like most of the songs on Yoko’s ‘lesser’ records it runs
out of things to say very quickly, as if the narrator is unsure how to cope
with writing about happiness as she has spent so long pondering over sorrow.
‘Hard Times’ doesn’t have the emotional impact of the other songs on ‘A Story’
and the tune, too, rambles and coasts as if it has all the time in the world –
apt for the song but something of an irritant after so many short snappy songs
on the trot. ‘Hard Times’ is exactly the sort of song this album needs to end,
though, rounding off Yoko’s 1970s output in a much happier and uplifting mood
than the vast majority of the tracks before it.
So, against all odds, ‘A Story’ ends up not as
one of the most miserable or negative albums of her career but as a
comparatively uplifting work, one where Yoko’s analysis of mistakes in her past
means she won’t make the same mistakes in the future. How inconceivably sad,
then, that after five years of musical silence and parenthood Yoko will find
herself back in this state for her next album, the terrifying ‘Seasons Of
Glass’, where many of these songs are re-recorded and sound all the more futile
and sad for Lennon’s death. Yoko understandably spends most of that album in a
dark and heavy place, with backing musicians doing their best punk impressions
and a sheen of noise quite unlike anything else in her back catalogue. But on
‘A Story’ she possesses a lightness of touch that enables her to make the most
out of her multi-surfaced songs, adding a depth and a debate that songs this
fragmented and short shouldn’t possibly have. Along with ‘Glass’ and our AAA
favourite ‘Approximately’, ‘A Story is one of the three Yoko albums you really
need to own, light years above the rest of her output, marvellously tuneful, lyrically
insightful and as hard-hitting yet
accessible as they come. Not every track works and even the best of these songs
sounds somewhat undeveloped compared side by side to the best on this list, but
overall ‘A Story’ is a towering achievement and it’s a great shame this
forgotten album has gone neglected for oh so long. If only every ‘story’ in
Yoko’s ‘journey’ could be as good as this and the other two classic records –
ah but then I wouldn’t wish the circumstances of Yoko’s recording of all three
of them on anybody. The fact that she wrote anything of worth at all in this
turbulent period is remarkable – as is the ongoing dismissal of her work as a
bunch of talentless trash. Listen to this work with open ears, marvel at the
naked autobiography that even the greatest Western writers can’t bring
themselves to write, hum along to the perfectly crafted tunes and then tell me
which reading of this album is the ‘story’ and which one the truth.
(Geffen, June 8th 1981)
Goodbye Sadness/Mindweaver/Even When
You're Far Away/No One Sees Me Like You Do/Turn Of The Wheel/Dogtown/Silver
Horse//I Don't Know Why/Extension 33/No No No/Will You Touch Me?/She Gets Down
On Her Knees/Toyboat/Mother Of The Universe
CD Bonus Tracks: Walking On Thin Ice/I
Don't Know Why (Demo)
"I
never want to cry or hold my breath in fear again"
Until
now Yoko's reserve, leftover from her 'posh' Japanese upbringing, has been a
source of irritation and the barrier that prevents shy Yoko from connecting
with others. However on this painful album her reserve is Yoko's greatest
strength, as she both taps into the sheer tragedy of her husband's sudden death
without going over the top or being sensational. Recorded in something of a
daze in the months after Lennon's death, many people around Yoko and many
critics considered that hitting the 'Double Fantasy' studios so soon after
Lennon's death was madness - but Yoko had always used her art to come to terms
with colossal turning points in her life and this was no exception. 'Season Of
Glass' makes good use of a handful of 'Double Fantasy' leftovers and several
songs intended for the unreleased 1974 album 'A Story' with newer songs, so
that in a sense we're getting the same mix of feelings that Yoko must have been
feeling, switching from the past to the present to the future with every wave
of grief. The old songs, still written partly as love songs to Lennon ('A
Story' would have been to Ono what 'Walls and Bridges' was to Lennon - half
still playing around but mainly tearful 'why did we ever say goodbye?' songs)
are delivered in a mocking tone, songs that were once about separation and
physically betrayal turned into songs about absence and death.
The
outtakes such as the 'Yes I'm Your Angel' style 'Turn Of The Wheel' are almost
painful as Yoko returns to 'Hard Times Are Over' by sighing that even after all
this time there are 'still more heartaches to learn'. And the new songs are powerful
stuff: 'I Don't Know Why' was written in grief and shock the day after Lennon's
death - a demo recorded at the time appears on the CD re-issue and is perhaps
the most harrowing moment of a harrowing album, with Yoko close to tears. 'No
No No' doesn't refer to the death itself but it begins with three gunshots and
Yoko crying before in a musical version of her film 'Rape' she gets taunted by
'herself' into facing something she can't cope with just yet. Other songs
reflect sadly on the life of old age that wasn't to be, referring to Lennon in
the past tense for the first time on 'Mindweaver' (close to Lennon's
description of himself as a 'dream weaver') and sighing that for all their
disagreements 'No One Can See Me Like You Do'. The result is deliberately raw
and performed understandably with less care and attention than usual by Yoko
(who sleep-sings her way through the entire record, still audibly in shock) but
it's undeniably powerful. A bit too powerful for most fans in places, who lack
Yoko's life-saving reserve - especially the cover featuring Lennon's
blood-stained glasses set in the window of the Dakota apartment and a glass of
water Lennon had left there mere hours earlier when he had been photographed
for the last time by Playboy magazine. Yoko was ticked off something awful by
the press for being 'sensationalist' - but it was a mere glimpse at how
harrowing the experience must have been for Yoko and makes sense within this
album's theme of 'show it as it is'. Lennon, keen on authenticity no matter the
cost, would almost certainly have approved. Though released quietly, with as
little fanfare as possible, a grieving public took Yoko to their hearts for one
solitary time and made this by far her best-selling album, peaking at a US
chart high of #49.
'Goodbye Sadness' clearly picks up where 'Hard Times Are Over' left off, but
though Yoko's lyrics are upbeat the one time on the album we hear her voice
quiver and the funeral tone of the sparse backing make it clear that sadness is
in fact here to stay. 'Mindweaver'
is a stunning song and the clear album highlight, as a sad synth lick sighs
mournfully under a cracking Hugh McCracken flamenco guitar part. Lennon was by
turns a 'mindweaver' 'mindbeater' and 'mindbender' as Yoko tries to remember
her husband in all his many facets before her memories are wiped out by the
'sainted' portrayals by the media. Yoko remembers him 'always on the phone'
discussing some big plan, selling 'dreams', talijg through his 'hurt' or
'telling me what I did wrong'. The melody to this track is one of Yoko's best,
sad and desperate, but sung detached as if the grief hasn't hit her yet.
Five-year-old Sean introduces 'Even
When You're Far Away', another clear highlight, by telling us of a joke
his dad told him of how 'once upon there was an old old story in which once
upon a time there was an old old story' adding like his dad 'you see - the
story can begin and end anywhere!' Mum Yoko hopes he's right and following the
as-yet unreleased 'Milk and Honey' songs about how John and Yoko were the
re-incarnations of previous lovers Yoko looks forward to a time when they'll be
together again. Thinking of Mark Chapman she sighs 'I wonder why I could never
hate you' though the anger in her voice nearly gives her away before Yoko
almost crumples before us, trying to take away what she learnt from Lennon's
'gonna be alright mantra' that 'this is just the way it happens to be'.
Reflecting on the murder she blames herself and her fellow artists for not
doing more to make the world a nicer place quicker, sighing that 'we don't know
how to love without fear'. Addressing Lennon directly she tells him 'part of me
will always be with you - part of you is growing with me...I saw your soul and
you saw mine'. Together with the beautiful haunting melody and the powerful
dramatic performance (in which Earl Slick dazzles on guitar) Yoko creates a
response that Lennon would have been proud of, painfully trying to replace fear
and anger with love.
'Nobody Sees Me Like You Do' is another special song, with Yoko looking over at her son's
troubled face and asking the fates 'why did it have to be like this? I wanted
us to be happy!' Yoko remembers seeing her husband slipping away but still with
a 'touch of life', apologises for everything she did wrong and adding 'please
remember - I only wanted you to be happy'. A final verse has Yoko longing for
it all to be over, to 'quit moving, quit running, I wanna relax and be tender'
and hoping against hope that it's all been a bad dream and even yet she and
Lennon can be together in old age 'rocking away in our walnut chairs'. Another
lovely melody, sighing but still keeping going, makes for another classic
heartbreaking track. 'Turn Of
The Wheel', leftover from 'Double Fantasy' sounds very out of place with
Yoko singing up-front with a smile on
her face - the contrast is surely deliberate as we're reminded of the chasm
between the two records recorded just a few months apart. It's not that great
as a song though sadly and was probably the ';right' song to get the push from
the 'Fantasy' album. 'Dogtown'
was originally an upbeat chatty song from 'A Story' as Yoko walks her dog round
the local neighbourhood and reflects on all the things she keeps meaning to do,
before the 'dogtown' becomes a metaphor for the nastier side of life as Yoko
gets told off for trying to be like Europeans. This time round Yoko sings
through gritted teeth and the mood is much gloomier all round, with horror
movie style backing vocal swoops, though the overall effect is underdone by
Yoko returning to the 'peas porridge hot' nursery rhyme over and over for no
apparent reason.
The
shaky ballad 'Silver Horse'
sounds more like a demo than a finished recording but is pleasant enough, with
Yoko remembering a recurring dream that she's trained herself to escape from
the moment she sees it coming, with something she doesn't want to face. Yoko
feels like a 'frightened deer' but she learns to trust her fear one day when
instead of the evil monster in walks a silver horse to take her on glorious
adventures (she moans to us in conversation that he had 'no wings' the way
she'd always imagined - 'but he wasn't
so bad you know!') The angry 'I
Don't Know Why' is understandably unhinged as Yoko wonders why things
had to go so badly wrong just when things seemed to be going so right, opening
with a lovely passage of bird song that's cut cold. Her mantra is 'I don't know
why' accompanied by an excellent Earl Slick guitar part that could strip paint,
stalking Yoko throughout the song as if her nightmare has just become real as
she laments a world 'so empty without you'. By the end Yoko's reserve slips and
still in her immediate grief she screams 'You Bastards!', blaming a whole body
of people rather than just her husband's murderer, 'Hate us, hate me...We had
everything you...' but Yoko composes herself before she loses her hold on the
song anymore. It's an incredibly moving moment, the one place on the album
where the 'real' Yoko of 1981 slips through and it was a brave move allowing
this song out at all when it was all still so raw. Another album highlight. 'Extension 33' is a rather
histrionic remake of the rather more placid demo from the 'A Story' era.
Trapped away from Lennon during the 'lost weekend' phase (and now of course
more permanently) Yoko imagines herself 33 times removed from him - the number
of her telephone and chants 'freedom!' Richie Havens style in the chorus, first
out of pure unbridled enjoyment, but then in mocking tones as if her 'freedom'
away from Lennon has only trapped her more.
'No No No'
starts with three gunshots and Yoko howling 'no!' as if she's reliving the
moment before she kick-starts a mocking, bitter song in which a spoilt brat
persona goes head to head with her more troubled self. However the lyrics make
no mention of the murder and instead seems to refer to a night of love-making
Yoko never wanted and which haunts her now ('I can't do it - I keep seeing
broken glass when we do it!' one half of her sighs while the other orders 'do
it!') Yoko seems to be imagining herself with someone else in the future, the
wedding ring falling off her finger, but while her lust seems to get the better
of her she can't bring herself to do it. The song then crashes into a turbulent
'nee-naw'ing siren that recalls the main riff of 'I Am The Walrus' and no doubt
the ambulance that rushed her and John to the hospital. 'Will You Touch Me?' is one final love song for
Lennon, written back in the 'A Story' era originally song coquettishly by Yoko
but now sung with a sadness. What used to be the comedy line 'all my life the
doors kept on closing on me' now sounds terribly sad. 'She Gets Down On her Knees' has Yoko reviving
her scream for one last time as she returns to another song about missing John
from 'A Story', vomiting a bit more of the painful life away to go along with
her hangover (the original version was rather better). The playful 'Toyboat' dreamily drifts
past, Yoko dreaming of an escape from her life that will take her to shore -
and wondering why she ever got inside a 'toy boat' and trusted it to keep her
safe. The song is apparently a new recording, but it sounds very different to
all the other 'new' performances on the album, with Yoko back to her old
twinkling self, suggesting this may in fact be another 'A Story' leftover that
never made the final submitted album (it's childlike feel is certainly more
akin to that album than this decidedly grown up record). Finally 'Mother Of The Universe' is a
slow hymnal song that re-writes The Lord's Prayer and pleads for 'wisdom and
power'. Again Yoko sounds strangely 'together' compared to most of the album,
suggesting this too is an older song. It's a rather odd and average way to end
a compelling, powerful album.
Overall
though 'Season Of Glass' is as hard-hitting an album as you can wish to hear.
Many artists would have chosen to wait before releasing such songs of upset and
anger into the world, but Yoko instinctively understands how important this
album was to the world to mourn and for her in particular to work through her
grief. Any fan who ever cared for Lennon and has a tough enough skin to listen
to her widow turning her pain into high conceptual art with a few rough edges
thrown in needs to hear this album, which is one of the most powerful
AAA-related records of them all, even close to a 'Yoko Plastic Ono Band' album
than the real thing. It could have been better - there are far superior and
fitting songs from 'A Story' to revive, including the gorgeous 'Winter Friend'
and this should perhaps have been a really strong ten-song set than an
inconsistent fourteen-track one. But 'Season Of Glass' gets every important
decision 'right', facing Lennon's death head on without glamorising or
sensationalising it and though nobody wanted an end to the JohnandYoko story at
all, this is a powerful and fitting coda to one of the greatest relationships
in all of rock music.
Yoko
Ono "It's Alright (I See Rainbows)"
(Polygram, November 1982)
My Man/Never Say Goodbye/Spec Of
Dust/Loneliness/Tomorrow May Never Come//It's Alright/Wake Up/Let The Tears
Dry/Dream Love/I See Rainbows
CD Bonus Tracks: Beautiful Boys
(Demo)/You're The One (Alternate Take)
"There
are many things in life I can endure"
Yoko's
next album was a more commercial attempt to launch Yoko as a commercial star in
her own right. Taking to period technology in a way neither her nor John ever
had before, it sounded very modern and contemporary at the time although nowadays
it's considered one of her most dated, more ordinary works. The mood couldn't
be more different to 'Season Of Glass' - though not quite joyful there's a hope
and optimism across this record which comes as a surprise and it's a mood that
rather wrong-footed the public who were still very much in mourning for their
lost hero. Not that Yoko's forgotten Lennon at all - he's the source of many of
the songs and is pictured on the very moving back cover, a 'ghost' whose
returned to look after his family, spotted by a now seven-year-old Sean in
'our' world while walking through Central Park. However Yoko seems to have
moved on through her stages of grief rather quickly and is now thankful for
their times together rather then distraught that they're over. 'My Man' for
instance boasts that no other wife ever had a husband as special as John,
'Tomorrow May Never Come' is a pop-fuelled song about denial from 1974 and the
two title tracks dream of a happier future in true JohnandYoko fashion, while
the effects-filled album highlight 'Never Say Goodbye' (which sounds more like
Duran Duran) is about how the pair will be together again someday.
Interestingly Yoko revives her final 'A Story' leftover in the form of
'Loneliness', written for her 'lost weekend' in 1974, but which takes on a
whole new meaning after Lennon's murder; it sounds very out of place amongst
the other largely happy songs although this version is far less depressed
sounding than the original. Unfortunately the backing makes this one of the
most 1980s albums in my collection and rather detracts from the worth of the
songs, making the lyrics hard to hear and ultimately this is easily Yoko's
weakest album outside 'Feeling The Space'. If Yoko ever decides to revisit it
'Double Fantasy stripped down' style, however, I'll be first in the queue as
there's definitely something here worth listening to and Yoko's decision to try
and show the way by making the world a happier rather than sadder place for
Lennon's passing is surely something of which her husband would have approved.
Yoko
Ono "Starpeace"
(Polygram/Rykodisk, February 18th 1985)
Hell In Paradise/I Love All Of
Me/Children Power/Rainbow Revelation/King Of The Zoo/Remember Raven//Cape
Clear/Sky People/You and I/It's Gonna Rain (Livin' On Tiptoe)/Starpeace/I Love
You Earth
"The
world as our reflection will regain it's circulation, our life span will meet
our star plan of starpeace"
In 1985 the world needed Lennon more than ever.
The cold war was hotting up, Regan and Gorbachov were both threatening to blow
the world up and here, right in the middle of the decade that proved to be the
polar opposite of the 1960s values, the hippie dream looked over. Cue Yoko
doing the sort of thing her husband would have done, releasing a sci-fi concept
album that sought to repeal the 'star wars' defence system with pure human
thought, kindness and love. Had this record been released in 1965 (with period
technology) it might have been fabulous - but once again the 1980s excesses
rather mire what should have been a timeless album and turn it into something
of a museum piece for modern listeners and the critics, used to tough records
full of three-minute pop singles savaged it even more than usual. Yoko's
honeymoon period with the critics and fans was clearly over and she wouldn't
release a new album for eleven years. Even without the technology, though,
there's the feeling that this is flimsy and clichéd by Yoko's standards, brave
in the unfashionable stance that the material took rather than because it
actually had much of import to say. The best known song is the minor hit single
'Hell In Paradise', which does have a certain breathless manic quality about it
that's highly apt and once again proves Yoko's love affair between her voice
and angry snarling guitars (with Eddie Martinez excellent in the
Lennon/Slick/McCracken role). Other guest stars fare less well: Robbie
Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar, stars from the reggae world, are badly under-used.
The epic ballad 'Rainbow Revelation' has a lovely melody despite the all-too
sappy words and even features a sitar part, while the bonkers closing track 'I
Love You Earth' is deeply catchy in a charity single kind of a way. Most of the
rest of the album, though, is forgettable and bland melding a unique mix of reggae
and nursery rhyme that doesn't really come off (much of this material sounds
too childish for a ten-year-old Sean, never mind his now fifty-two-year-old
mother - Sean does appear on the title track by the way, 'on the line' to some
celestial entity Yoko calls on for help). Yoko went on a rare solo tour to
promote the album, but sales were slow and attendance was poor, leaving her to
withdraw to the Dakota and spend more time as Lennon's archivist than a creator
in her own right. On the evidence of her past successes, that's a great shame -
although 'Starpeace' suggests that Yoko may have been running out of ideas.
(Rykodisk, '1992')
CD One ('London Jam'): No Bed For
Beatle John/Mind Holes/O'Wind (Body Is The Scar Of Your Mind)/Why?/Why
Not?/Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty baby Carriage All Over The City/Touch
Me/Paper Shoes/Mind Train/Open Your Box/Toilet Piece (Unknown)/Don't Worry
Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)/Telephone Piece/Midsummer
New York/The Path/Don't Count The Waves/Head Play (You-Airmale-Fly)/Is Winter
Here To Stay?
CD Two ('New York Rock'): Yang
Yang/Death Of Samantha/What Did I Do?!/Approximately Infinite Universe/What A
Bastard The World Is/Catman (The Rosies Are Coming)/I Want My Love To Rest
Tonight/Shirinkatta (I Didn't Know)/Peter The Dealer/I Felt Like Smashing My
Face In A Clear Glass Window/Winter Song/Kite Song (Alternate Version)/Now Or
Never/What A Mess/I Have A Woman Inside My Soul/Move On Fast/Looking Over From
My Hotel Window/Waiting For The Sunrise
CD Three ('Run Run Run'): Growing
Pain/Yellow Girl (Standby For Life)/Coffin Car/Warrior Woman/Women Of Salem/Run
Run Run/If Only/A Thousand Times Yes/Straight Talk/Angry Young Woman/Potbelly
Rocker/She Hits Back/Men Men Men/Woman Power/It's Been Very Hard/Mildred
Mildred/Let's Turn The Right Turn
CD Four ('Kiss Kiss Kiss'): Walking On
Thin Ice/Kiss Kiss Kiss/Give Me Something/I'm Moving On/Yes I'm Your
Angel/Beautiful Boys/Open Your Soul To Me/Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves
Him/Hard Times Are Over/Don't Be Scared/Sleepless Night/O'Sanity/Anatano Ye
(Your Hands)/Let Me Count The Ways/Forgive Me My Love/You're The One/There's No
Goodbye/Have You Seen A Horizon Lately?
CD Five ('No No No'): I Don't Know
Why/Mindweaver/Even When You're Far Away/Nobody Sees Me Like You Do/Silver
Horse/No No No/Toyboat/She Gets Down On Her Knees/Extension 33/Never Say
Goodbye/Spec Of Dust/My Man/It's Alright (I See Rainbows)/Let The Tears
Dry/Dream Love/Hell In Paradise/I Love You Earth/cape Clear/Goodbye Sadness
CD Six ('A Story'): A
Story/Loneliness/Will You Touch Me?/Dogtown/It Happened/Tomorrow May Never
Come/Winter Friend/Heartburn Stew/Yes I'm A Witch/Yume O
Moto/O'oh/Namyohorengekyo/We're All Water/Josejoi Banzai/Sisters O Sisters
"If
we don't open our souls to each other there's just nothing in between"
Two
years after the 'Lennon' box Yoko got one of her own. Though at first the
response was quite negative (Yoko got an extra two discs compared to her
husband - but then she did record more!) in time this big heavy box has come to
be seen as one of the best examples of the art. Yoko has a good ear for her own
material, with almost all her best work here and thankfully the lesser 80s
material is reduced to the bare minimum. The set's eclecticness is the box's
most impressive strength - as well as it's bigger weakness. Each CD manages to
be both chronological and 'themed' all at the same time, which means that we
really get five different Yokos on offer here (with the bonus sixth disc a
whole 'other story') - which means there's a little something for everybody but
liking one disc won't necessarily mean you'll like any of the rest of it.
The
first disc, titled 'London Jam', is what fans may be expecting: squawking,
caterwauling jamming sessions and avant garde experimentation. Some of this
works only too well (the three best songs from the 'Yoko/Plastic Ono Band' LP
and most of the best of 'Fly') while some of it frankly doesn't (the rest of
'Yoko/Plastic Ono Band' and the unreleased material from 'Fly'). Any disc with
'Mind Train' 'Midsummer New York' and 'Greenfield Morning' all in one place is
pretty special though, even if you have to keep the 'skip' button handy. Oddly
there's only one 'unfinished music' track here ('No Bed For Beatle John' from
'Life With The Lions') and none of Yoko's performances with the Plastic Ono
Band from 'Lice Peace In Toronto' or 'Sometime In New York City'. The second
disc, titled 'New York Rock', is superb - it's all taken from 'Approximately
Infinite Universe' (with a few curious such as a rawer outtake of 'Kite Song'
thrown in) and is in effect an 80 minute highlights of the original 100 minute
set with all the weaker tracks removed. Already Yoko's masterpiece, this work
now sounds even better, switching from emotional confessional to joyful pop to
raw rockers to lush ballads with every throw of the dice. It remains possibly
the greatest single disc of Yoko of them all.
Disc
three is less essential, featuring the whole of the lesser album 'Feeling The
Space', although the longer running time gives Yoko the space to deliver the
album as she originally intended for the first time, with five extra songs cut
from the final version (which made it a long-running single album instead of a
short-running double LP). The record still doesn't sound great but it makes a
lot more sense heard like this with the poetic 'Warrior Woman', the wicked
comedy 'Mildred Mildred' and the philosophy-funk of 'Left Turn's The Right
Turn' all superior to anything that made the original album. Disc four mops up
most of the excellent 'Season Of Glass' album along with choice cuts from
'Double Fantasy' and 'Milk and Honey' - many of them in significantly different
mixes and alternate versions (a trippier 'Kiss Kiss Kiss' more like the version
on 'Stripped Down', a tweaked vocal for 'Beautiful Boys', a very different
elongated mix of 'Don't Be Scared', a much longer electronicy start to
'Sleepless Night', plus the lovely 'Fantasy' outtake 'Open Your Soul' that
would have been one of Yoko's best tracks on that album and 'Forgive Me My
Love', a nice if noisy outtake from 'Season Of Glass' which bids another
tearful goodbye to Lennon).
Disc
five is perhaps the lesser disc on the set, mixing more from 'Season Glass'
(though admittedly the highlights: the opening quartet of 'I Don't Know Why'
'Mindweaver' 'Even When You're Far Away'
and 'Nobody Sees Me Like You Do' makes for one heck of a powerful
beginning) and a few highlights from 'IT's Alright' and 'Starpeace' which still
aren't up to the average level throughout the rest of the set. Disc six,
however, is excellent: Yoko's entire nine-track unfinished album 'A Story'
which was recorded in 1974 for release on Apple but got lost in the troubles
that company were having and suffered from not having Lennon interested or
involved enough to push it through. We've already reviewed this classic record
elsewhere on our site - suffice to say it's probably Yoko's best work after
'Universe', with a playful child-like quality that hints at some overwhelming
emotions under the surface - the lonely and desperate 'Winter Friend', Yoko's
own take on the 'lost weekend', may well be the best thing in the entire set.
Added on the end are another six oddities - old friends from 'Sometime In New
York City' that seem rather out of place here (note the shorter edit of 'We're
All Water' compared to the version on the 'NYC' CDs these days) along with a
mixed bag of largely Japanese language tracks with the cute O'oh (about an
Independence Day celebration in New York) and Yoko's most overtly psychedelic
track based on the Buddhist chant
'Namyohorengekyo' the most
interesting.
Overall,
there's perhaps a little bit too much here for all but the most passionate Yoko
convert - and even the most passionate convert will tend to like one of these
discs a lot without playing the others that much (for me it's disc two, though
other fans have claimed disc one, three or four as their must-hears). However
'Onobox' is a lot more melodic than newcomers might expect and a lot more
playful than even fans of the record s might imagine, offering a welcome chance
to buy pretty much all of Yoko's essential releases up until this point in her
career in one handy go. A best-of was released at the same time with twenty
tracks trying to pick and choose from all these songs, but to be honest bigger
really is better in this case, with Yoko showing off five sides to her
personality one after the other, with a generous helping of largely strong
unreleased tracks thrown in too. The only things that work against this set are
the packaging (though there's a booklet it's not as informative as it might be
- there are some fascinating stories behind these songs that Yoko simply chose
not to tell), the ugly block white cover and the lost opportunity to give this
volume the best name for a set of this size ever: 'Open Your Box!' Badly in
need of a re-issue.
Yoko
Ono "Walking On Thin Ice"
(Rykodisc, May 7th 1992)
Walking On Thin Ice/Even When You're
Far Away/Kiss Kiss Kiss/Nobody Sees Me Like You Do/Yang Yang/No No No/Death Of
Samantha/Mindweaver/You're The One/Spec Of Dust/Midsummer New York/Don't Be
Scared/Sleepless Night/Kite Song/She Gets Down On Her Knees/Give Me
Something/Hell In Paradise/Women Power/O'oh
"It
was like an accident...part of growing up!"
Released
as a single disc 'sampler' for those unwilling to fork out for the big box set,
Yoko's first best and to date only best-of is a pretty god reflection of all
the more 'normal' side to her career. Many of the highlights from her back
catalogue are here - 'Midsummer New York' from 'Fly' is here, 'Death Of
Samantha' and 'Kite Song' from
'Approximately Infinite Universe', 'Walking On Thin Ice' from 1980 and
'Mindweaver' from 'Season Of Glass'. There's even the addition of a charming
'new' Yoko song (actually an outtake from the 'A Story' period in 1974) 'O'Oh',
with Yoko at her prettiest as her home state comes together to celebrate 'July
4th in New York City'. Of course like many a compilation the set could have
been better yet - the songs from 'Feeling The Space' sound as bad as ever and
there are far too many repeats from 'Double Fantasy' and 'Milk and Honey'
(albums that every curious fan buying this album would have owned in multiple
versions you would imagine). The decision to include these recordings in a
'jumbled' manner means that you also jump from some of the most 70-sopunding
recordings to some of the most 80s-sounding, which is disconcerting (though the
songs themselves flow together rather well - Yoko's good at this sort of
thing). This is also very much an 'easy' way in for fans - you don't get any
real sense of who Yoko 'is' from this record the way you would from some
best-ofs and there's none of the harder, braver stuff from her albums here
(particularly the 'Yoko/Plastic Ono Band' and 'Fly'). This is instead the
'catchier' side of Yoko's art - and feels ever so slightly like selling out,
especially with so many songs from Yoko's less artistic 1980s records. You
wouldn't, for instance, necessarily agree with the glowing sleevenotes from
David Bowie, Eric Clapton or Cyndi Lauper - all included in the CD booklet -
that Yoko is a brave pioneer simply based on what we have here. However the
advertising slogan for this record and the box set ('It's not as bad as you
might think!') is ungenerous: at her best as with the four highlights above
Yoko had an instinctive grasp of rock and roll and a keen ear for what worked
well, releasing a handful of records that were every bit as good as her
husband's (who wasn't exactly the most consistent of the solo Beatles himself).
Had this record added a few more gems - 'Move On Fast' 'Now Or Never' and
'Winter Friend' - then this record might yet have been so good the wider world
would have been forced to reckon with how good she was. Instead this album won
the usual grudgingly nice reviews and a few comments on how badly Yoko lost her
way after John died.
(Capitol, May 4th 1994)
It Happened/I'll Always Be With
You/Spec Of Dust/Midsummer New York/What A Bastard The World Is/Loneliness/Give
Me Something/Light On The Other Side/Tomorrow May Never Come/Don't Be
Scared/Growing Pain/Warzone/Never Say Goodbye/O'Sanity/I Want My Love To Rest
Tonight/I Felt Like Smashing My Face In A Clear Glass Window/Now Or Never/We're
All Water/Yes, I'm Your Angel/It Happened/Where Do We Go From Here?/Sleepless
Night/No No No/Even When You're Far Away/Hell In Paradise/Toyboat/Story Of An
Oak Tree/Goodbye Sadness/(Hidden Track) Never Say Goodbye (Reprise)
"I
don't even remember how it happened, I don't even remember the day it happened
- but it happened and I know there's no return"
About ten years ahead of current trends - as
per usual it has to be said - 'New York Rock' was Yoko's attempt to write a
musical about her life with Lennon and the 'Ballad of John and Yoko' story from
her eyes for a change. However the public didn't really take to two hours of sitting
down with echo and ten years before 'Mamma Mia' made having a musical de rigour
Yoko was releasing this to the 'wrong' type of fanbase who'd move on from the
Beatles and weren't nostalgic just yet. Now, I've never seen this as a musical
and only know the soundtrack, but on the basis of this CD I can't say it was
much of a lost opportunity. Yoko hasn't chosen her best material or even her
material that tells a story about Lennon and the thinly veiled attept to give
the couple in the musical different names seems pointless when everyone knows
who this is really about (Yoko, usually so good at telling the 'truth', would
have been better just putting her life up on screen instead of blurring the
edges between fantasy and reality). The cast frankly don't understand her songs
and the cast list of characters ('Mother' 'Little Boy' 'Ignorance' 'Violence'
'Streetkid') doesn't bode well for this being a deep yet emotionally involved
work of any great insight. All that said
the handful of new songs - later revised and re-recorded by Yoko herself for
'Rising' and her first new material in nine years - are promising.
(Capitol, January 18th 1996)
Warzone/Wouldnit?/Ask The Dragon/New
York Woman/Talking To The Universe/Turned The Corner/I'm Dying/Where Do We Go
From Here?/Kurushi/Will I?/Rising/Goodbye My Love/Revelations
"I
look in the mirror where there used to be a smile, but all I see now is a
stranger"
'Rising'
won Yoko's best reviews for decades, as Yoko returned to her gritty angst
driven screaming on a series of hard hitting songs backed by Japanese rock band
IMA (which means 'Now' in translation) and Sean, now a twenty-one-year old guitarist.
At last, after so many years away, the musical world had caught up with Yoko
and she was finally 'current' with grunge and garage clearly having much in
common with her early style. While an extraordinary record for a
sixty-three-year-old, with an intense no holds-barred performance that would
put singers a third of her age to shame for passion and energy, to some extent
it's still Yoko's laziest album. The songs are as one-note as any of the songs
she was getting ticked off for writing in the 1980s and actually less effective
than her earlier avant garde records when this sort of thing was genuinely
'shocking' not 'in the charts'. Much of
the album comes across as just a noise, which is a shame because no previous
Yoko record however odd or confrontational was 'just' a noise. After a full
eleven years away this record was a disappointment, however welcome it was to
see the music reviewers finally understanding Yoko's art. However some songs -
the most 'normal' - do shine through the murk. The funky hiphop 'Wouldn'tit?'
adds a whole new string to Yoko's bow of musical styles more convincingly than
most musicians her age, her tribute to local artists 'New York Woman' could
have come straight out of her more lyrical 19760s material and the bluesy 'Where
Do We Go From Here?' which sounds like a revised chapter from her book of
sayings 'Grapefruit' and even throws in another old nursery rhyme just like the
old days ('Ding Dong Bell').Best of all is 'Turned A Corner', one last attempt
to make sense of Lennon's murder which is almost too hard to bear, two
lovebirds giggling as they turned the corner without knowing what would come
next - and the corner that Yoko had to turn in her life to be able to deal with
it. However much of the rest is just a sea of nothing from an artist that we're
used to giving us so much more than we can usually cope with. Rising isn't
quite risible, but it's one of Yoko's weaker albums despite the critical
plaudits.
(Capitol, November 9th 2001)
I Want You To Remember Me (A) (B)/Is
This What We Do?/Wouldnt It Swing?/Soul Got Of The Box/Rising II/It's Time For
Action!/I'm Not Getting Enough/Mulberry/I Got Everything/Are You Looking For
Me?
"Found
guilty and robbed of my dignity, my tears are now the river
s, my flesh your
earth"
'Blueprint
For A Sunrise' both looks and sounds like a Bjork album. The album came with a
striking full-on cover of Yoko dressed as a fortune teller, staring out the
camera, and the music is more concept art and theatrical than Yoko's usual
style, though she does return to her favourite theme of women's lib. The result
is an album that's much more challenging than 'Rising' , one that isn't as
confrontational as the avant garde works or as musical as most of Yoko's albums
since 'Universe' in 1972 but somewhere win the middle. While it's nice to hear
Yoko exploring her more dangerous and eccentric style, the songs that work best
on this album tend to be the most traditional: 'Is This What We Do?' is a
lovely self-questioning ballad with pop overtones that would have fitted nicely
onto 'Double Fantasy' or 'Milk and Honey' , 'It's Time For Action!' is a 'Power
To The People' for the modern era and the lovely 'I Remember Everything' is a
lovely nostalgic ramble through Yoko's life. Much of the rest of the album,
though, sounds as if it's trying so hard to shock it's forgotten how to rock,
with twelve minutes taken up by the spoken word 'Rising II' and all sorts of
live and collage recordings thrown into the mix that disrupts the flow of the
album. The opening two songs - with Yoko arguing amongst herselves - are
particularly poor and a surprisingly cheap trick for someone whose usual such a
cerebral, thinking artist. The album's hidden star is probably son Sean, who
plays most of the guitar across the record and is right there wherever his
mother is prepared to go no matter how 'normal' or 'weird'. Promising, with
many highlights, but not quite up to where Yoko was at her peak.
Yoko
Ono "Yes, I'm A Witch!"
(Apple/Astralweeks, February 6th 2007)
Hank Shocklee/Peaches (Kiss Kiss
Kiss)/Shitlake Monkey (O'Oh)/Blow Up (Everyman Everywhere)/Le Tigre (Sisters O
Sisters)/Porcupine Tree (Death Of Samantha)/D J Spooky (Rising)/The Apples In
Stereo (No One Can See Me Like You Do)/The Brother Brothers (Yes I'm A
Witch!)/Cat Power (Revelations)/The Polyphonic Spree (You and I)/Jason Pierce
(Walkin' On Thin Ice)/Antony and Hahn Roe (Toyboat)/The Flaming Lips (Cambridge
1969)/The Sleepy Jackson (I'm Moving On)/Hank Shocklee (Witch Shocktrina
Outro)/Craig Armstrong (Shirinkatta)
"My
voice is real, my voice is truth - I don't fit in your ways"
Figuring
that it was too soon for another solo best-of, but keen to make the most of the
new interest in her work, Yoko decided to put together a remix album which
revisited her back catalogue with the assistance of several hip young
practitioners. The album again got good reviews and impressed all the sort of
people who'd once written Yoko off. However like 'Rising' there's the sense
that Yoko is actually taking the 'soft' option again - these songs worked so
well the first time round (and many of Yoko's best songs are here) because
they're timeless - making them sound so mid-2000s they already sound slightly
dated is an odd move in retrospect. The parts that reviewers fell over
themselves to praise weren't the revised mixes anyway but the strength of
Yoko's original songs, most of which are fairly obscure - what might have been
better was to release a sort of secondary best-of featuring Yoko's more
forgotten tracks as they were. I dare say some fans will like this sort of
thing, but for me remixes don't often work because they feature a different
artist's vision to the original creator - and unless you know you like the work
of every re-mixer it's a gamble whether they're on your wavelength or not (as
least with an artist you know whether you like the bulk of their work or not -
and even if you don't like a record you can at least appreciate it for filling
in a bit more of their 'journey' with you). The result is rather a hodepodge of
old songs judges by modern standards, not unlike sticking antique furniture in
a modern house - the two don't really go. Some tracks work better than others
though - the choir that sing along with an electronic freakbeat 'O'Oh' , an
uptempo disco beat version of 'Every Man Has A Woman Who Loves Him', a spacier 'Death Of Samantha' and best of all
a sparse, tinny 'Walking On Thin Ice' which turns one of Yoko's noisier punkier
songs into a vulnerable ballad (at least until a nasty wall of noise crawls in
for the second half). However nothing here improves on the originals and I find
it hard to forgive what the remixers did to classic songs like 'I'm Moving On'
'Kiss Kiss Kiss' and especially a hip hop version of 'Sisters O Sisters' which
feel like the desecration of old friends. Amazingly there'll be a second
version along just a couple of months later...
Yoko
Ono "Open Your Box"
(House, April 24th 2007)
You're The One/Everyman
Everywhere/Walkin' On Thin Ice/Hell In Paradise/Give Me Something/Walkin' On
Thin Ice/I Don't Know Why/Yang Yang/Will I/Everyman Everywoman/Kiss Kiss
Kiss/Open Your Box/Walkin' On Thin Ice #2/Give Peace A Chance
"This
is hell - in paradise!"
Everything
that applied to the last review goes for this one too with yet more remixers
given the job of revising a lesser set of Yoko originals. Opener 'You're The
One' is about as good as this set gets, turning what was meant to be a cutting
edge 80s song into a cutting edge 2000s song but far too many of the other
remixes insist on simply adding a drum beat to the song and a few twiddly
synthesisers that are going to sound every bit as dated as the originals and
more so in years to come. 'Open Your Box' itself is appalling, completely
mis-reading the coquettish inventiveness of the original , a Pet Shop Boys go
at 'Walking On Thin Ice' has too much them and not enough Yoko and the glorious
'Yang Yang' has been turned into a flimsy excuse for the same blooming drum
beat that runs through everything released in the past ten years. I'm also
considering pressing criminal charges on DJ Dan for taking an institution like
'Give Peace A Chance' and turning it into a frightful nightclub song - in the
word of Lennon himself How do you sleep at night? What worries me is that I'm
of precisely the age and generation that should love this sort of thing - but
anything that things that the drum beat is the most important part of the song
and delays the vocals coming in for a three minute drum solo that sounds like
every other three minute drum solo from every other song out there is an
appalling waste of music and of Yoko's talent. Don't open this box whatever you
do - throw it away and get the originals!
Yoko
Ono "Between My Head and The Sky"
(Chimera Music, September 21st 2009)
Waiting For The D Train/The Sun Is
Down!/Ask The Elephant/Memory Of Footsteps/Moving
Mountains/CALLING/Healing/Hashire Hashire/Between My Head and The Sky/Feel The
Sand/Watching The Rain/Unun To/I'm Going Away Smiling/Higa Noboru/I'm Alive
CD Bonus Track: Hanako
"Water
evaporates - it comes back as rain"
At
long last, the real Yoko - sassy, witty and completely at home with whatever
music has moved on to make at the age of 76. More upbeat than most Yoko albums
both musically and emotionally, using several of the techniques that ruined the
remix albums, this is an album best heard in parts rather than in one go where
it's all rather too much. The most impressive thing about this album is it's
eclecticism: it sounds like a sampler, as if Yoko has taken tracks at random
from all tracks of her six-disc 'Onobox' and added in her modern sounds too. As
usual, it's the ballads about Lennon that impress: the mournful 'Memory Of
Footsteps' is a gorgeous song about her memories of seeing her husband wave her
off from the 'seventh floor' (no doubt intended metaphorically as well as
physically). Elsewhere highlights include a bit of an Indian vibe on the a
capella 'CALLING', the gentle folk of 'Healing', the new age 'Feel The Sand'
that's strangely moving seeing as it's just Yoko reading out random
Grapefruit-style phrases and the Japanese language Higa Nobooru (translation:
'Transcend Falsehood') which features Yoko playing piano in the classical style
in which she was trained (but which has only now come in useful, in her seventies!)
The more modern, noisier songs aren't quite as inventive or as expressive, but
even they are far more convincing than on Yoko's last two records and her two
remix albums, with musicians who seem to understand Yoko this time. Once again
Sean is Yoko's wing-man, playing some very interesting guitarwork that like his
dad's breaks all the rules and offers Yoko the tough backing she needs to draw
on, with his own band Chimera backing his mum on most tracks. The result is a
very impressive comeback record, still not quite up to Yoko's very best but
certainly her strongest work since 'Season Of Glass' and more than worth
tracking down for those who loved her earlier work.
(Chimera Music, September 25th 2012)
I Missed You Listening/Running The
Risk/I Never Told You Did I?/Mirror Mirror/Let's Get There/Early In The Morning
"I
never - I never told you - did I?"
The
Yoko equivalent of Paul McCartney's 'Fireman' albums, where Macca got pushed
outside his comfort zone by a younger producer ('Youth') keen on
experimentation and improvisation, this is an intriguing collaboration between
a now 79-year-old Yoko, and fifty something Sonic Youth bassist Jim Gordon and
guitarist Thurston Moore. How odd that Yoko should be working with 'Sonic
Youth' about the same time her husband's 'ex' was working with 'Youth' on such
a similar project! It's an odd and not altogether successful album this, as the
Sonic Youth pair create all sorts of avant garde surroundings for Yoko to do
her famous squeal to. Yoko's most out-there release since 'Fly' in 1971, it has
its moments - the whispered 'I Never Told You Did I?' (where we never find out
the secret and where Yoko sounds very like Lennon's beloved Spike Milligan) and
the laidback playfulness of 'Early In The Morning' where Yoko seems to develop
a nasty cough while washing some dishes - or something like that. Too much of
this album is just pure noise, though, with Yoko's ugliest most OTT wailing
moment coming not on any of her live appearances or work with Lennon but here
on the ten minute 'Let's Get There' (if you ever need an instant migraine for
any reason, this should be your first port of call). The collaboration doesn't
seem an entirely natural pairing - the trio are audibly sounding each other out
rather than working telepathically as John and Yoko (eventually) did - but it's
good to hear Yoko pushing herself outside even her comfort zone (which must be
huge the things she'd one over the years) and this is the sort of album you're
glad Yoko's up to making, right up to the point where you actually find
yourself listening to it.
(Chimera Music, September 17th 2013)
Moonbeams/Cheshire Cat Cry/Tabetai/Bad
Dancer/Little Boy Blue Your Daddy's Gone/There's No Goodbye Between Us/7th
Floor/NY Noodle Town/Take Me To The Land Of Hell/Watching The Dawn/Leaving
Tim/Shine Shine/Hawk's Call
CD Bonus Tracks: Story Of An Oak
Tree/Ai
"If
one day we slip away - and that may be
in the cards - we will know deep in our hearts that there's no goodbye between
us"
Yoko's
most recent record at the time of writing, 'Hell' is nicely upbeat and positive
despite the title. The record opens with new age style sound effects that 's
only missing the whale to become the sort of thing that plays when you're
getting a massage and much of the record feels like unwinding in a hot bath,
far calmer and gentler than Yoko usually is. Overall it's another strong album
that shows off Yoko's range and features a 'revival' of the Plastic Ono Band
name for the first time since 1971 (with Sean again on guitar). 'Cheshire Cat
Cry' is Yoko's best song in decades, a witty surreal song with Yoko returning
to her theme of her reserve holding her strong emotions in check with some
cracking guitar, bass and drum work. Other highlights include the playful
'Tabetai' (translation: 'excuse') and the title track which is another strong
Yoko piano ballad. Lennon is still Yoko's favourite subject though and her songs
for her husband are truly moving: the indescribable contemporary dance track
'Little Boy Blue Your Daddy's Gone' about trying to tell Sean his dad had died
(which starts with a long sigh that speaks volumes), the sweet 'There's No
Goodbye Between Us' about their last walk through Central Park together which
sounds very much at one with the gritted-teeth-strength of Yoko's 'Season Of
Glass' album and the powerful 'Watch The Dawn' in which Yoko asks John to wait
for her because she's still got a bit more to do back on Earth first.
Admittedly there isn't much happening on the rest of the LP, but considering
how quickly Yoko released this album after her last and how often she's gone
down these roads before this is still an impressively inventive and moving listen.
Yoko seems to be getting better with age, returning to the promising career
that got cut short by the 'lost weekend' era and the poor reception to her
lesser 1980s work. Lennon would have been very proud and it will be fascinating
to see where Yoko might go from here.
'Lennon/Plastic Ono Band' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-43-john-lennonplastic-ono-band.html
A NOW COMPLETE LIST OF JOHN AND YOKO ARTICLES TO READ AT
ALAN’S ALBUM ARCHIVES:
'Lennon/Plastic Ono Band' (1970) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-43-john-lennonplastic-ono-band.html
'Imagine' (1971) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/john-lennon-imagine-1971-album-review.html
'Sometime In New York City' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-35-john.html
'Mind Games'(1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/news-views-and-music-issue-77-john.html
'Walls and Bridges' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-63-john-lennon-walls-and-bridges.html
'Sometime In New York City' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-35-john.html
'Mind Games'(1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/news-views-and-music-issue-77-john.html
'Walls and Bridges' (1974) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-63-john-lennon-walls-and-bridges.html
'Double Fantasy' (1980) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-double-fantasy.html
'Milk and Honey' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/news-views-and-music-issue-135-john.html
'Milk and Honey' (1982) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/news-views-and-music-issue-135-john.html
Non-Album Recordings
1969-1980 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-non-album.html
Live/Compilation/Unfinished
Music Albums 1968-2010 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/john-lennon-livecompilationraritiesunfi.html
The Best Unreleased Lennon
Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/john-lennon-best-unreleased-recordings.html
Surviving TV Clips
1968-1980 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/john-lennon-surviving-tv-clips-1968-1980.html
Essay: Power To The Beatle – Why Lennon’s Authenticity Was So Special https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/john-lennon-essay-power-to-beatle-why.html
Landmark concerts and key cover versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/john-lennon-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
Essay: Power To The Beatle – Why Lennon’s Authenticity Was So Special https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/john-lennon-essay-power-to-beatle-why.html
Landmark concerts and key cover versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/john-lennon-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
Yoko: 'Approximately
Infinite Universe' (1972) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2008/07/review-54-yoko-ono-approximately.html
Yoko: 'A Story' (1974/1998)http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-89-yoko-ono.html
Yoko: 'A Story' (1974/1998)http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/news-views-and-music-issue-89-yoko-ono.html
Yoko
Complete Solo Album Guide 1971-2014 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/yoko-ono-complete-solo-albums-guide.html
