My Life in the Cutout Bins: John Lennon & Yoko Ono/Sometime In New York City

John Lennon's two LP release Sometime In New York City seems like it was born in the cutout bins, landing there as soon as it became apparent that the followup to Plastic Ono Band and Imagine was not at all like those records and would tank in the sales department as soon as fans caught a whiff of it.

John Lennon's solo reputation rests largely on those first two albums plus a couple of singles. After Sometime in New York City he returned to recording rock and pop songs on Mind Games, which was fairly successful, and then on Walls & Bridges. While Walls & Bridges seemed, to me, like a better, deeper record, it was not at all well liked at the time of its release, and it barely fares better to this day. Rock & Roll, the rock 'oldies' cover album is generally brushed over, but it is actually a solid John Lennon album from a performance standpoint. His voice is the best suited of The Beatles to tackle the old scream and testify rock standards on display here, and Lennon’s Spector-inspired production is solid.

That was the end of Lennon's career for five years. When he reemerged to release Double Fantasy, the record was well on its way to not being well received before Lennon was assassinated. This caused a re-evaluation of Lennon's entire career, but nothing was as obvious a maneuver as Rolling Stone's revised review of the record it had originally panned.

In the years since, Lennon's stock has slowly declined even as fellow bandmate Paul McCartney's has continued to rise, culminating with the worshipful depiction of Macca in Peter Jackson's serious revision of history, Get Back. There, Lennon is relegated to the background, equally distracted by Yoko Ono and heroin. While it is true that John was busy with extracurricular activities and saw this new Beatles project as just one more thing rather than the thing, he still came up with 'Don't Let Me Down' and "I Dig a Pony."

Sometime In New York City is titled correctly, as it chronicles 'sometime'--1972--as well as 'some time' spent in NYC, which became the new home of the Lennons. It is a broadside, quickly written and recorded in order to remain current by the time of its release. Both Lennon and McCartney had tired of the whole record industry process, whereby it took months to a year to get a record recorded, mixed, mastered, pressed and into the stores. Even so, time moves quickly and events are fluid: Lennon wrote "John Sinclair" for a protest in Michigan. By the time Some Time in New York City was released, Sinclair had already been released. The Beatles had always been, and had remained a singles band even as they helped define the era of the album. One side of Magical Mystery Tour was devoted to collecting singles they had released in the previous several years onto one long playing record.

For McCartney the idea was to go back to square one, starting out with a new band playing club and college gigs. Lennon wanted to be part of the street party that was going on , to put his message into the countercultural mix along with such luminaries as Timothy Leary and Angela Davis. John released "Power to the People" and "Instant Karma" in 1970, both non-album singles that were written, recorded, and released in a shorter than usual time frame--"Instant Karma" in something like ten days. Sometime in New York City reads as an attempt to achieve that kind of freshness and immediacy in an album format. "I wrote 'Power to the People' the same way I wrote 'Give Peace a Chance,' as something for the people to sing. I make singles like broadsheets" he said at the time. (quoted in Williams, Richard (2003). Phil Spector: Out of His Head. London: Omnibus Press. p. 160)

These early solo singles were full on pop records, catchy and effectively produced by Phil Spector. On Sometime in New York City, Lennon took a more utilitarian approach to his agitprop, while Yoko Ono's songs are often more nuanced and generalized. With its intermingling of tracks by Lennon and tracks by Ono, Sometime in NY City is a kind of alt-political rock dry run for Double Fantasy.

Musically, Lennon wanted to play a more basic, blues based rock and roll. He was still more in the grab your guitar case and show up at the gig/studio/rehearsal, plug in and jam mode than the let's create a studio masterpiece guy. And to that end, he commandeered a local rock group, Elephant's Memory, to serve as the Plastic Ono Band on this record as well as on two Yoko Ono albums, Feeling the Space and Approximately Infinite Universe.

Ultimately, it's the Yoko Ono tracks that tended to lodge in my head long after Lennon's more topical screeds had faded from memory. "Sisters O Sisters" is a fifties girl group number devoted to rousing women to a greater state of political and social awareness. It develops its own head of steam, with robust support from guitar and sax, all gorgeously rendered by Phil Spector.

Spector puts the reverb sheen, the echo, the phat guitar sound and flat drums as well as a light string section on these tracks, making some of Lennon's most mediocre music sound terrific. You can easily find yourself bopping along to this album because all of the moving parts are so agreeable, but at some point you have to ask yourself: is this what John Lennon has become, really? Will he continue on as some kind of politically charged latter day Johnathan Richman, dispensing obvious wisdom and cheeky good vibes to a fifties rock groove?

Yoko's "Born in a Prison" is perhaps the most affecting song on the album, a catalog of the myriad ways that humans lack the compassion to help each other, trapped in a prison that is all-encompassing: "born in a prison/raised in a prison/sent to a prison called school". The verses are quite dark, unusual for Ono, and they paint a portrait of an Orwellian existence in shades of grey. But the chorus, which breaks into a more musically bright section, offers some Zen-like insight:

Wood becomes a flute when its loved

Reach for yourself and your battered mates

Mirror becomes a razor when it's broken

Look in the mirror and see your shattered fate

And that feels like the major thing that I carried away from this record: love creates beauty, inspiration, art, while hatred and self-loathing create pain and violence. Musically, the chorus uses a pentatonic melody that is meant to evoke traditional Japanese music and highlight the more spiritual aspect of the lyrics.

It's easy to deride John and Yoko's political detour as little more than theatre or limousine liberalism, and those elements certainly exist. They aren't helped by the name-dropping "New York City," though it's John's best song on the album, mostly because he lets his sense of humor out to play and because it's a genuinely rocking number. But he talks about 'waiting for Jerry (Rubin) to land' which means nothing to most current listeners. Hell, he mentions NY folk singer David Peel, and I, listening to this record in 1974, already had no clue who that was without looking it up. But the song documented Lennon's love for NYC, the city he would fight to remain in after being targeted for deportation by the Nixon administration, and unlike some of the other tracks here, it is fun to listen to.

But Lennon clearly wanted to weigh in on some of the controversial people and actions taking place in the charged atmosphere of 1972. Echoing his broadside comment, the original gatefold album cover is a newspaper with the song titles as headlines and the lyrics as the stories, accompanied by images. Jethro Tull employed a similar album cover concept, releasing Thick as a Brick that same year, though Lennon's was a little more controversial. A doctored photo depicting Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong dancing naked together accompanied the lyrics to Yoko's album closer, "We're All Water." Though my copy is unmolested, the record company apparently put a non-removable sticker over the image on a large number of later copies of the record.

The headline that's front and center on the cover is "Woman is the Nigger of the World" with a photo of a smiling John and Yoko right above it. The song was released as a single prior to Sometime in New York City's release, and its use of the pejorative term drew reaction from black leaders. John and Yoko went out of their way to defend themselves against accusations of racism. In true Lennon fashion, the song is a critique within a critique. The fact that the term 'nigger' is used to convey a universal sense of disdain, of the downtrodden, the untouchable, the oppressed presents its own problem with treating all human beings equally--there's an implied critique of racism and colonialism there. But that no matter the culture, women are always at the bottom of the list. The most oppressed group, ranging across cultures and races and classes.

The other piece of art work that is reproduced on the front cover, in the panel with the lyrics for "Woman is..." is a black and white detail of a drawing by artist Toshio Saeki. Saeki is a master of Japanese erotic art. The drawing depicts a demon raping a Japanese schoolgirl, cutting straight through her midsection with a large knife while blood spurts from the wound. Indeed, one wonders how closely people looked at the album cover as this image would have been shocking and unexpected to Western viewers unfamiliar with the twin themes of eroticism and violence that feed such Japanese media as manga.

No one seemed to take offense at Saeki's artwork even though the record company had gone nuts over the doctored photo of Nixon and Mao naked. Of course , it was a sensitive time for Chinese/American relations--Nixon's historic visit to China occurred during the week that John and Yoko took over hosting of the Mike Douglas Show and introduced middle America to the radical leftist agenda that they were involved in. But by interacting with guests like Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale, they demonstrated that these were only people after all, just as Nixon and his minions were. That's the message of "We're All Water" and it's the same message that the photo sought to convey.

So, yeah, bad vibes all around for the lead single and lead off track to the album. So much so that the album was maybe (?) cancelled as a 50th anniversary edition release because no one (Sean Lennon?) wanted to promote it and have that whole discussion again.

Well, then, what about the second disc, full of live music from Lennon and Ono with Plastic Ono Band and even with Frank Zappa?

Side three offers a set from London's Lyceum, where the Plastic Ono Band all-stars played in a benefit show for UNICEF. On hand were George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston, Klaus Voorman, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, Alan White, Jim Gordon, Delaney & Bonnie, and John & Yoko. John & Yoko launched their War Is Over! poster campaign, and the posters were seen for the first time at the Lyceum concert. This would also be John's last performance in England, ever, though I'm sure no one knew it at the time.

This performance is the main reason to own the record. The group opens with "Cold Turkey" following Lennon's introduction: "This is a song about pain." Which it is, and Lennon opens up with the primal screaming, a therapy he and Yoko would undergo with its developer, Dr. Arthur Janoff. The band sounds good, Lennon sounds good, it's a solid performance, during which Yoko reportedly sat in a bag (a cloth sack, really) on stage.

Ono burst forth from the bag, screaming, for a rendition of "Don't Worry Kyoko" that is the equivalent of a free jazz work out and which was reportedly much longer in person than the fifteen-plus minutes allotted it on this album side. It is clearly not everyone's cup of tea, but I will say that this sounds like what Yoko Ono was actually trying to achieve in her avant-rock music at the time. As we see on Sometime in New York City and on Approximately Infinite Universe and Feeling the Space, she, like John, was seeking a musical language that would carry her message to a wider group of listeners than her audience in the art world.

Lennon remembered this gig fondly (perhaps because it was his last in England), and he also remembered, in a December 6m 1980 interview with Andy Peebles, that there were a lot of young people there, down in front, who were 13 or 14 years old (perhaps because of the gig's UNICEF connection). He wondered how many of these kids formed bands that came around in the post punk era, in whose vocal techniques and primitive rock and roll he heard echoes of this period of his and Yoko's work. I've always thought that his claim of influence here was a bit overstated, though Yoko was influential to pop and rock artists who came after. But so were groups like CAN who were experimenting in ways both similar to and different from Yoko.

The final side is a performance by Lennon and Ono with Frank Zappa and his then current Mothers of Invention, recorded in June of 1971 at NYC's Fillmore East. Though everyone was excited at the prospect of Lennon and Zappa sharing the stage, the event is underwhelming. The band starts with the minor blues "Well (Please Don't Go)" with Lennon singing and Yoko wailing. Then there's "Jamrag" which is Zappa's composition "King Kong" only Lennon & Ono renamed it and put their names on as the writers. "Scumbag" is more of a jam, but apparently Lennon mixed Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan way down in the mix so that they could barely be heard. The final track, "Au" seems to be pretty much a jam as well, with Yoko doing her thing. Zappa was not only pissed about the song theft, but also about the fact that he was unable to release his version of the live recordings, which finally came out on Playground Psychotics in 1992. It's a cleaner mix with the instrumental passages and solos standing out more clearly, but ultimately it's not a winning performance that you want to hear over and over again.

Zappa got back at the Lennons by titling his mix of "Au" as "A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono."

And the record buying public got back at Lennon by not buying Sometime in New York City, giving it a sound boxing on the ears and sending it to spend its life in the cutout bins.

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