by Barry Miles
Yoko: Do you think they noticed . . . do you think they noticed, because I mean . . .?
John: You bet they noticed. They were trying so hard not to notice. You know that when you go in a restaurant. You can always tell people are trying not to look at you. You know, they’re being cool, and you pick up this sort of vibe, or whatever you call it, coming from people not looking at you, you know. It’s worse than when they look.2
In fact Douglas Oliver, in the Cambridge Evening News, gave a neutral report of the event, sounding as if they didn’t really know what to make of it – a view shared by many others – but were doing their best:
Miss Ono began with a fearsome siren note, as Japanese as a Noh Play Chant, and sustained it to the point of self-torture. Lennon was squatting at her feet, back to the audience, holding, shaking, swinging electric guitars right up against a large speaker, or hitting the instrument against the speaker, to create ear-splitting feedbacks . . . The concert was strange and chilling, not in a bad sense, but because so much unusual sound texture and harsh melody were disturbing. At no time did the music become comforting. It was an extraordinary experience.3
Yoko, with John, had the opening set, followed after a break by a group of well-known free jazz musicians including saxophonist John Tchicai and percussionist John Stevens. It was Yoko’s show; she howled and screeched at the front of the stage while John sat at the back in the shadows and accompanied her on an over-loud feedback guitar. The organizer, Anthony Barnett, said, ‘Lennon had been trying to show off and be more avant-garde than anyone in avant-garde music.’ John and Yoko had told the other musicians, ‘If you would like to join us for some improvisation, please do.’ At the very end they were joined onstage by John Tchicai and John Stevens.
John Tchicai, the Danish free saxophonist and composer (1936– 2012), had played with John Coltrane and Albert Ayler as a side-man. He was a member of Archie Shepp’s New York Contemporary Five and led the New York Art Quartet. Critic Mort Maizlish described him: ‘Tchicai plays in a dry, metallic manner that at first makes other styles appear florid. He is, however, an extremely inventive and emotional player, whose tonal innovations do not follow even the conventions of “originality”.’4 John Stevens, at that time less well known, was a free-improvisation English drummer (1940– 1994) and a founding member of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. They had their own audience and group of followers; the appearance of John Lennon would not have been greeted with derision, just puzzlement. It was only the second time Lennon had played apart from the other members of the Beatles, and, as Lennon himself said, it was the first time he had ever tried to play feedback guitar. He did not have the control of Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix, nor did he have the skill of the many free jazz players who used feedback as part of their performance, so any criticism – if indeed there was any – was probably valid.
Lennon’s ambivalence towards avant-garde music was not something he ever really resolved: he was unfamiliar with the developments in modern music and in free jazz, and so he dismissed them all out of hand as ‘intellectual crap’. However, this was the background that Yoko came from: she had played with John Cage and others and had recently collaborated with Ornette Coleman in an evening of experimental music at the Royal Albert Hall. This particular evening seems to have been the cause of a certain amount of jealousy on John’s part, and it was interesting to see how he came to terms with it. The event had by then turned into something of a cause célèbre: first of all the British Musicians’ Union would not allow Ornette to play unless a British musician was offered a similar gig in America (an absurd restriction that set British jazz back by decades because virtually none of the new American musicians were able to play in the UK, and the UK had no players of international status to exchange). Ornette eventually was allowed to come over from Paris, where he was living, after a campaign to get music professors all over Britain to write in claiming he was a classical musician. That worked, and the concert was scheduled for 29 February 1968. Ornette brought with him the same sidemen he used earlier that month in Milan, an unusual combination utilizing the twinned basses of David Izenson and Charlie Haden, along with Edward Blackwell on drums.
Trouble arose almost immediately at rehearsals because Ornette’s sidemen were unable to understand Yoko’s directions; they were too abstract and poetic to give any clear musical instruction. Coleman suggested that she write it down, but this did not help much as the text was a typical piece of baffling, whimsical and somewhat erotic Yoko poetry. The musicians liked it and suggested that it be used in the programme, even though it could not be used as a guide to her intentions. The programme was printed, but when the Albert Hall officials saw it they regarded it as obscene – Yoko’s instructions included words like ‘shit’ and ‘penis’, and the programmes were all confiscated and destroyed. Yoko had more produced which were handed out on the night with the tickets, but even then the guards attempted to confiscate them, in some cases grabbing them from the hands of people who had already paid for them. The hall then ordered a stop to the sale of tickets, but this caused a near riot, with the crowd outside chanting, ‘Let the people in! Let the people in!’ So rather than have to call the police, the hall relented and allowed the concert to proceed. The concert itself did have a somewhat sexual theme, with Yoko’s cries and grunts sounding like sexual intercourse, as Ornette and the trio provided suitable honks and squeals.
Yoko and John in hospital after Yoko’s miscarriage. This photograph was to form the album cover for Life with the Lions. It was taken by Susan Wood in Room No. 1, Second West Ward, Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, Hammersmith.
That September I spoke with Lennon about the Ornette concert, as well as his recent concert in Toronto with the Plastic Ono Band: a pick-up band consisting of Eric Clapton, bassist Klaus Voorman and drummer Alan White. We also talked about the Cambridge concert with Yoko, which was included on Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions that had been released four months earlier. At that time all conversations and interviews in John’s and Yoko’s front room on the ground floor of Apple were being tape-recorded.5 In this section of the transcript John is talking about the Plastic Ono Band’s appearance at the Toronto Rock-’n’-Roll Revival on 13 September, ten days earlier:
John: You’d have enjoyed it . . . It was really something; it finally happened that night – something happened on stage all right, and in the crowd. Because we didn’t know what we were going to do, a rock-’n’-roll audience, and how the reaction would be. But something magical happened that night. The fact that it affected Eric and Klaus and Alan – they really got turned on by that experience. So that turned us on even more. The whole thing really just was a big, big turn-on. And it was like a new direction. We didn’t do anything we didn’t do at Cambridge, or that Yoko hadn’t really done with Ornette Coleman at Albert Hall. But the fact [is] that when she first gave me her Albert Hall stuff I grooved to it. I was saying all that intellectual jazz, but going on in the background, ‘Can’t stand it. Can’t stand it! Let’s do it together, do it this way.’ Conceptually you think you’re going to howl and the musician’s going to play, but the difference between Ornette Coleman intellectualizing that jazz, which is just, to me, intellectual literary crap coming out of a trumpet or whatever he plays, and just playing rock ’n’ roll, or just playing the amplifier, is tremendous, you know, and that’s what happened in Cambridge because it was small, it was a small experience.
Yoko: And that happened too because I didn’t need John then. I was going through a phase of all that scene when I was the oddball because my thing was that I was less theoretical than most of them. I was intuitive, and so when I followed even, say, Ornette, you can obviously see immediately that Ornette’s job is highly intellectualized, sophisticated stuff. And I’m howling, and the combination is not a combination really; it’s not merging, it’s sort of separate. But I didn’t have anybody else to merge with. But then I met John who was having the same kind of problem. He was always having to
cut himself down for the Beatles and playing old stuff by himself at home. He was really freaking out at home. And I’ve heard some of that freaked-out stuff that he did at home. I really wanted to groove, you know. And this time it was really very easy, because both of us are basically intuitive people and we are normal oddballs. And you know what they say, when two people dream it’s a reality. We were like in a dream state, and then he came and we started to make love.
John: I’ve never heard any avant-garde stuff that I’d wanna bring in. I’d sooner have ten Eric Claptons. I’d sooner get a Salvation Army Band than get a lot of avant-garde people to squeak and play all that intellectual crap. I think anything’s valid, but if Yoko says this is a particular performer that I recommend and we should perform with him, then I’d do it, but anything I’ve heard has always left me cold. I haven’t heard anything better than a car engine yet . . .
It’s just like if I painted myself blue. What could we do about it? If there’s a concert on and for my turn of the party I want to be painted blue there’s nothing to intellectualize about . . . I mean, some of the letters from the kids, they’re having no trouble [with what I do]. Sixty thousand kids in America are having no trouble with Life with the Lions. I mean, there’s always going to be people complaining because we left the Cavern and went to work in Manchester, you know. That’s all it is really. How dare I leave the Cavern and jump in a white bag in the Albert Hall? But I can’t wait around for those people to decide they’d like me to go into tap dancing.
If the Beatles had just gone into showbiz, there would have been nothing said; we would have got probably a knighthood and nothing but praise, but we’re not looking for that. At least I’m not, and so I must just do what I want, and I can’t. It’s like we couldn’t take a poll at the Cavern to see if they thought it was suitable for John Lennon, Paul, George and Ringo to go and play in Croydon because the poll would have said, ‘No, stay at home’, and we couldn’t have taken a poll as to whether the Beatles went to America or not because most of the British fans would have said, ‘No, stay here’, you know, and it’s only the same thing going on. I’m just moving out, or pressing the outer limits of whatever’s going on and people say, ‘How dare you, I don’t understand why you’re leaving your cosy rut and doing something else? Why don’t you stay in your rut where we can recognize you?’ There’s no time for waiting for people to understand why I’ve grown a beard or why I’ve shaved it off, or why I want to be naked or why I want to stand on my head; there’s no time for it. You know, if people waited for people to understand everything they did, nothing would ever be done.
I’m not a politician so I don’t rely on public taste or public opinion as to how I run my life. I refuse to do that. I mean, I don’t even consider it. For a politician to go into a white bag in the Albert Hall he’d have to consider the effects it would have on his constituents, but I’m not a politician, and I don’t owe my constituents anything other than I create something, whatever it is, and they accept it or reject it on its own merits and not on any preconceived ideas.
The second side of Life with the Lions was composed of cassette recordings made in Room 1, Second Ward West, Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, between 4 and 25 November 1968, the world-renowned maternity hospital on Du Cane Road, London W12, that Yoko had been admitted to following complications with her pregnancy.
Track one, ‘No Bed for Beatle John’, is John and Yoko chanting the texts of press cuttings a cappella style: these include a report that John had no bed to stay in overnight and had to sleep on the floor and of how EMI refused to distribute Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins because of its controversial cover showing them both naked. Lennon said, ‘On “No Bed for Beatle John”, it’s another diary of how we are now. We just thought it would be nice to sing these press cuttings because they’re stylized and people just read them out usually. We chose them because it is what people were saying about us in that [hospital] room. We never left that room to make that record. We even made a film while we were in that room. We were reading about ourselves like everybody else reads about us. So, we thought about singing it’.6
The second track, ‘Baby’s Heartbeat’, is a recording of the actual heartbeat of their baby, John Ono Lennon II, recorded using a Nagra microphone and looped to last four minutes.
Track three, ‘Two Minutes Silence’, can be seen as a memorial to their son, who miscarried shortly after the recording was made, and can also be read as a reference to John Cage’s famous ‘4’33”’, which requires listening to the relative silence of a room for that length of time, although John’s and Yoko’s silence is just dead tape.
The last track is ‘Radio Play’, a collage of John and Yoko in conversation, Lennon making a telephone call and snatches of the sounds of a radio. An edited version of this track was first released as a flexi-record and included in an issue of Aspen, the art magazine that appeared in a box.
A month earlier Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher and his Drugs Squad team had raided Montagu Square. John and Yoko always maintained that Yoko’s miscarriage was brought on by the stress of the raid. The front sleeve of the album is a photograph, taken by Susan Wood, of Yoko in bed with John on his mattress on the floor at Queen Charlotte’s where Yoko was recovering. The hospital did not have enough beds, and so John had to bed down on a mattress on the floor.
The back-cover news agency photograph shows the distraught and scared-looking couple leaving Marylebone Magistrates’ Court on 19 October, the day after the police raid on Montagu Square. The back cover also carried a quote from George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, saying, ‘No comment’.
Years later, when asked about the photograph on the sleeve of Life with the Lions, showing her in bed in hospital, Yoko was remarkably casual about it:
Yoko Ono: Yes. We had a miscarriage or something, didn’t we?
John Lennon: You had a miscarriage, and I was there, the actual reality of it.
Yoko: That’s right, exactly . . . We had many miscarriages.
John: We did.
Yoko: Yes, about three.
John: Yeah, enough to make us miserable about it, you know.7
The organizers did not know that she and Lennon were together, and his appearance was not expected. The organizer, Anthony Barnett, asked her if she was going to bring a band or accompaniment. Yoko asked John what he thought and he told her, ‘ Well, I’m the band, but don’t tell them, you know. I’ll be the band.’ So she told him, ‘ Yes, I’ll bring a band with me.’
George Harrison with Paul McCartney in 1967. Although Paul seemed to show more interest in the electronic music scene initially, it was George who would release the Electronic Sound album, showcasing his experiments with the Moog synthesizer and his psychedelic artwork on the album sleeve.
Chapter 14
Electronic Sound
ALTHOUGH I NEVER TALKED with George Harrison about electronic music as such, I know it was one of the areas that interested him and that it was a subject the Beatles discussed between themselves and with George Martin, their producer. Back in December 1966 I had a taped conversation with Paul McCartney in which we predicted that this would be the area that popular music developed into, although neither of us could of course predict Kraftwerk and the rise of techno. Paul said:
This is the gap in electronics, the one where people, quite a few people, that are prepared for the next sound, they’re ready, they’re waiting for the next scene in music, the next scene in sound. A lot of people now are ready to be led to the next move. The next move seems to be things like electronics because it just is a different field, it’s a complete new field, and there’s a lot of good new sounds to be listened to in it. But if the music itself is just going to jump about five miles ahead, then everyone’s going to be left standing with this gap of five miles that they’ve got to all cross before they can even see what scene these people are on and, for instance, with the people . . . I can see that it is in a way a progression to accept random things as being
planned. Random is planned, as well, but most people won’t accept that and they’d need a lead into it, to accepting that. You can’t just say to somebody, ‘That machine plays random notes, but it’s planned and I can control the amount of random in it.’ They’ll say, ‘What for? Why don’t you write a nice tune or why don’t you just write some interesting sounds?’ That’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to look into that gap a bit.
It turned out that George, not Paul, was the first Beatle to investigate it enough to release an album of his experiments when he made Electronic Sound two years later. In the meantime, we had all been listening to a lot of electronic music. It was popularized by Switched On Bach by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos with Benjamin Folkman, released in September 1968, and was the number ten top American LP of 1969 and stayed in the ‘classical’ chart for 310 weeks; it was soulless though. Indica Books did import some records, and in my role of ‘purveyor of anything hip that you think we should have’ to the Beatles, I had sent them all copies of Silver Apples of the Moon by Morton Subotnik (1968), who worked with a modular voltage-controlled synthesizer, which he called the Electric Music Box. It seemed the sort of thing they would all want to hear. (Other records I sent to them all included Freak Out by the Mothers of Invention, USA edition; The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, volumes one and two; Ghosts by Albert Ayler; and The Fugs on ESP. Other electronic compositions I sent round were Philomel by Milton Babbitt and Visage by Luciano Berio.)
The press release accompanying the release of the first two Zapple albums on 9 May 1969 described the label:
Zapple is . . . an extension of everything raw and different which Apple has tried to bring to the record business. On Zapple you will hear eccentricities . . . Zapple will bring sounds of all kinds . . . not necessarily music as you know it, love it or fear it. There will be electronic sounds, spoken-word, recorded interviews . . . We may . . . and whisper it with infinite subtlety, only loud enough so that it may be heard, no louder . . . have some classical music.