Talking To Yoko Ono, 1984
She Did Not Break Up the Beatles
There were a few times when I may have been an unwitting participant in a conceptual art piece by Yoko Ono. In "Telephone Piece," according to a 2006 New York Times article, " a phone rings intermittently and passers-by pick it up to find Ms. Ono live at the end of the line."
That opened to me twice, sort of, in the 1980s at my office at New York Newsday. The phone would ring, I would answer it, and it would be a member of Yoko's staff, asking if I wanted to come over to her home at the Dakota to speak with her. They'd send the new album over, we'd make an appointment, and a few days later we'd spend an hour or so drinking tea and chatting about her work. The quotes from Ono below are from my transcript of an interview for a story that appeared in Newsday on September 13, 1984, headlined "Ono Awaits A Brighter Season."
Today, December 8, is still a difficult day for many of us, as it is the anniversary of the 1980 murder of John Lennon by a handgun-wielding assassin. Only four years later, Ono had me over in 1984, to talk about Every Man Has a Woman, a compilation of songs she wrote, covered by others, as a 50th birthday tribute, originally planned by John.
She was candid about her reaction to watching Lennon bleed and die in front of her four years earlier, and about her resiliency and responsibility to move on.
"Those extreme emotions, extreme sorrow," Ono said. "And there was a part of me that felt extremely guilty. For no reason, but for instance, would John have ever come to live in New York City if it weren't for me? Little things like that."
WR: And now?
Yoko: "I've got a great sort of feeling for John now. I miss him. I feel nostalgia for all the things we did. So it's a pleasure for me to think about his music. When he was alive, it was more pleasant for me to think about my music, not his. But now it is a pleasure."
The album has versions of Ono songs recorded by an assortment of artists and friends. Harry Nilsson, the late singer and songwriter and John's raucous partying buddy during a low point of Lennon's life in the 1970s, is on three songs. Trio, a band produced by longtime Beatles friend Klaus Voorman, is here, as are tracks sung by Roseanne Cash, Eddie Money. The best track is Elvis Costello & the Attractions' version of "Walking On Thin Ice," produced by Allen Toussaint. Ono's neighbor in the Dakota, Roberta Flack contributes "Goodbye Sadness." Even Eddie Money is here, doing "I'm Moving On"--not Hank Snow's song, but Yoko Ono's.
Elvis Costello & the Attractions knock Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Thin Ice” out of the park, with the TKO Horns and Allen Toussaint producing.
WR: Do you think this album will bring you new respect as a songwriter?
Yoko: (scoffing) I hope it will bring some demand. Respect is something else. But demand, you know, I need it. . . John said I was the most famous unknown person, or whatever. I was suffering from people not knowing I'm a songwriter."
Yoko was already established as a member of important 1960s conceptual art movements such as Fluxus when she met Lennon at a London art gallery in 1966. She had little understanding of rock and roll.
Yoko: "First I thought it was so simple, and I didn't know why they were doing something as simple as that, musically. They were doing 'Yellow Submarine.' I said, 'Yellow Submarine'? What are they doing that for? But now I see it, 'Yellow Submarine' is a brilliant song and beautiful. And the simplicity is something that stems from the basic being of human nature."
There was a mini-industry of Lennon and Ono books in the years after John's death. Over the decades, she has been burned by some of the more salacious and negative stories about her, and John, and the Beatles, but at that moment in 1984, she was trying to let go of some of her control instincts.
Yoko: "There was some indignation." [About the books]. But the various angles might have resulted in some sort of truth, or honesty, or historical correction.
"Maybe it's good that a lot of it comes out, and there's sort of a drawing board, some of shape, or semblance of what it was. Or maybe it's not really that important that you really know what it was. What you get out of it is the most important thing. It shouldn't be, 'I have a set idea about something and everybody has to get the message that way...You can be inspired by somebody throwing something in a garbage can. You don't know what's going to trigger your mind into something beautiful."
She said preferred Tarot cards to psychiatry. "I don't think there's any psychiatrist that can cover all the complexity, experience-wise, that I went through. That's my arrogant side." But she didn't use Tarot cards for advice either, saying they gave her "a wider scope," but that "a decision is made by the accumulation of all of your faculties."
She spent a lot of time talking about her and John's young son Sean, who closes the album with a song called "It's Alright."
And, as we know now from Peter Jackson's movie Get Back, she did not break up the Beatles.
Yoko: "I think that anything that breaks is going to break. . . That goes with marriage, and theirs was a kind of marriage, wasn't it? I never felt guilty. I thought it was a very sort of healthy change, transformation for all of them. Especially for John. He knew exactly what he wanted, and he got it. And I don't think anybody could have told him what to do, or to change his feelings. I think he was following his intuition, and I was following mine."