The Elephant in the Room
jamming good with John and Yoko
I am proposing the feminization of society; the use of feminine nature as a positive force to change the world. We can change ourselves with feminine intelligence and awareness, into a basically organic, noncompetitive society that is based on love, rather than reasoning. The result will be a society of balance, peace and contentment. We can evolve rather than revolt, come together, rather than claim independence, and feel rather than think. These are characteristics that are considered feminine; characteristics that men despise in women. But have men really done so well by avoiding the development of these characteristics within themselves?
~ Yoko Ono, The Feminization of Society, 1972
Hayley and I have been reading music biographies to each other. We can definitely recommend Chuck Berry’s The Autobiography (1986), by no means the complete story, the world may never be ready for that, but an endearing if untrustworthy portrait of a smart businessman, likely to succeed in any field, who turned out to be equal parts pop star, poet, and pervert, and who, as he tells it anyway, always remained the gentleman. Some of the best bits of The Autobiography are portraits of women, because Chuck is a man who, whatever his motive, cares for and about women. In fact, he stars in the YouTube clip that’s the first to come up if you search for Yoko Ono. In 1971, New York TV talk show host Mike Douglas had asked John and Yoko to curate his show for a week. Amid the avant garde performance art and radical rhetoric there were some musical guests, and one was John’s hero Chuck Berry. The clip is popular because Chuck and John, belting out a decent version of ‘Memphis Tennessee’, are joined by Yoko, who joins their harmony with her signature choked, vibrato scream. Chuck’s facial reaction is briefly humorous, from his years of entertaining, and the commentors like to take this as him being shocked by something he doesn’t recognize as music. As evidence, I guess, that Yoko’s art is objectively bad or ridiculous. But I think this is mis-reading Chuck’s character, as well as Yoko’s genius. He’s heard Yoko before, at the Montreal rock ‘n’ roll revival show. He probably knows by now that the theme of ‘Memphis Tennessee’ - separation from a girl child - is also that of Yoko’s ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’, on the flipside of John’s heroin song ‘Cold Turkey’, which is where most people first encountered her unique style. In The Autobiography, Chuck doesn’t mention this performance but does graciously pay his respects to the widowed Yoko. The band behind them is Elephant’s Memory.
I know this because Hayley excitedly played me Yoko’s 1973 song ‘Yang Yang’ a couple of weeks ago and the lead guitar and wild soprano sax caught my ear. I wondered whether the guitarist was Eric Clapton in his wah-wah period, but discovered that Elephant’s Memory accompanied Yoko on Approximately Infinite Universe. I seemed to remember that this group had their own identity before they became John and Yoko’s backing band for Sometime In New York City, so I started looking for their music, and discovered two things - firstly, I’d assumed they were just a scruffy rock’n’roll bar band and John had liked them for that reason, but no, they were already an eclectic outfit who can remind me (sometimes in the same song) of the Velvet Underground, the MC5, the United States of America, and Blood Sweat and Tears. And secondly, there’s a surprising shortage of information, let alone critical appraisal, about a band so close to the cultural epicentre that John and Yoko were in early 70’s NYC, a band whose own music represents the revolutionary ferment of those times. Drummer Rick Frank and saxophonist and clarinetist Stan Bronstein met playing the NY strip club circuit, and were inspired to form a rock group after witnessing Frank Zappa and the Mothers’ 1967 series of New York performances. Their 1969 debut album is full of raucous bluesy rock, but also much odder work like ‘Super Heep’, an acid trip with a Soft Machine-like fuzz organ solo.
Yes and now as the final potato is peeled for the stew of my mind
I watch as the vinyl papaya is slowly brought back into line
The peacock who is my friend
Dies back in my mirrored hand
We’ve all been there. Elephant’s Memory in the pre-John and Yoko years had room for a female vocalist - Carly Simon spent 6 months in the band, and by the time they recorded their debut album Michal Shapiro was there to sing the song that’s their finest moment, ‘Old Man Willow’, which featured on the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack during the Factory party scene.
The Broadcast sound before Broadcast, cycling organ riffs over treated guitar and sax, ‘Old Man Willow’ also journeys into prog jazz, and back, over its 7 minute full length.
One gets the feel of too many personalities, too many competing ideas in their music for it to ever focus on one modality for long. The next album Take It Too The Streets (1970) has a VU sound in places — ‘Piece Now’ starts out like ‘Oh, Sweet Nothing’, but it moves through psych before turning into something more like the MC5.
But the title is noteworthy — ‘Piece Now’ could be read as a Yoko Ono reference; her artworks often had “Piece” in the title, and Peace Now was her goal; whether or not there was a Fluxus influence on Elephant’s Memory, the coincidence is likely to have impressed Yoko, a life-long believer in numerology, tarot cards, and like portents.
‘Mongoose’, perhaps Elephant’s Memory’s greatest “hit”, features a startling house piano drop near the start, 20 years before anyone else asked for one. It’s probably derived from the same Herbie Hancock influence as their 1969 instrumental track R.I.P. These fascinating teases of future musicks and super-hip influences are buried under a lot of formulaic jazz-rock and bluesy bluster, but still.
After finishing The Autobiography, we started on David Sheff’s Yoko Ono biography, a birthday present for Hayley. There are helpful summaries of Ono’s artistic career in this book and of course the moving personal story, and we enjoyed it, but Yoko Ono has its flaws. Sheff overcompensates for decades of racist, misogynistic and artistically reactionary abuse of his subject by suppressing or minimizing almost anything that might be interpreted as a negative character trait or bad behaviour, which by the end of the book seems kind of insulting, and there isn’t that much for the reader with an interest in her music (the only real insights are in quotes from Sean and a couple of modern critics). For example, Sheff, who seems to think Yes I’m A Witch is a dance remix album like Open Your Box, tells us absolutely nothing about Yoko’s relationship with Phil Spector, her co-producer with John on Imagine and Sometime in New York City, and, most exquisitely, and most relevant to Sheff’s story, on her 1981 solo album Season of Glass. Sheff only mentions Elephant’s Memory once, as John and Yoko’s backing band for Sometime In New York City (1972) and “a live performance at Madison Square Gardens at which they played songs from the record”. We’re told the couple were depressed by the negative response to both. A new film, One to One: John & Yoko (2024) documents this period in a collage of TV clips, documentary footage, art films, and live concert footage, and recreates, as a sort of cinematic art installation, the couples’ two-room flat at 105 Bank Steet in New York’s West Village.1
John and Yoko had been meaningfully involved in social justice activism in England for some time — in 1969 they’d produced a TV documentary arguing for the innocence of James Hanratty, who had been hanged in 1962 for murder, rape, and attempted murder in a layby on the A6, and in January 1971 they posted bail for Michael X, an enforcer-turned-activist and revolutionary.2 Their 1969 bed-ins in Holland and Canada had been attention-grabbing attempts to put world peace on the table as an imaginable concept and thus a possibility. In New York, John and Yoko connected with the US peace movement and the anarcho-Marxist underground of 1971 New York, including AJ Weberman, who studied first Bob Dylan’s lyrics, then his garbage and founded the Dylan Liberation Front, a radical left organization aimed at saving Bob Dylan from himself, with David Peel, the proto-punk stoner urban folkie who later made… this.
Peel and Weberman, while wrecking any chance of working with Dylan, are entertaining enough in One To One, but pale next to Jerry Rubin, whom you saw next to Yoko on bongos in that Chuck Berry clip. Obnoxiously charismatic, Rubin, who co-founded the Yippie party with Abbie Hoffman, was an underground star for his unpredictable, performance art take on political activism.3 As one of the Chicago 7, he’d stood trial for inciting violence at the Democratic Party convention in 1968 (he sure did, but the pigs committed it). You can find a pdf of Rubin’s memoir-cum-manifesto Do It here; the illustration below is something of a Yippie/White Panther self-portrait, and shows the behaviour expected of musicians in the service of the Revolution as the Dylan Liberation Front morphed into the Rock Liberation Front.
It was Rubin who first introduced the Onos to Elephant’s Memory, slipping them a cassette dub of a taped live performance.4 ‘She’s Just Naturally Bad’, a song in praise of retail theft and general urban outlawry, seems to show Rubin’s influence on their songwriting (as well as Lou Reed’s).
At first both John and Yoko were keen to show their commitment to the myriad causes of their new American revolutionary friends. The album they created with Elephant’s Memory, Sometime In New York City, covers a lot of ground, with songs protesting the oppression of women and the Irish, the jailing of John Sinclair for petty weed offenses, and the imprisonment of Angela Davis.5
Sometime In New York City was widely panned at the time for its trendy and undiscriminating activism, but in its defense, activism then wasn’t like activism now - there were no corporations, and no political parties, exploiting the causes John and Yoko were drawn to, and no pressure on normies to put flags on their profile pics - the revolution was as pure as it would ever be, its diverse causes united by their underground, outsider status.
On the album’s best rocker, ‘New York City’, John and Elephant’s Memory’s rugged Chuck Berry riffing, thickened with sax and Phil Spector’s production, would inspire David Bowie to try something similar on Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs.
Over the course of the 71-72 period that One To One covers, Rubin and his Yippie cohorts involved John and Yoko in their plans for protests at the 1972 Republican Party convention in Florida. At one point John decides to go on tour, using the gig earnings to bail prisoners, mostly black, who’d be free if they weren’t poor, en route to Florida, and discusses the rationale with lawyer-manager Alan Kline, who’s surprisingly sympathetic. Yoko, meanwhile, has May Pang buying flies to star in a remake of her film Fly (1970), a surprisingly involved process. But much of the time, the pair are holed up in their Bank Street apartment, in a year long bed-in, watching US TV amid the after-effects of heroin and methadone addiction. One To One’s editing immerses us in their channel-surfing, two dedicated media consumers feeding their experience back as content producers - the influencers of their day. Eventually they gave up on the idea of the Florida tour, deterred by the Yippies’ obvious thirst for violence and a lack of feminist input (getting involved in a riot was probably not going to help John’s immigration status or Yoko’s custody chances either). Their activism was sent in a more useful direction by Geraldo Rivera’s documentary TV series exposing inhumane conditions at Willowbrook State School for mentally disabled children (Robert F. Kennedy had called the school a “snake Pit” in 1965). The One To One gigs, two shows at Madison Square Gardens on 30 August 1972 to raise funds to improve the standard of care at Willowbrook, were the only rehearsed, full length concerts that Lennon ever gave after leaving the Beatles, and the last time he performed live with Yoko or Elephant’s Memory.
For all I know, the live footage has been released before, but it looks glammy and, as remastered by Sean Ono Lennon, sounds great, showing us both John Lennon at the peak of his power, and Yoko Ono emerging as the art-pop diva she became in the 21st Century, delivering a stunning ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ with Stan Bronstein’s soprano sax echoing her vocal as it does on ‘Yang Yang’. In an earlier essay I credited Lennon and Phil Spector (who’s on stage with them for ‘Give Peace a Chance’) with inventing Glam, and backing band Elephant’s Memory (beefed up with Jim Keltner on drums) are giving the full glam sound to songs like ‘Come Together’ (here transposed from Dm to a heavier, more sensible Em).6 John and his classically-trained wife sitting at his’n’hers electric pianos and making sweet music together on ‘Instant Karma’, and ‘Imagine’, the instruction-art piece that is both John’s fan-tribute to Yoko’s concept of conceptual art and a borrowing from it that would posthumously justify a change in the song’s songwriting credit.
In November 1972, in a post-election party at Jerry Rubin’s place, a drunken John was conspicuously unfaithful to Yoko. Guilt over the damage done to the relationship so essential to him, surely more than any critical and commercial rejection of Sometime In New York City, put his creativity in crisis, but it had the opposite effect on Yoko, who exorcised her pain in songs including ‘What A Bastard The World Is’ and ‘Death Of Samantha’, which were added to the double album she was making with Elephant’s Memory, Approximately Infinite Universe, which John co-produced.
On 16th February 1973 Yoko and Elephant’s Memory (billed as the Plastic Ono band), introduced by John, played three songs from Approximately Infinite Universe live for the Canadian TV show Flipside - ‘Death Of Samantha’, ‘Cat Man’, and ‘Winter Song’.
Elephant’s Memory’s sound on these tracks is as futuristic as Roxy Music’s or Hawkwind’s. Where else can we find a woman singing her own songs with a comparable sound and attitude in 1973? Of course Yoko was born rich (even if she was disinherited), of course she married one of the world’s most famous pop stars, but consider what she did with the new creative opportunities on offer - instead of taking up space in the charts like some filthy rich nepo baby, she’s making space. It’s conceptual art - you don’t need to experience it as finished, you can hear it as offering possibilities - Imagine.7
Chuck Berry also recorded an album with Elephant’s Memory in 1973. The album, Bio, was not a success, and Allmusic calls it “inessential”, but its existence supports my revisionist take on the ‘Memphis Tennessee’ performance, which is that Chuck and Yoko were closer than we think. They both filmed bottoms, for one thing, and I can imagine Yoko’s frank-yet-gentle approach to sexual politics inviting Chuck’s eager confidences. Imagine.
Postscript - Jerry Rubin became a capitalist by the 1980’s, saying ”Wealth creation is the real American revolution. What we need is an infusion of capital into the depressed areas of our country.”
Elephant’s Memory released a self-titled album produced by John and Yoko on Apple records in 1972 and one more on a different label in 1974, to little acclaim. Michal Shapiro, who sang ‘Old Man Willow’, left Elephant’s Memory before the John and Yoko period and became a successful photographer and art curator in New York City. Other members of Elephant’s Memory seem to have enjoyed successful careers as musos-for-hire, guitar teachers etc.
Algorithmic Piece — Fat White Family - John Lennon (Crooked Fluxus 2)
John’s mansion at Tittenhurst, where he and Yoko had filmed much of the Imagine movie, was sold to Ringo, who used it in his Born To Boogie, the T. Rex fantasy/concert film .
In February 1972 Michael X, who had returned to Trinidad, was involved in the murder of two members of his new revolutionary commune. He would be hanged in in 1974. James Hanratty’s guilt was verified by DNA testing in 2002.
https://unherd.com/2021/02/was-michael-x-a-gangster-or-a-madman/
It’s hard to tell if Rubin is on speed in One To One, or just needs to be prescribed it.
Billy Joel was the opening act.
Davis, on the run, was arrested because a shotgun she’d bought two days earlier was used by kidnappers to murder judge Harold Haley outside the Marin County courtroom. She was acquitted of conspiracy to commit murder after a year in prison. John and Yoko’s song about her is one of Sometime In New York City’s best tracks. The Rolling Stones also recorded a tribute, ‘Sweet Black Angel’. They don’t write songs like those anymore.
On ‘Sisters Oh Sisters’ Elephant’s Memory’s street-funk groove meets Yoko’s girl group pop, and we get something very like the French yé-yé sound, a trick repeated on ‘Yang Yang’.
Instruction poem - mix ‘Hirake’ (1971), ‘I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window’ (1973) and ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss’ (1980), stir well, add 2025 beats, strain through autotune, and serve with one of the internet’s variations on ‘Cut Piece’ (1964).
”I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically”.