LINDSAY ZOLADZ Are we living through a Yokossance? Though the 92-year-old conceptual artist, musician and Beatle widow Yoko Ono has spent much of the past decade far from the public eye dealing with health issues, each year seems to bring a new opportunity to reassess her contributions to culture.
In the 2020s alone, there has been a tribute album, a small shelf’s worth of biographies and, just last year, a blockbuster, career-spanning show of her artwork at London’s Tate Modern. (That retrospective, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” comes to Chicago in October.) All of that followed Peter Jackson’s long-awaited 2021 Beatles documentary “Get Back,” which reignited debates about Ono’s influence on the band she was unfairly accused of “breaking up.”
David Sheff, a longtime friend of Ono’s who is best known for writing a memoir about his son’s struggles with addiction, “Beautiful Boy” (Ono gave him permission to title it after a John Lennon song), argues strongly against that assumption in his new biography, “Yoko.” He even takes it a step further, proposing that “it’s possible that the band stayed together longer than they would have because of Yoko,” since she gave Lennon several years of relative groundedness during which the Beatles made “Let It Be” and “Abbey Road.” “During the writing and recording of those albums, John had a foot out the door,” Sheff writes. “If he hadn’t had Yoko, the other foot might have followed sooner than it did.”
We get extended glimpses of Ono and Lennon a few years later in “One to One: John & Yoko,” Kevin Macdonald’s forthcoming documentary that focuses on a well-told chapter of their story, their time living in New York City in the early 1970s.
I’m curious, Jon: Did either Sheff’s biography or Macdonald’s film add anything to your understanding of Ono? I’m also thinking of an essay that our colleague Amanda Hess wrote in 2021 about Ono’s transfixing presence in “Get Back.” She said she had observed the slow evolution of Ono from “a cultural villain” into “a kind of folk hero.” Do you think that shift is now fully complete?
JON PARELES I’d love to think so. Fellow musicians have been praising her, and emulating her fearless vocals, all the way back to the punk years; that’s approaching half a century. The “Onobox” collection that came out in 1992 helped convince more of the naysayers that Ono had always been a serious musician, not an indulged amateur. Then dance-music producers embraced her in the 2000s. And in the art world, where her career began, she has been well recognized by now as a pioneer of multimedia, conceptual, performance and participatory art; she’s had big retrospectives and permanent installations.
But then again, misogyny lingers. As Sheff points out in “Yoko,” none other than Taylor Swift got compared to Ono — as a distraction undermining a team — when her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs hit a rough patch.
The idea that Ono broke up the Beatles — and not a multitude of pressures, conflicting personalities, solo ambitions, growing up and (this is not a cliché) artistic differences — is such a simplistic explanation that it may never disappear, especially since it absolves the other Beatles of any friction or responsibility. As a woman and an outsider, Ono still makes a convenient scapegoat, no matter how much Lennon cherished her or all she has accomplished.
“Yoko” brings out lifelong themes and strategies that run through Ono’s career in music and art. But what I see in “Get Back,” and now in “One to One: John & Yoko,” is how ad hoc so many of their choices were. They weren’t following some grand master plan. As artists, celebrities and human beings, they were improvising.
“One to One” chronicles the couple’s turbulent residency in New York City in 1971 and 1972, striving to act on their idealism. In the brief period the film covers, Lennon and Ono would dabble in radical-left politics, in primal-scream therapy and in emerging 1970s feminism, a.k.a. “women’s lib.” They were searching in very public view.
When Ono grew explicit about feminism, Lennon enthusiastically joined her — a very rare attitude for a rock superstar in 1972. Watching the concert performances now, it sounds like Lennon’s moans and shouts in “Cold Turkey” were a vocal vocabulary that Ono helped him unleash. He was praised for letting it all out; she was ridiculed.
One of the most telling sequences in “One to One” shows Ono at the First International Feminist Planning Conference, held at Harvard University in 1973. Ono speaks, quietly but intently, about facing intense pressure to stay in the background of Lennon’s career, and how at one point she developed a stutter, and she felt that “the whole society wished me dead.” Bravely and stubbornly, she stayed active, productive and visible, decade after decade, cheerfully declaring, “Yes, I’m a witch.” Ono’s particular combination of steely purpose, cathartic sound, gentle tenacity and obstinate positivity still has resistance at its core — and that can’t please everybody.
ZOLADZ Jon, you bring up a good point about Lennon’s embrace of feminism, which both the film and the biography highlight. I appreciate how, in later interviews, he was vocal about taking responsibility for previous mistakes, when he was being guided blindly by machismo. In 1980, he talked to Sheff about his decision, a decade earlier, not to credit Ono as the co-writer that she very much was on “Imagine” (the song title itself is clearly taken from the instruction pieces in her book “Grapefruit”).
“I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it,” Lennon said. “I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without acknowledging it.” One of many things the culture lost with Lennon’s death was his rare example as a burgeoning and often self-searching male feminist, serving as a role model for men looking to take account of their behavior.
PARELES When Lennon and Ono moved to a Greenwich Village apartment in 1971 (after a stretch at the more luxurious St. Regis hotel), they fell in with a radical, politicized crowd, including the sloganeering songwriter David Peel (who wrote songs like “The Pope Smokes Dope”), the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the radical Yippie (Youth International Party) leader Jerry Rubin. “Some Time in New York City,” the 1972 album by Lennon, Ono and a New York version of the Plastic Ono Band, showed Peel’s influence; it offered bluntly titled topical songs like Ono’s “Sisters, O Sisters” and Lennon’s “Attica State.”
Lennon and Ono had fame and leveraged it. Invited to be hosts for a week on “The Mike Douglas Show,” a daytime talk show, they gave Rubin and the Black Panthers leader Bobby Seale nationwide airtime. Meanwhile, Rubin sought to enlist Lennon and Ono (and, with Lennon’s help, Bob Dylan) for a concert tour intended to rally a youth movement and raise funds to bail out prisoners, aiming for a finale alongside the 1972 Republican Convention. Worried about violence at the convention, the couple canceled those tour plans.
They pivoted. After seeing an investigative report on the squalid conditions at the Willowbrook State School, Lennon and Ono decided to headline the One to One concerts: two benefit shows at Madison Square Garden to support individual (one-to-one) care for the children. Perhaps a different TV report would have led them to a different cause; they were fluid.
I was alive in the 1970s, and “One to One” did carry me back to that divided, scruffy, analog era, despite too many vintage TV snippets and some forced juxtapositions; for one thing, I don’t see “Instant Karma” as either soundtracking or protesting the war in Vietnam. Lindsay, did the film show you anything unexpected?
ZOLADZ I’m afraid Macdonald’s film didn’t provide a whole lot of new insight. The early ’70s is such a thoroughly covered period of Ono and Lennon’s existence, so much of the documentary felt like rehashing. The footage of the One to One concert is often quite electric, but since the audio was already released in 1986 as a live album, I’m not sure it’s enough to fully justify the film’s existence.
Sheff’s book, too, didn’t tell me that much I didn’t already know — save for a few juicy bits of trivia, like the fact that Ono and Sylvia Plath had a mutual ex-boyfriend during their college years (!), or that, at an early New York performance of “Cut Piece,” the artist Carolee Schneemann went up to a man who had been laughing at Ono and slapped him in the face (!!).
But for Ono neophytes, “Yoko” is an easily digestible, well reported and relatively comprehensive look at her life, so I’d say it’s a worthy starting point. I would have liked for Sheff to take more critical stances on Ono’s art (he farms out most of his value judgments to the people he quotes, which can make his prose feel a little thin), and I don’t know that I agree with the jacket copy’s argument that “Yoko’s part has been missing” from the story of Lennon’s life. An entire corner of my bookshelf suggests otherwise.
There’s a more provocative (and thought-provoking) engagement with the ideas that Ono espouses in her work in Lisa Carver’s excellent 2012 book “Reaching Out With No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono,” and Donald Brackett’s 2022 biography “Yoko Ono: An Artful Life” digs a little deeper into her art. I also found Ono comes alive more convincingly in Elliot Mintz’s breezy 2024 memoir “We All Shine On: John, Yoko & Me.”
PARELES One thing I’m still hoping for in this Yokossance is a restoration of her full recorded catalog. “Season of Glass,” the 1981 album she released after Lennon was murdered the year before — with a photo of his bloodstained glasses on the cover — is not on streaming services, and that’s a glaring cultural gap. The album was measured and crafted (produced by Phil Spector) as well as heartsick. It was a set of songs, not primal screams, that spoke of love, grief, anger, fear, memories and how to move forward — an artist’s response to a terrible personal loss that the world shared.
Other albums have also gone missing: “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)” from 1982, “Starpeace” from 1985 and “A Story” (recorded in 1974 but released in 1997). Without access to all of her music, Ono’s story is still not complete.
Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and the Village Voice.
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
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