When John Lennon thought he was Robin Hood | Culture

The New York musician David Peel calls John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s apartment in Greenwich Village. She takes it. After some routine greetings, Ono collapses:

Yoko Ono: People go around saying I’m the person who broke up the Beatles, you know? When I was pregnant I received letters saying: “I hope your baby dies.” And they sent me a rag doll with a lot of needles stuck in it: in the eyes, in the mouth, in the nose. When I walked down the street with John, they would come up to me and say, “You’re ugly.” They pulled my hair and hit my head.

David Peel: Did that happen in England?

Yoko Ono: Yes, yes, in England. I had three miscarriages during that time.

David Peel: Oh my god, Yoko, I can’t believe it.

This conversation from 1971 remained unpublished until now, which is included in the documentary One to One: John & Yoko, premiered 20 days ago at the Venice festival, which is shown at the London Film Festival in mid-October and is awaiting a date for commercial release in theaters and platforms. What draws attention, beyond a content that was more or less already known (many English press of the time enthusiastically joined the lynching of Ono: there is the newspaper archive), is the tone of the voices, the indignation, the anguish and the information it provides about a time that was inflamed socially and politically and exciting musically.

In 1971, with the Beatles dissolving a year earlier, John Lennon and Yoko Ono (married in 1969) rented a small apartment on Bank Street, in New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village. They were fleeing the toxic atmosphere they lived in in England. She was the favorite target of the Liverpool quartet’s followers, with a virulent faction that blamed the Japanese artist for the group’s end. John and Yoko longed to live in peace, to go unnoticed, to not receive threats and attacks. Paradoxically, in New York they went through even more controversial episodes than in London. This is how the English writer Philip Norman, one of those who best knows the Beatle universe, describes it in the voluminous Paul McCartney. The biography: “John and Yoko had moved to New York, ostensibly seeking refuge from the incessant abuse and ridicule they suffered in Britain. Instead, they had become figureheads of the far-left politics that at the time permeated rock culture in the United States, and had therefore become, at the very least, more conspicuous and controversial than before.”

The reason for choosing a simple apartment when the ex-Beatle’s account was overflowing with money is justified by Lennon in an interview he gave to an American network days after his arrival in Manhattan: “I have always felt identified with the working class (although he was raised in the conservative and bourgeois home of his aunt Mimi). But I bought a big house on the outskirts of London, with a huge plot of land. It had everything. Yoko talked to me about ignoring my possessions and freeing my mind. He told me: ‘Look at you, you’re rich and you don’t know what life is.’ And he convinced me. We traded everything for two small rooms in the Village. And I am happy. I feel like a student again. “We are like a newlywed couple.”

The early seventies could not have been more turbulent and exciting in the United States: the streets were ablaze with protests against the Vietnam War, demonstrations in favor of human rights proliferated, sexual liberation movements took to the streets, feminism wanted to defeat to the patriarchy, there was fear of a nuclear war between the USSR and the USA… All seasoned with LSD and marijuana. Poets, political agitators, musicians, pushers, hustlers and left-wing leaders passed through John and Yoko’s small apartment. Guys like Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, John Sinclair, AJ Weberman…

In a conversation with his slimy manager Allen Klein, the ex-Beatle, in a megalomaniacal outburst, proposes hiring lawyers and paying bail to get the blacks arrested in the anti-racist riots out of jail. “It’s like being Robin Hood, fucking good. Or Jesse James,” exalts Lennon. In the end, the idea does not come to fruition.

Some came with curiosity to see the humble home of a rock star, others with the intention of using Lennon for their own cause. He, receptive, signed up for everything with Ono’s support. The couple divided their time supporting pacifist and political causes and compulsively watching the flickering television, which they installed at the foot of the bed. The series The Waltons, American football, detergent ads with mothers getting scared by the stains on their daughters’ dresses, Sonny and Cher in their Comedy Hour…And Nixon, about to be re-elected despite the noise in the street. Lennon enjoyed being the standard-bearer of the intense American left while Ono inaugurated exhibitions in cool galleries with nibbled apples in a glass case. They always went together to interviews and social gatherings. He talking a lot and she listening and with an expressionless face. Sometimes she would come up to him and whisper something in his ear. Surely Paul McCartney recognized that practice, since he suffered from it in the last years of the Beatles.

Lennon had already released fundamental albums in his solo career, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imagine (1971). The latter included a corrosive How Do You Sleep, the song where he rants against McCartney: “You live with idiots who tell you that you were the king… / The only thing that you did was Yesterday, and since you left you are nothing more than an ordinary day”. Something really relevant also happened in the couple’s shabby apartment. Among the personalities who visited them in their modest New York apartment was McCartney himself. It was in 1972, and it marked the reconciliation of those schoolchildren who mounted the greatest revolution in the history of pop. Two years had passed since the acrimonious dissolution of the Beatles, enough time for the two to stop acting like insidious children, taunting each other in songs. They made peace, although their relationship was never warm.

All this is not discussed in a documentary directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards and which has been controlled by Sean Lennon (New York, 48 years old), which is the same as saying that Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 91 years old ) has supervised the material. This does not mean that One to One lose interest. Even for those not beatlemaniacs It is interesting to look above the social context. Those looking for musical surprises will also be surprised by the excellent sound of the concert that Lennon (and Yoko) offers at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the Willowbrook School for children with disabilities, and where Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack also participated. The images of this recital of August 30, 1972 were already known (even released an album in 1986, Live In New York City), but listen Mother With today’s technological improvements, it captivates the listener.

It is known that the couple’s phone was tapped. They had become, due to their progressive ideas, a threat to the shady Nixon government and the CIA was not going to sit back. Lennon’s deportation was attempted. The phone rings again. This time it’s Jim Keltner, one of the most sought after session drummers. He warns Lennon: “There are people who can cause you harm because of your political positions.” “That they want to kill me?” Lennon responds. Then it comes up: “Uuuum. “I’m still an artist, you know, an artist of the revolution.” However, Lennon was terrified and agreed on occasion, on the advice of his lawyer, to tone down his tone against the US government. In 1972 Nixon was re-elected. A year and a half later, he had to resign due to the Watergate scandal. The musician and Yoko Ono ended their 18-month affair in the apartment of students in the Village and Lennon went on a rampage in Los Angeles with his lover May Pang and his gang of stoner musician friends: Keith Moon, Harry Nilson and also ex-Beatle Ringo Starr. In 1975, the US authorities declared that there were no grounds to deport John Lennon, who had already ended his Californian spree and returned to New York, into the arms of Ono.

The couple had had Sean and John was beginning a five-year retreat away from music to focus, according to him, “on raising the child.” In February 1979, Sex Pistols Sid Vicious died of an overdose in a house located on Bank Street, the same street where John and Yoko became political agitators. On November 17, 1980, Lennon returned to music with the album Double Fantasy, accompanied by Yoko. Less than a month later, on December 8, Mark David Chapman’s bullets ended his life. Hours earlier, Lennon had scrawled an autograph on a copy of Double Fantasy that I had requested Chapman.