Team Yoko: Lou Waxman Reconsiders Some Time in New York City

Liver pate and oysters.  For the longest time, they made Lou gag.  But Lou maintains an open mind.  Or should he say an open palate?  William Burroughs has a line somewhere about the evils of those who think they are right.  Like those who do not mind their own business.  These are the Karens of the world and in large part they are of Lou’s generation.  As Lou has aged, he tries hard to be willing to change his mind and maybe even try new things.  Lou is nothing if not a creature of habit but every once and a while he throws in a swerve.

Like with liver pate and oysters.  At some point, the light flipped on and Lou found himself actually liking these acquired tastes.  If he had never been willing to try them again and again over the years, he never would have had the joy of a black peppercorn liver pate on a water cracker or a salty Maine oyster with some horseradish.  Lou’s world would have been diminished without these new experiences.

Yoko Ono is the liver pate and oysters of rock and roll.  For years, Yoko made Lou gag.  She was not to Lou’s taste.  Nowlet’s be clear, Lou wasn’t of the camp who blamed Yoko for breaking up the Beatles or destroying John Lennon or world hunger or any of that.  Lou acknowledged that she was an important artist and a major player in the Fluxus circle and Lou felt that Yoko actually gave John Lennon’s intellectual and experimental pretensions some credibility.  In terms of art and politics, Yoko as far more sophisticated than Lennon.  Her Cut Piece performance from 1964 is proof of that.

But in terms of being a musical performer, Yoko was tough to take.  Lou thought she was pretentious and unlistenable.  She made Lou’s ears gag.  But Lou has an open mind when it comes to music.  If it is on vinyl, Lou will listen to it at least once.  Lou purchase of Yes’s Tales of Topographic Oceans is proof of that.  Complete shite.  All eighty minutes of it.  But Lou gave Oceansa spin even though Lou hated Fragile and Close to the Edge and Yessongs.  Lou bought them all in the hope that something would change like with the liver pate and onions.  Not so.

Similarly, Lou bought The Plastic Ono Band’s Live Peace in Toronto 1969.  As mentioned, Lou is not a Yoko fan nor Lennon for that matter.  The A-side is a mix of classic rock and roll tunes, like “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Money”, and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, along with some Lennon rockers as he was drifting away from the Beatles, like “Yer Blues” and, especially “Cold Turkey”. Side A ends with “Give Peace a Chance”, a Lennon-McCartney song that Lennon had hijacked ownership of.  

The B-side is a Yoko showcase and once again Lou absolutely hated it.  “Don’t Worry Kyoto (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)” seemed interminable at under five minutes.  This was Yoko accompaniment to Lennon’s “Cold Turkey”.  Similarly, “John John (Let’s Hope for Peace)”, Yoko’s response to “Give Peace a Chance” and the concert’s closer, strains one’s eardrums and patience with Yoko’s screaming and the band’s feedback carrying on for over twelve minutes.  The best part was the several minutes of feedback sans Yoko that happened when the band walked off stage to protest all the boos coming from the audience.  Lou was right there booing from his Laz-E-Boy chair.  It was awful.

But Lou was willing to try again.  A copy of John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band’s Some Time in New York City was sitting in the bins for months and Lou thought about buying it each time he was in The Vogue.  The thought of listening to Yoko made a purchase impossible.  However, curiosity got the best of Lou, and he took the record home.  And wouldn’t you know it;Lou has the firm belief that it is the best solo Beatle album he has heard.  In the past year, Lou bought several of the solo Beatles albums from the early 1970s and up to this point he liked Ringo the best.  Until Some Time in New York City that is.  Liver pate and oysters, dude.

What really got Lou is how batshit insane this record is.  It is something of a fuck you to the expectations and desires of the fans and the record industry on the level of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.  But Lennon had been doing this bit for years.  It is kind of mind-blowing for a rock star of Lennon’s stature to turn his back on catering to his audience and critics.  Tons of “serious” rock stars talk about disobeying their audience, and some like Bob Dylan have done so.  But they stay within the bounds of rock and roll.  Some Time is not popular music.  It is experimental avant garde music to be sure.  It is like the music of Fluxus.  This is due to Yoko and Lou admires that Lennon would go in this direction.  It takes enormous balls.  Or naivety.  Or pretentiousness.  

Case in point, the album gets a lot of shit for all the political posturing (or poseuring) on it.  There are songs on Angela Davis and John Sinclair as well as the Irish Troubles and prison reform.  All these issues were hot button topics of the day.  Critics felt Lennon was politically naïve and out of his elementin dealing with them.  This criticism is like Tom Wolfe’s take on the liberal elite in Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the FlakCatchers with the famous essay, “These Radical Chic Evenings” on the party Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panthers.  Throughout the book, Wolfe lambasted the liberal establishment for how it dealt with black rage and white guilt.  This criticism is no doubt on the mark, but when you get down to it you could say this of any political statement made through the medium of rock music.  As Lester Bangs insisted, rock music is dumb and pointless.  The apex of rock is The Kingsmen and the Count Five.  The more rock takes itself seriously; the worse off it is.  This is why people can argue that the Beatles were damaging to the course of rock and roll.  The Beatles brought pretention into things.  John Lennon most of all.  Many believe that any political message by a rock star is just radical chic.  The statements on the level of Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit are few and far between.  Bruce Springsteen is dealing with this criticism now.  To Lou, protest music should be free.  It is basically a PSA, and fans should not have to pay for it, and rock stars should not be able to profit from it.  It is hypocritical to do so.  Billie Eilish is dealing with this criticism now.  The problems with Some Time are evergreen.

That said the opening track on Some Time which cannot be played or printed nowadays (and Lou believes has been erased from current issues of the album) has some things going for it.  The song coming from Yoko (she get a writer’s credit) has some validity particularly when you consider the sexism and misogyny that was standard operating procedure in the Civil Rights Movement, let alone everywhere else in the world.  Afterall, as Stokley Carmichael said so eloquently:  The only position for women in SNCC was prone.  This statement is as important a statement in the history of Civil Rights as “I have a dream”, if you are interested in understanding the movement in all its complexity and complicated nature.  It is this complicated history that makes the Civil Rights Movement so important, and interesting.  Long story short, the presence of Yoko saves this song if there is any possibility that it can be justified.

Lou doesn’t know if there was something just right (or wrong) with his body chemistry as he listened to Some Time, but all the Yoko stuff sounded awesome.  The closer on Side Two of Disc One was “We’re All Water”.  Lou was picking up what Yoko was putting down.  The song was interesting musically and lyrically.  This may be because the song was adapted from Yoko’s poem “Water Talk” from 1967.  

Disc Two Side One features live jams from a December 15, 1969 concert at the Lyceum Ballroom in London benefiting UNICEF.  George Harrison was also on board.  The side opens with “Cold Turkey” but ends with “Don’t Worry Kyoko”.  Lou was dreading this song from the moment he put the needle down.  But the version of “Kyoto” on the Live in Toronto album does not hold a candle to the sixteen-minute version on Some Time.  Lou was entranced.  For the first time, Lou could see why Yoko was such an icon for the No Wave/Noise Rock scene in New York City in the early 1980s.  Yoko is proto-noise rock for sure.  And it wasn’t grating or boring.  

The live concert with Frank Zappa was great as well.  Zappa went on to trash this set in the reissue Playground Psychoticsand in interviews, particularly the stylings of Yoko (Zappa renames a song “A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono), but to Lou’s ears it was a fascinating listen.  Lou suspects that Zappa got his panties in a bunch because Lennon took credit for “King Kong”and put the song (with edits to the track) on the Some Timealbum without Zappa’s permission.  This is a pot calling the kettle black situation.  Lou might be wrong, but he seems to remember that Zappa was pretty strict about keeping songwriting credits in his own name even in the most collaborative of situations.  Getting fucked over hurts when you are the fuckee.  

Lou does not want to go overboard in his praise of Yoko and Some Time.  Lou will have to listen to it again.  And probably again.  Will Yoko and the album hold up?  It doesn’t really matter because for that one moment in time Lou greatly enjoyed himself.  So much so that he texted like twenty people, “Yoko is great on Some Time in NY.  Can’t believe it.”  We will see if Lou will have to text them back.  “Forget that.  Lou was wrong.”  Admitting that your wrong is proof of maturity, but in this case, it would pain Lou to do so.  He is Team Yoko and he doesn’t want to quit the Team just yet.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

Cut Piece:  Yoko Ono's CUT PIECE: A Masterclass in Performance Art and Courage

Best Yoko Songs:  10 Best Yoko Ono Songs of All Time - Singersroom.com

Sexism and the Civil Rights Movement:  Sexism and the Civil Rights Movement

Zappa on John and Yoko:  Zappa on John & Yoko

— Lou Waxman