The Night John Lennon & Yoko Ono Jammed with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East (1971)

It’s unfor­tu­nate, I think, that legions of Bea­t­les fans turned on Yoko Ono with such fero­cious ani­mos­i­ty after the breakup of the band. Most fans still absolute­ly despise Yoko. (See the legion of often crude­ly misog­y­nist com­ments under every Youtube video in which she appears.) Sure, her voice and music is cer­tain­ly not to everyone’s taste, but with­out her artis­tic and con­cep­tu­al influ­ence on John Lennon post-Bea­t­les, it’s unlike­ly his amaz­ing solo albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imag­ine (1971) would sound the way they do. Yoko, in fact, more or less gave Lennon the seeds of “Imag­ine,” the song, in her quirky 1964 self-pub­lished book, Grape­fruit: A Book of Instruc­tions and Draw­ings, though she nev­er took the cred­it for it.

Like it or not, if we love solo Lennon, we have no choice but to take the more tra­di­tion­al­ly great song­writ­ing with the messy, exper­i­men­tal, and some­times unlis­ten­able. They can­not be com­plete­ly untan­gled, to the dis­may of a great many peo­ple. As Dami­an Fanel­li at Gui­tar World com­ments on Lennon and the Plas­tic Ono Band’s impromp­tu performance/jam with Eric Clap­ton in Toron­to in 1969, “Yoko screams—very loudly—during the entire oth­er­wise-decent per­for­mance.” This is not an exag­ger­at­ed or espe­cial­ly biased char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. “Some­day,” Fanel­li then goes on, “I’ll vent about how ter­ri­ble and depress­ing this is.” Fine, but whether we think of her singing as chal­leng­ing per­for­mance art or “depress­ing” cat­er­waul­ing, we’re stuck with it. But do the dynam­ics of John and Yoko onstage change when we add anoth­er polar­iz­ing weirdo—Frank Zappa—to the mix? See for your­self in the videos here, from an onstage jam ses­sion the two did with Zap­pa and the Moth­ers of Inven­tion at the Fill­more East in 1971.

See Zap­pa, Lennon, et al. do Wal­ter Ward’s “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go),” which Fanel­li declares “the high­light of the jam, for sure.” Zap­pa announces to the band the key and “not stan­dard blues changes,” then Lennon intro­duces the tune as “a song I used to sing while I was in the Cav­ern in Liv­er­pool. I haven’t done it since.” Zap­pa rips out a fan­tas­tic solo and the band—though seem­ing­ly in the dark at first—lays down a right­eous groove. And Yoko? Well, it’s true, as Fanel­li notes, “all she did was scream her head off.” In this straight-ahead blues num­ber, I have to say, it’s pret­ty obnox­ious. But her vocal tics play much bet­ter in more freeform, odd­ball, Zap­pa-lead jams like “Jam­rag” and “King Kong,” and the shouty, repet­i­tive “Scum­bag,” which sounds almost like a Can out­take.

Zap­pa and band, as always, are in top form. Lennon at times looks out of place and uncer­tain in their impro­visato­ry envi­ron­ment, but he game­ly keeps up. Yoko… Yoko does her usu­al lot of scream­ing, howl­ing, yodel­ing, etc. But before you gin up to tear her to pieces in yet anoth­er nasty online com­ment, bear in mind, for what it’s worth, no Yoko, no “Imag­ine.”

As Fanel­li notes, “the per­for­mance was released as part of Lennon and Ono’s poor­ly received (and not very good at all) 1972 studio/live album, Some­time in New York City.” See Allmusic’s review for a much more thor­ough, fair-mind­ed assess­ment of that record­ing, which “found the Lennons in an explic­it­ly polit­i­cal phase.”

via Gui­tar World

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969)

Down­load the John Lennon/Yoko Ono “War is Over (If You Want It)” Poster in 100+ Lan­guages

Hear John Lennon’s Final Inter­view, Taped on the Last Day of His Life (Decem­ber 8, 1980)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness