The new issue of Uncut โ in shops now and available to buy online by clicking here โ follows John Lennon throughout a turbulent 1969 as he embarks on a series of wild avant-garde experiments with Yoko Ono on the way to extricating himself from The Beatles and establishing himself as a solo artist.
As well as the famous bed-ins, the naked experimental films, the avant-garde albums and the political campaigns, there is the formation of a new musical outfit, The Plastic Ono Band, hastily assembled to play the Toronto RockโNโRoll Revival festival at the invitation of Kim Fowley on September 13, 1969.
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The Plastic Ono Band bassist Klaus Voorman remembers rehearsing their set of rockโnโroll classics on the plane from London. โWe went once through each song,โ Voormann tells Peter Watts. โThen we got to โCold Turkeyโ. I thought it was a great song and we should spend time to โจget the right feeling, but we didnโt.โ
Inside the venue, the band got another chance to rehearse in the dressing room, although the bass and two guitars were plugged into a single amp and they didnโt have a drum kit. A nervous Lennon threw up backstage. Voormann was worried his friend was going to stain his fine white suit. โOne thing hardly anybody realised is that John wasnโt a frontman, that wasnโt his thing,โ he explains. โPaul was the frontman of The Beatles. John didnโt know how to handle the crowd. It was wrong to play โCold Turkeyโ, it was a lousy version and the crowd didnโt like it. John got angry. That wasnโt cool.โ
After playing a few rock standards, โYer Bluesโ, โCold Turkeyโ and โGive Peace A Chanceโ, the set โจtook an unexpected turn. โI heard this feedback and thought somebody needed to turn the mic down,โ says drummer Alan White. โBut it was Yoko, in a bag, on the floor, howling through a microphone. That was a bit of a shock and the audience were as stunned as I was. It was weird โ but it was exciting too and thatโs what she was into, thatโs what she wanted to get over.โ
Voormann thinks that Onoโs performance was amazing. โShe was doing everything she could possibly do to let the people know that war was terrible,โ he says. โBy the end she was croaking like a dying bird. It was heartbreaking. I really heard tanks and soldiers and people dying. At the end, John came and embraced her. You could see exactly what he saw in her. He was proud of her and loved her, and in a way he couldnโt care less about the public, but in another way they were trying to spread this message.โ
On the plane back to London, Lennon decided The Plastic Ono Band were his future now. On September โจ20, during a meeting at Appleโs headquarters, he told Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr that he was leaving The Beatles. Ten days later, he invited Voormann and Eric Clapton to join him and Starr at Abbey Road. Lennonโs post-Beatles career was to begin in earnest.
โJohn said we would do โCold Turkeyโ and I was happy about that,โ says Voormann. โWe went in the studio and John and Eric were playing lots of different riffs until we created this haunted thing.โ When the single was released on October 20, the credit on the green Apple label read simply โJohn Lennonโ: Lennon-McCartney was no more.
Sean Ono Lennon feels that some of his fatherโs more radical interventions in 1969 were partly inspired by a deliberate attempt to break with his own weighty history: โIt was a reaction to being a Beatle and being told what to wear and say. He wanted to break out the box of being a Beatle. He always had an instinct that wasnโt rebellious as much as a need to escape the confines of conventional society. He was intellectually driven and wanted to figure out what the world was and who he was and what love was.โ
You can read much more about John Lennon and Yoko Onoโs 1969 in the new issue of Uncut, on sale now.