Came in here to read happy mutant comments about Yoko and the B-52’s, and then see the thread devolve into “if you don’t like Yoko’s music, you’re lazy.”
Please don’t do that. It’s exactly the kind of gate keeping, snobby intellectualism that puts people off. I don’t much care for her music, just as I don’t much care for Bjork’s music, or speed metal, or country, or kabuki. Doesn’t’ make me “lazy”, it just means I enjoy different things. I acknowledge Picasso’s influence, even if I find much of his work visually unappealing. Same with Yoko, which is what this piece is celebrating, her influence on other groups that I DO really like. This is the kind of piece designed specifically to appeal to me and help me understand her. This thread undermines that work by telling me I’m “lazy” because her music “challenges” me and is clearly too “hard” for the likes of me.
Art is a subjective experience that is personal to each person. How we respond to it is exactly right because it is our own personal response. It may differ from your response, and we may not see the things you do, but that doesn’t make us stupid. That just means we are moved in different ways.
and many people do that without it being about whether the artist has ovaries or testies.
I have no doubt that she is hated and vilified due to sexism and racism. I take that in the other direction though. a lot of male artists get a free pass on being totally useless. where as they should be as hated as Yoko Ono.
If I have this right, Ringo quit first, but Paul talked in back in. Then George quit and that was that. Watch the movie Let It Be and you can almost feel George’s disgust with how Paul was telling him what to do. Also, I fell in love with Yoko when I bought Live Peace 1969. Don’t Worry, Kyoko was simply pure rock n roll, proto-punk. And then I was blown away with John, John Let’s Hope For Peace. Which was especially interesting because I found out that the part where she starts screaming just scared the willies out of dogs. They’d hide.
Plus the factor that they had been together for a long time. Most of it being a Beatle 24/7, with little room for being themselves. That’s bound to wear you down, and make you start to see the others no longer as people who help you to move forward, but as people who hold you back.
It makes me wonder how some bands (like the Rolling Stones) have managed to stay together for decades. That takes a great deal of friendship to pull off.
Pretty much everybody was sick of one another in that movie and you could practically feel the contempt and bad vibes through the screen. About the only time anybody seemed to be enjoying themselves was when they were doing One After 909, and maybe the rooftop concert at the end.
Who can tell?
Arguably, the band as such broke up in 1969, but managed to keep the brand going up until now.
Then again, the Gods of Rock & Roll might have accepted Brian Jones as an offering, or maybe the 1995 “Rolling Stones Special Edition” of the VW Golf Mk3 had some sort of life-prolonging impact.
Pretty sure also that that is exactly why the film was more or less pulled from distribution. It’s still not that easy to find. I do take some comfort in that the Let It Be sessions predate Abbey Road. Paul’s insistance on the film caused Let It Be to come out after Abbey Road. Kinda nice to know they really did go out with a huge bang.
It would seem that the Stones managed to live very seperate lives. Charlie Watts actually formed a jazz band for instance. Bryan Jones drowned. Keith got his teeth fixed…
Speaking chronologically they really did go out on a high note. Let it Be is just stifling to listen to and you can really tell that nobody is into it. (Phil Spector’s overwrought and ridiculous treatment didn’t help things any.) Abbey Road is such a superior album and I’m sure this is due in no small part because everybody actually wanted to be there, come together (no pun intended), and just put out a good album without egos or pressure. Not many bands are this lucky.
Bah. I think Let It Be is mostly fairly light, sprightly and fun. Abbey Road has great tunes, but there’s a sterile feeling to it. (Although, I’ll admit my copy is an early, possibly the first CD edition, so poor mastering could be the issue.)
I worked in an LA recording studio for several years and Yoko was present while I was working on a (sadly unreleased) project (not her project, someone else’s). Every time she was there she was having some strange suggestion or another. First she came in and sat right in the “sweet spot” in the middle of the console where the engineer or producer usually sat and wouldn’t move no matter how distracting it was. at one point she would only let them set the tempo to an odd metronome marking, to the point we had to tell her the tempo was 97 when it was really 96. Once she just stood up said the energy was “off” in the room, left for a few hours, came back with what she said was honey in small single serving sized unmarked glass jars and told us to eat it (hard pass on that) to fix the energy or vibe or something. There was other stuff which I can’t remember all the details of but my impression was that she was a bit off her rocker. Everyone seemed mildly annoyed she was there but put up with her because who she was. And the whole experience was bizarre at best.
I find it to be oppressive - such a bad fit for Spector’s Wall of Sound which was becoming pretty old hat by that point anyway.
While still far from my favorite Beatles album, I much prefer the later release Let it Be…Naked with the Spector treatment stripped out and some of the bad decisions fixed (like John’s clumsy bass playing over The Long and Winding Road).
It’s unfortunate that her music ventures have overshadowed her art.
I went to a Fluxus exhibition at Rutgers University in New Brunswick (which was a hotbed for that movement back in the late 50s and 60s) and was really taken with her work. It was whimsical, uplifting, interactive, positive, thought-provoking, and a lot of fun.
I could understand why John was taken with her when he first encountered it.
People keep telling me that the original mono recordings are the ones where the Beatles cared about the production. I think the CDs were all based on the stereo recordings, at least until the Mono remasters were released about ten years ago, so they weren’t really what the band wanted you to hear.
Remember that most of their fans would have mono record players so it made more sense to focus on mono during the 60s.
It also looks like it was first released on CD in 1987, which was around the start of the time when mastering on CDs was at it’s best (not too quiet, not overcompressed.)
In the final analysis, Ono wasn’t a cause, she was just a symptom. Lennon was a blithe narcissist, as evidenced by his complete disinheritance/unpersoning of his first wife and first son. However, how Ono hypocritically treated Julian Lennon after John’s death is indefensible.
