JOHN LENNON: LIVE PEACE IN TORONTO (1969)
1) Blue Suede Shoes; 2) Money;
3) Dizzy Miss Lizzy; 4) Yer Blues; 5) Cold Turkey; 6) Give Peace A Chance; 7)
Don't Worry Kyoko; 8) John, John (Let's Hope For
Peace).
General verdict: Sloppy, silly,
sometimes unlistenable, but still imbued with that odd summer '69 charm.
Blame it all on the ridiculous title of this
album and the even more ridiculous sequencing on the D. A. Pennebaker-directed
movie version of the Toronto Rock'n'Roll Revival — but the overall event was
far more normal than the impression of it that you get from the most commonly
available mementos of the show. John's decision to add the word Peace to the title makes you think that
it was some sort of anti-Vietnam gathering, when in reality the subject of
«peace» was only vividly brought up once, by John and Yoko, over the twelve
hours of the festival. And Pennebaker's decision to concentrate his filming on
performances by Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis —
and then on John Lennon and the
Plastic Ono Band — makes you think that this was primarily and exclusively a
Fifties' revival event, rudely crashed by John and Yoko who, out of some
egotistic hatred, just had to submit
the innocent Jack Rabbit Slim's crowd to platters of their bullshit avantgarde
art.
In reality, both the Plastic Ono Band and the Fifties' icons were only parts
of a much larger project that day — a project that also included several quite modern
bands, including Chicago, The Doors, and Alice Cooper (yes, this was the very
same event where Alice had his infamous «chicken incident» that pretty much
defined the band's — and the man's — entire life), and whose conceptual goal,
as drawn up by producers John Brower and Kenny Walker, was integration between
generations past, present, and future: the first significant event in the
history of rock'n'roll festivals where old heroes would mingle with
contemporary ones in a demonstration of mutual respect and friendship. And for
the most part, perhaps still under the influence of the Woodstock vibe,
everything went well.
Unfortunately, a definitive video and audio
presentation of the festival, one that would combine all the high-quality
material saved on that day, is still lacking — instead, one has to search out a
scattered variety of albums and videos, some of which are still easily
available today and some are long out of print. (For that matter, I also long for the day when somebody
would get around to making a definitive boxset for the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival,
not to mention Woodstock). The Live
Peace album, containing John and Yoko's performance in its entirety, is just
one of these chunks — and being released long before all the others, under
John's direct supervision, is also the most commonly known. And also the most befuddling if you ever
make the mistake of listening to it completely out of the day's context.
As is well known, the Plastic Ono Band was more
of a concept than a real band, and on that particular day — September 13, 1969
— it consisted of John, Yoko, ex-Manfred Mann bass player Klaus Voormann,
ex-Blind Faith guitar player Eric Clapton, and future Yes drummer Alan White: a
somewhat rag-taggy crowd, especially considering that they were all brought
together by John at something like twenty-four hours' notice and only had time
to very briefly rehearse a few numbers on the plane flight to Toronto.
(Admittedly, John already had the opportunity to play together with Clapton on
ʽYer Bluesʼ for The Rolling Stones' Rock'n'Roll Circus, so this was not such a
completely blank-slate experiment). Throw in Clapton's psychologically unstable
state at the time (he was in the process of crashing his second band in three
years), John's «anything goes» mentality, and Yoko in a bag, and it is actually
nothing short of amazing that they still made it on to the stage and played a
set that was... listenable. Well, up to a certain point.
For all the confusion, the progression in the
setlist seems to have been quite logical. The band started out with three rock'n'roll
oldies, to match and honor the spirit of the day (two of them from The Beatles'
recorded past and ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ probably done to death by John and the
boys when Klaus Voormann was still their Hamburg neighbor); continued with ʽYer
Bluesʼ, one of the few authentic blues-rock numbers in The Beatles' catalog;
from there, they switched on to John's brand new solo career, doing a fairly
rock'n'rolly take on ʽCold Turkeyʼ — and then adjusted the audience to the
iron rule of Yoko Ono as mercifully as possible, by running through the
blues-based ʽDon't Worry Kyokoʼ first and saving the harshest stuff for latest.
Thus, symbolically, the progression from the rockabilly of ʽBlue Suede Shoesʼ
to the brutal avantgarde of ʽJohn, John (Let's Hope For Peace)ʼ could be
regarded as the entire history of musical evolution in the past fifteen years,
over a 40-minute long set.
Of course, it all sounds so much cooler in
theory than in practice. The rock and roll numbers sound steady enough, but
somewhat stiff (out of caution, they slowed down the tempos to avoid any
unnecessary accidents), and Eric is occasionally quite sloppy, not to mention
that rockabilly soloing was never one of his strong sides. On ʽYer Bluesʼ, I
would even say that Lennon delivers a better guitar solo overall than Eric —
less technically complex, but more in touch with the overall mood of the song.
ʽCold Turkeyʼ is played more like a straight rock number than the proto-industrial
nightmare of the studio version, although even that would be more tolerable if
John did not forget about half of the lyrics. And ʽGive Peace A Chanceʼ...
well, if somebody needs to hear ʽGive Peace A Chanceʼ with tons of bluesy
rhythm guitar, there you have it.
The best news is that Yoko sat out much of this
part of the performance in a bag on the stage — no, wait, actually the best
news is that after she got out of the bag and began to wail the wail on ʽYer
Bluesʼ, John had the gall to go into the studio and edit her out (see, even the most heartless bastards have their
moments of mercy). On the other hand, it seems that occasionally he also edited her in — there is at least one
blazing goat scream during the solo in ʽDizzy Miss Lizzieʼ when in the movie,
at that same moment, Yoko is clearly bag-residing, unless she had a hidden recording
mike under the cover, of course. (Anyway, this is all far more merciful than
that one time when John brought Yoko to his joint performance with Chuck Berry
on the Mike Douglas show in 1972... remember that one? Fifty million Chuck
Berry fans still complain about Mark Chapman missing the mark up to this day).
The Yoko-dominated side of the album, which has
most likely remained in pristine quality for all LP owners, is tolerable as
long as the band actually plays — ʽDon't Worry Kyokoʼ, here heard in all of its
electric chaos, comes across as a sort of proto-Zeppelinish voodoo ritual, and
the menace and madness of the blues riff strangely agrees with Yoko's wailing
which, just for this once, actually carries over some of the atmosphere and
symbolism that its equivalents may have in traditional Japanese culture (any
fan of Kenji Mizoguchi's movies will probably understand what I am talking
about here). Once the actual music dies down, however, and the last track
becomes ten minutes of screechy-squeaky feedback and «wailing for peace», it is
rotten tomato time all over the place, although I do have to tip my hat to John's
audacity — it is one thing to conduct such experiments in the studio, or even
to play them before a forcefully tolerant group of Cambridge University
students, and quite another thing to unload the same baggage before thousands
of regular fans, most of which came there to headbang and dance to Little
Richard, not to mention expecting the greatest Beatle to, you know, lay on some
ʽRock And Roll Musicʼ like in the good old days of Candlestick Park. So we also
have to tip our hats to the fans who were polite enough to let the Plastic Ono
Band off stage without any broken bones or anything.
In the end, Live Peace is what it is — a single, out-of-context, but still
intriguing page from a very important historical document, still waiting to be
properly re-integrated into its own little book, and barely usable at all for
any entertainment-related or enlightenment-related experiences. It did remain
the only officially available document of a post-Beatles John Lennon live
performance until the archival release of Live
In New York City in 1986; but now that the latter is available, the only
reason to come back to Live Peace is
to get an extra taste of the all-permeating craziness of the Woodstock era.
Which, admittedly, can be quite a bit of a reason.
Side one is fine. Side two...
ReplyDeleteActually quite like Eric's playing, including his Yer Blues solo, which in my recording, sounds like it nearly gets unplugged three quarters of the way through
ReplyDelete