As expected, refurbished versions of the only two full-length concerts John Lennon ever gave after leaving the Beatles and before his 1980 murder will be screened in worldwide cinemas starting April 29 under the moniker POWER TO THE PEOPLE: John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with Elephant’s Memory and Special Guests – Live at the One To One Concert, New York City, 1972.
Footage from the shows previously formed the backbone of last year’s Kevin MacDonald documentary ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO after it was meticulously restored by a team including Lennon and Ono’s son Sean, Simon Hilton, Ben Wainwright-Pearce, Peter Worsley, Paul Hicks, Sam Gannon and audio engineer Rob Stevens, who had to bake the master tapes before transferring them to high resolution audio. The music was also released in deluxe boxed set form last October on the day after what would have been Lennon’s 85th birthday.
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When Lennon and Ono moved from London to New York in the wake of the Beatles‘ 1970 demise, they could easily have chosen a life of secluded opulence after years of laboring under the crushing weight of their outsized celebrity. Instead, they secured an unassuming one-bedroom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, immersed themselves in the thriving counterculture and lent their voices to the raging anti-war movement in opposition to the American government’s evermore deadly presence in Vietnam.
After watching an exposé on the Willowbrook State School by TV journalist Geraldo Rivera, Lennon and Ono were appalled by not only the conditions of the Staten Island, N.Y., facility but the larger impact on both the intellectually disabled children living there and their families. The cause was particularly meaningful to Ono, whose own daughter Kyoko disappeared in 1971 in the custody of her father, Tony Cox, and spent decades living under a false name in a Christian religious cult (mother and daughter were not reunited until 1998).
In response, they organized the Aug. 30, 1972, concerts (one in the afternoon, the other in the evening), which raised $1.5 million for the cause (about $11.5 million today). During them, Lennon and Ono were backed by local rock collective Elephant’s Memory for runs through early Lennon solo favorites (“Instant Karma!,” “Imagine” and “Mother), Ono’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko” and “Open Your Box,” a show-closing cover of the Elvis Presley-popularized “Hound Dog” and even a lone Beatles song (“Come Together”).
“When I watch the film, the feeling I come away with almost more than anything else is, why the fuck did he not do this more? He’s so good live and he’s such a great performer,” MacDonald told SPIN last year of Lennon’s talents as a live performer. “Simultaneously, he was incredibly anxious and he’s documented that the reason he didn’t is because he got terrible stage fright. But at these shows, he seemed so relaxed. He’s improvising, throwing in words and pulling this band together. He’s the beating heart of it, musically, and they hadn’t really rehearsed very much. It was all done in quite an ad hoc way.”
“It was a concert that had a legendary status in my mind, because it was my dad’s last concert,” Sean Ono Lennon says. “I remember wanting a Les Paul because he played Les Paul during that show. I feel very grateful I got to work on it because he did plan on touring and he didn’t get to, so all we’ve got is this concert. And I think it is very beautiful because it is so unlike what people were doing at the time. Everybody was getting into slicker and slicker stuff in the early ‘70s, and I think my dad was already kind of pre-empting the arrival of punk. He just wanted to go back to basics and be raw and spontaneous and rock‘n’roll. It’s a very cool thing he was doing that was very against the grain. Maybe not everyone realizes how special it is for me to hear my dad talking or to see him. I grew up with a set number of images and audio clips that everyone’s familiar with. So to come across things that I’ve never seen or heard is really deep for me, because it’s almost like getting more time with my dad.”
Tickets for the screenings go on sale March 20, which would have been Lennon and Ono’s 57th wedding anniversary.
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