John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band or Yoko Ono / Plastic Ono Band?

Yoko surely about those techniques, but Lennon didn't know that tapes could be played backwards, never mind what they sounded like backwards (to say nothing of loops), until 1966. His mantra was "'avant-garde' is French for bullshit" until he met Yoko.

Lennon's art school education was far different/more conservative than the later (and, significantly, London) art school experience of, say, Pete Townshend, who was immersed in an overtly avant-garde curriculum (and, as it turns out, witnessed a Yoko performance, in collaboration with Gustav Metzger, at least a year or two before Lennon met her).

you guys aren't really answering my question

although the implication seems to be that it was just osmosis - CAN and John/Yoko were on similar trajectories and arrived at the same point largely independent of each other

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51aLY99QTeL.jpg

i got the new vinyl Plastic Ono Band reissue. sounds great! i really love this record. it is still quite mindblowing. love the noise jams. love the drone rock. hey on some of these songs there are more Beatles playing than on actual Beatles songs. Ringo + John + i count bassist Klaus Voorman who may as well be an honorary Beatle from the OG days (and doing the cover art for Revolver). the Beatles with a German art school bass player and a Japanese conceptual artist lead singer. its the Beatles as Can.

"Why?" is such an powerhouse opener. i really love the direction it takes on side two. "Touch Me" and "Paper Shoes" going through different moods. the bit with the train going by. the part where the tree falls and it cuts right into a primal muck bass-drums groove by Ringo and Klaus. so great. i really appreciate the flow of this record, especially all the little found sounds. there is a part where the music stops and we just hear birds in a little forest for a while, a potent and soothing antidote. lot of love and care in this album.

the re-issue is really nice and comes with an art booklet and a foldout poster for the Feb 1968 Ornette Coleman performance that opens side 2. the label on the record is a grapefruit done in the style of the classic apple label. fucking awesome.

this is really cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59qSQRoDj4w

awww sweet. But now I'm going back through the thread and still wondering if Yoko and John had heard Can

I just thank God they never heard Geir!

Saw Revival69: The Concert That Rocked the World tonight, about the '69 concert in Toronto. Seems to be a Canadian film, but I'm sure it'll play everywhere.

Not really a concert film; all the performance clips are brief. (No footage of the Doors, just audio.) For the old guys--Berry, Little Richard, Lewis, Diddley, Gene Vincent--that's probably good. For me, the chance that any of them will improve on the brilliance of their best singles live is pretty much nil. ("Be-Bop-a-Lula," with Vincent backed by the Alice Cooper band, really misses.) They might sound like Sha Na Na--"Isn't this fun?"--or they might try to change the songs to keep up with the times, and both options are terrible. From what you do hear, Bo Diddley sounded the best to me.

So you're left with animated recreations of all the organizing, old video and audio clips (including many from Lennon), and all the talking heads reminiscing: John Brower (one of the two promoters), Shep Gordon and Anthony Fawcett (facilitators), Alice Cooper and Klaus Voorman and Robbie Krieger (performers), Christgau (on assignment), audience members Geddy Lee and Claudja Barry, Molly Davis (part of D.A. Pennebaker's crew, who filmed the concert), Edjo Leslie (the biker who fronted the money to entice the Doors!), others. Touching: Leslie was clearly smitten with Davis, and asks the filmmakers to send his regards. (Leslie and the other bikers do not come across as Altamont-like sinister, although who knows what nefarious things they were involved in.)

I found it really funny when, with the whole thing about to fall apart--the original bill didn't spark ticket sales, and neither did the addition of the Doors (maybe or maybe not because of recent trouble in Miami...)--someone suggests to Brower that he has to fly in Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley from L.A. to emcee the show. Which he does; struck me like like enlisting the captain of the Titanic to save your sinking ship. But it actually was Fowley who came up with the idea of contacting Lennon.

It's a great story, but I think I've maybe--finally--reached my limit with '60s and '70s pop stars looking back on these events. It's like they're always trying to sell you on the idea that this was the most amazing, most monumental thing that ever happened. And lots of amazing things do happen, but they have a certain style of talking about it all that's starting to wear on me.

Worth seeing in any event. I hadn't turned eight yet, but I wish my older cousin David had gotten tickets for me, him, and his brother Glen.

Interesting. Any performance clips of Lennon/Ono in the movie?

Just a tiny bit. And--many will hate this--Yoko's contributions are half-played for laughs. Although Voorman speaks thoughtfully about how he'd changed his mind about Yoko by the end.

From what you do hear, Bo Diddley sounded the best to me.

sounds about right!

My Dad (a David, but no brother Glen) told me he had been at this. I’m on the fence as to whether he actually was but it’s still nice to think about.

That's great. Do you know if he was also at the Toronto Pop Festival a few months earlier? (The Velvet Underground and Sly & the Family Stone!)

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/the-performers-at-canada-s-first-pop-festival-in-1969-1.5180010

Small chance your dad turns up in one of the crowd shots--you should see it.

The footage I've seen from that concert was pretty amazing. Little Richard especially (which was also used in The Little Richard Story a great film by William Klein. I think it was the first time I ever saw Jerry Lee Lewis play guitar - his set was good. I've only seen brief bits of the rest, but I'll have to check out Bo's.

Which concert -- Toronto Pop or the other Toronto show?

Never mind. There's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEtOMrXJFTw

Yeah, that's the one! I remember the outfit. FWIW, the one time I saw Little Richard in-person, he had the brightest, shiniest and most sparkling shoes I had EVER seen. Never mind shoes, of any piece of attire worn by anyone.

I will watch them and look for him, he was only about 15 in ‘69 though so doubtful he was at anything earlier. Sadly I lost him a few years ago so can’t ask :(

Oh I misread and thought the other was a couple years not months earlier

Ritchie Yorke turns up in Marcus's column today, and also in Revival69--at one point, he was instrumental in saving the whole show. Made me laugh, because Yorke became a running punchline for a friend and I who both remembered his book Axes, Chops & Hot Licks, a look at Canadian pop in the early '70s. It was one of the few rock-related books that might be in your school library in the mid-'70s, at least if you were Canadian. (Yorke was Australian, but he moved to Canada and wrote for the Globe and the Telegram.) I don't know if either of us had even read him--I have a copy of Axes I bought later--but based on his 10-favourite list in the first Paul Gambaccini Top 200 book, we decided he was a good stand-in for a certain kind of '70s rock critic, best described, maybe, by the joke in Annie Hall about achieving "total heavy-osity." Very unfair, no doubt. He died five years ago.

He was included in the list of "10 Worst Rock Critics" that Marcus wrote for the Book of Rock Lists in 1980, I can't imagine that the passage of time has made him more beloved.

I'm sure that was part of us seizing on him in particular.