T.A. Your latest record and your recent public statements, especially the interviews in Rolling Stone magazine, suggest that your views are becoming increasingly radical and political. When did this start to happen? 1.L. I'se always been politically-minded, you know, and against the status quo. It's pretty busic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean, it's just a basic working class thing. though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swullowed up in the system. In my case l've never not been political, through religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around 65 or *66. And that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit-religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, "Well, there's something else to life, isn't there? This isn't it, surely?" But 1 was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood Fused to write magazines in school and hand them around. I was very conscious of class, they would say with a chip on my shoulder, because 1 knew what happened to me and I knew about the class repression coming down on us-It was a fucking fact but in the hurricane Beadle world it got left out-1 got further away from reality for a time.
T.A, What did you think was the reason for the success of your sort of music?
J.L. Well, at the time it was thought that the workers had broken through, but 1 realise in retrospect that it's the same phoney deal they gave the blacks, it was just like they allowed blacks to be runners or boxers or entertainers.
That's the choice they allow you-now the outJet is being a popstar, which is really what I'm saying on the album in Working Cluss Hero. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit. Of course there are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middie class kids in pretty clothes.
But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bustards running everything R.B. Of course, class is something the American Rock groups haven't tekled yet.
J.L Because they're all middie class and bourgeois and they don't want to show it. They te scured of the workers, actually, because the workers seem mainly right-wing in Americu.
clinging on to their goods. But it these middle class groups realise what's happening, and whal the class system has done, it's up to them to repatriale the people and to get out of all that boureeois shit.
T.A. When did you start breaking out of the role imposed on you as a Beatle?
J.L. Even during the Beatle heyday I tried to a few times and Epstein always tried to wattle on at us about saying nothing ubout Vietnam.
So there came a time when George and I said "Listen, when they ask next time, were going to say we don't like that war and we think thay should get right out." That's what we did. Al that time this was a pretty radical thing to do, especially for the "Fab Four". It was the first opportunity I personally took to wase the flag a bit. But you've got to remember that l'd always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that. to say "Well, I don't want to be king. I want to be real." So in it's way the second political thing I did was to say "The Bentles aro bigger than Jesus. " That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was u big trauma for all the kids that were following us. Up to then there was this unspoken policy of not answering delicate questions, though 1 always read the papers, you know, the political hits. The continual awareness of what was goiing on made me feel ashamed I wasn't saying anything. I burst out because I could no longer play that game any more, it was just too much for me. Of course, going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd tumed out to be a Trojun Horse, The Fab Four moved right to go against it, so did George. We went to Americs the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us. R.B. Wasn't there a double charge to whut you were doing right from the beginning? Yoko You were always very direct... J.L. Yes, well, the first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and suy "It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this", Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC. They were only comedians but that's what care out of Liverpool befure us. We myths and drewns. It's pretty hard when you are refused to play that game. After the Beatles cane on the scene everyone starled putting on a Liverpudlian accent.
T.A. In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?
J.L All, sure, Revolution. There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said "count me The original version which ends up the L.P said "count me in" too: I put in bott bacause I wasn'1 sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revalutionbut I mude a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution. On the version released as a single 1 said "when you talk about destruction you can coant me our". I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but Ijust know that they seerned to be so few and yet they painted waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtie, you know. 1 thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting perfectly beautiful mother. about it. That was how I felt-I was really asking J.l. And Yoko's family were middle-class a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russis and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitulist game. At one time I was so much involved in the relipious bullshit that 1 used to go around calling , myself a Christian Communist, but as Junos says, religion is legalised madness, It was therapy that stripped away all that and made me feel my own pais.
R.B. This analyst you went to, what's his J.L. Janov.
R.B. His ideas seem to have something in conmon with Laing in that he doesn t want to re conçile people to their misery, to adjust them to the world but rather to make thera face up to its causes?
J.L. Well, his thing is to feel the puin that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life-it's excruciuting, you are forced to realise that your pain. the kind that makes you wake up atraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment. As I realised this it all sturted to fail into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the Godshit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Janov doesn't just talk to vou about this but makes you feel it-once you've allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself. When you wake up and your heart is going like clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop sume other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as at is if you take a pill or a bath, saying "well. I'l get over it". Most people channel their pain. into God or musturbation of some dream of making it. The therapy is like a very slow acid trip which happens naturally in your body. It is hard to talk about, you know, because you feel "1 am pain" and it sounds sort of arbitrary. but puin to me now has a different meaning because of having physically felt all these extra ordinary repressions. It was like taking gloves off, and feeling your own skin for the first time. It's a bit of a drug to say so, but I don't think you can understand this unless you've gone through it-though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the Godtrip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instoad of always looking for some kind of heaven. R.B. Do you see the family in general as the source of these repressions?
T.L. Mine is an extreme case you know. My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was twenty, nor did 1 sec much more of my mother. But Yoko had her parents there and it was the some.
Yoko Perhaps one feels more pain when parents are there. It's like when you're hungry, you know it's worse to get a symbol of a cheesethemselves green and stood in front of the police burger than no cheeseburger at all, It doesn't do you any good, you know. I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a Japanese hut it's all the same repreasion. Though I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up. They are the ones who have the biggest struggle to say, "Goodbye mummy, Goodbye daddy".
TA. What relation to your music has all this got? The Red Mole 8-22 March 1971 Page 7
J.L. Art is only a way of expressing pan. I mean the reason Yoku does such fur out stuff is that it's a far out find uf pain she went through.
R.B. A lot of Beatle songs used to be about childicend...
1.L. Yeah, that would mostly be me...
R.B. Though they were very good there was wways a missing element...
J.L. That would be reslity, that would be the missing clement. Because I was never really wanted. The only reason Tara star is hecause of toy repression. Nothing clse would have driven ne throush all that if I was "normal"...
Yoto... and happy J.L. The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: "Now, mummy-daddy, will you love me!
TA. But then you had success beyond most people's wildest dreams...
J.L.. Oh, Jesus Christ, it was a complete oppression. I mean we had to go tough humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classcs and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use 1s. It was a special humiliation for me because 1 could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to com leract this pressure. It was really hell... Yoko It was depriving him of any real experi It was very miserable. I mean apart frum the first flush of nuking it-the thrill of the first number one record, the first trip to America. At lust we had some sort of objective like being as big as Elvis moving forward was the great thing, but actually atlaining it was the big lerdown. I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to rcality: I begun to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my R.B. Well. in any case, politics and culture are linked, aren't they? I mean, workers are repressed by culture not guns at the moment...
And the culture that's doping them is albums and in these interviews, What I'm trying to do is to inflence all the people I can influence. All those who are still under the dreum and just put a big question murk in their mind. The acid dream is over. that is what I'm trying R.B. Even in the past, you know, people would use Meatle songs and give them new words. Yellow Submarine for instance had u number of versions. One that strikers used to sing began "We all live on bread and margarine", at LSE we had a version that began "We ull live in a Red J.L. like that. And I enjoyed it when football crowds in the carly days would sing All Together now - That was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in Americ. took up Give peace a chance because I had written it with that in mind really. I hoped that inslead of singing He Shull Overcome from 1800 or something, they world have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why 1 would like to compose songs for the revolution now,. R.B. We only have a few revolutionary songs and they were composed in the nineteenth century. Do you find anything in our musical traditions which could be used for revolutionary J.. When I started, Rock and Roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids We were a bit conscious to begin with of being imitation Americans. But we delved into the music and tound that it was half white Countryard-Wester and half black rhythm and blues. Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of Dylan's best songs came from Scorland, Ireland or Englend. It was a sort of cultural exchangeThough I must say the more interesting sungi Tho Red Mole 8-22 March 1971 Page 3 to me were the black ones because they were more simple. They sort of said shake your arse, or your prick, which was an innovation really. And then there were the field somps mainly expressing the pain they were in. They couldn't express themsches intellectually so they had to say in a very few words what was happening to them. And then there was the City blues and a Tot of that was sbout sex and fighting. A lot of this was self-expression but only in the last few years have they expressed themselves completely with Black Power, like Edwin Starr making War records. Before that many black singers were still labouting under that problem of God, ir was often "God will save 15". But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also derived from European folk songs. Aren't these folk songs sometimes pretty dreadful stuff, all about losing and being defeated..?
As kids we were all opposed to folk songs because they were so middle-class. It was all college students with big scarfs and a pint of beer in their hands singing folk songs in what we call la-di-da voices-*I worked in a mine in Now-cast-le" and all that shit. There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic. But mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring like ballet, a minority thing Kep! going by a minority group. Today's folk song is Rock and Roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own mibic and that changed everything. R.B. Your album, Yoko, seems to fuse avante garde modern minic with Rock. I'd like to put an iden to you I got from listening to it. You integrate everyday sounds, like that of a train, into a musical patter. This seems to demand an aesthetic measure of everyday life, to insist that art should not be imprisoned in the museums and galleries, doesn't it?
Yoko Exactly, I want to incite people to loosen their oppression by giving them something to work with, to build on. They shouldn't be frightened of creating themselves-that's why ! make things very open, with things for people to de, Eke in my book (Grope/cuit). Because basically there are two types of people in the world: people who are confident becunse they know they have the ability to create, and then people who have been demoralised, who have no confidence in themselves because they have been told they have no creative ability, but must just take orders. The Establishment likes people who take no responsibility and cannot R.B. suppose workers" control is about that..
Haven't they tried out something like that in Yugoslavia, they are free of the Russians. I'd like to go there and see how it works. T.A. Well, they have, they did try to break with the Stulinist pattern. But instead of allowing uninhibited workers' control, they added a strong dose of political bureaucracy. It tended to smother the initiative of the workers and they also regulated the whole system by a market mechanism which bred new inequalitics between one region and another.
J.L. It seems trat all revolutions end up with u personality cult-even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure. I expect this happens in Cuba too with Che and Fidel.... In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers inage of themselves as the R.B. Thar's a pretty coal idea-the Working Class becomes its own Hero. As long as it was not a new comforting illusion, as long as there was a real workers power. If a capitalist or burenucrut is running your life then you need Yoko The people have got to trust in themselves. T.A. That's the vital point. The working class must be instilled with a feeling of confidence in itself. This can't be done just by propaganda the workers must more, take over their own factories and tell the capitalists to bugger off. This is what began to happen in May 1968 in France ... the workers began to feel their own IL. But the Communist Party wasn't up to R.B. No, they weren't. With ten million workers on strike they could bave led one of those huge demonstrations that occurred in th centre of Paris into a massive occupation of all goverment buildings und installations, replace de Gaulle with a new institution of popular power like the Commune or the original Sovie that would have begun a real revolution but the French C.P. was scared of it. They prefern to deal at the top instead of encouraging the workers to take the initiutive themselves... J.L. Great... but there's a problem about that here you know. All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were ahle to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers scemed to understand that they were in a repressed state. They havn't woken up yet her they still believe that cars and tellies are the answer....You should get those left-wing stude out to talk with the workers, you should get d school-kids involved with The Red Mole. TA. You're quite right, we have been trying do that and we should do more. This new Industrial Relations Bill the Government is trying to introduce is making more and more workers realise what is happening... J.L. I don't think that Bill can work. I don't think they can enforce it, I don't think the workers will co-operate with it. I thought the Wilson Government was a big let-down but thi Heath lot are worse. The underground is being harrassed, the black militants cun't even live in their own homes now, and they're selling mon aents to the South Afticans. Like Richard Neville said there may be only an inch of difference between Wilson and Heath but it's T.A. I don't know about that, Labour brough in racialist inmigration policies, supported the Vietam wur and were hoping to bring in new R.B. It may be true that we live in the inch o difference between Labour and Conservative but so long as we do we 1l he impotent and unable to change anything. If Heath is forcing us out of that inch maybe he's doing us a good Yes, I've thought about that, too. This putting us in a comer so we have to find out what is conting down on other people. Ikeep on teading the Morning Star (the Communist newspaper) to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the nineteenth century: it seem to be written for dropped-out middle-aged liberals. We should be trying to reach the your workers because that's when you're most idealistic and have least fear. Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won't approach them. Bu it's diffient to know where to start, we've all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I hase become more real, T've grown away trom most working-class people-you know what they like is Engelbert Humperdine It's the students who are buying us now, and that's the problem. Now the Beatles are four separate people, we don't have the impact we R.B. Now you're trying to swim against the stream of bourgeois society, which is much Yes, they own all the newspapers and they control all distribation and promotion. When we came along there was only Decca, Phillips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole burcaucrucy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than twelve hours to mace a whole album, which is what we did in the early days. Even now it's the same, it you an unknown artist you're lucky to get an how in a studio it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again. And they control distribution. We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated. They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn't like it. With the last rocord they've cen sored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocrit cal-they huve to let me sing it but they don't R.B. Though you reach fewer people now, perhaps the effect can be more concentrated. J.L. Yes, I think that could be true. To begin with, working class people reacted against our
they con or not, this double album helps to prove that the way out of the present stagnation of A working class hero is something to be зана вість POWER TO THE PEOPLE Power to the people Power to the peop e Power to the people Power to the people right on Say we want a revolution We better get it on right away Get on your feet And into the street, singing ..
Chorus... Power to the ceccle A million workers working for nething You better gise 'em what they really own We gotta pat you down When we corne into town, singing.
Choris... Power to the peocle gotta ask you comrades and brothers How de you treat your own women back home She got to be herself So you can fres yourself Chor.s... Power to the peoole John Lennon's forthcoming single.
Reproduced by kind permission of Macien (Music/ Ltd., 3 Saville Row, W. T. @ 1971 the records John Lennon/Plastic One Band PCS 7124 politics might have smothered art. Listening to it I realised that I could not hase been more wrong: the politics and the music are bound together through aesthetic necossity. Godard's problem is that his ultra-revolutionary world-view is simply and directly transposed onto the aesthetic level in a war against ail artistic foems and conventions Lennon rofuses to make any coustion between lus musc and politics or to imoly that rock a revolution as The Doors of Jefferson Airplane have done. Indeed, Working Cirse Hero explicitly asserts the opposite: that the proletarian super-star is a convenient safety valve for bourgeois society, not an index of social liberation. The reason why the LP is able to fuse music and politics so successfully is why both lyric and melody have the simplicity of an elemental force. Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band Sapcor 17 Ornette Coleman's trumpet or Lennon's guitar on this LP. Andrew Chester has suggested n distinction between two types of musical construction, the extensional and the intensional, which can help explain this (NLR 62). Most Western classical music is extenzional in the sense burian voice is not a dominant element in composition and is encouraged to develop the precision and invariance of an instrument when it is used. Jazz, and much other non-European music (including the Japanese), develop sound in a quite different, intensional manner: the volce is the most flexibie of all instruments is naturally dominant, Yoko's music is intensional in this sense, that is why it is so close to the blues and has a similar emotional impact on the Listener. and is so far from atonal music with its geometrical constructions. A number of rock LOUDLEY BLUSE and The Band have sought to develop and re interpret this tradition. Those who are finding Creedence Clearwater increasingly mechanical, The Band Increasingly insipid, and both groups repetitious, sbould welcome Yoko's new record as a fuscinating and potent now departuse.
not flow from within itself. It will be interesting to see whether musicians who do not have Yoko's evident familiarity with oriental musical traditions will be able to follow her. Whether OPEN YOUR BOX Open your box Open your box Open your windows Oben your closets Open your bottles Open your skirts Open your flies Come on come on aper your pants Open your eurs Open your eyes Open your nose FOND ONE PLASTIC OND BAND When 1 first heard about this record I was worried that Lennon might have done a Godard-that almost certainly that both grow out of very deeply-felt personal experience: of oppression and neglect in childhood, and theit complementary obverse when he became naked Emperor of tbe Dreamn. This is why the soups about childhood so powerfully reinforce the political theme, and Althougit at first listening Yoko's sound seems to derive from contemporary avant garde music in fact it is closer to the roots of rock than is at first apparent -which is why it goes so well with chat it builds up themes, variations and counterpoint on the basis of musical "atoms"- standard notes which do not themselves vary but which form intricate patters of sound. This is why tho music emerges from continual modulations of barmony and inflections of the beat. The human groups have recenlly sought to retur to the roots and recapture the intensional complexity of Creedence Clearwater can produce an acceptable carhon copy of the original Feeling is transmuted into liquid sound-a cleansing torrent which obeys no formal rules that do rock lies as much in rediscovering the intensional as in pursuing the path of extonsional developR.B.
Open your mouth Open your cold lect Open your thighs Come on come on. John open your legs Open your doors Open your schools Opert your prisons Open your factories Open your parliaments Open your cities Come on come on lets open the world Yoko Ono's new single reproduced by permission. Copyright One Music Ltd 19710 WORKING CLASS HERO As soon as you're born they make you feel small By giving you no time instead of it all Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all A working class hero is something to be A working class hero is something to be They hort you at home and they hit you at school They hate you if you're clever and they cespise a fcol Till you're so fucking crazy vou can't follow A worxing class hero is something to be A working class hero is something to be when they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years Then they expect you to pick a career When you can't really function you're so fuil of A working class hero is something to be A working class hero is something to be Keep you doped with religion and sek and TV And you think you're so clever and classless and free But you're still fucking peasents as far as | can see A working class hero is something to he There's room at the top they are telling you still But first you must team how to smile as you kill If you want to be like the folks on the hill A working class hero is something to be Yes, a working class hero is something to De If you want to be a hero well just follow me If you want to be a hero well just follow me Reproduced by permission of Northern Songs Ltd. Reproduction rights also claimed by Macien /Music) Lid.