It’s 1972 and John Lennon is talking to drummer Jim Keltner on the phone, about a tour he’s planning that will end in Miami Beach to coincide with a protest at August’s Republican National Convention. The ex-Beatle’s ongoing challenge to President Nixon and the US political establishment has him buzzing, but Keltner sounds a note of concern. Does Lennon realise he’s playing with fire? Has he considered the risks?
Lifted from a recently discovered box of tapes, the audio is one of the stars of One To One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ vivid and visceral new film about Lennon and Yoko Ono’s period of controversial activism, 1971-73. The pair’s recorded phone conversations with Keltner, Allen Klein, MC5 manager John Sinclair and more provide some of the film’s most surprising insights. One viewer was particularly struck.
“I was completely floored,” Sean Lennon tells MOJO. “I think 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.”
Covering the 18 months they spent living in a basement apartment on Bank Street in Manhattan’s West Village, consorting with America’s radical underground, One To One is full of such moments of surprising connection with the Lennons. The phone recordings provide what co-director Kevin Macdonald describes as one of the film’s “spines”; the other is restored footage of the one full live show Lennon performed as a solo artist: the benefit for Staten Island’s Willowbrook special needs school on August 30, 1972. Backed by their New York pick-up band Elephant’s Memory, with Keltner on second kit, Lennon and Ono deliver searing performances of Come Together, Cold Turkey, Mother, Don’t Worry Kyoko and more. After decades of mixed reviews for this period of Lennon’s music-making – encompassing Sometime In New York City and our previous best version of the Willowbrook show, the 1986 release of Live In New York City – it’s another revelation.
“To be honest, I don’t know what was going on that day, but the recording was very chaotic,” says Sean Lennon, who presided over the gig’s new audio mix, battling random mike placements, tidying flammy drums and foregrounding Lennon’s vocals. “Dad’s amazing at that show,” he continues. “Specifically, his voice, it’s got grit to it. Let’s just say, if I was in a band with John Lennon, I wouldn’t solo over his voice when he’s singing.” Lennon chuckles. “Let’s just put it that way.”
Collaged TV footage of contemporary events contextualises the Lennons’ activism – Carole Feraci of the super-square Ray Conniff Singers unveiling a Stop The Killing banner at a White House concert still merits a double-take a half century later – and you empathise with their idealism. “Flower power didn’t work,” says Lennon at one point, “but so what – we start again.” Yet the film doesn’t flinch from the less savoury aspects of their radical bedfellows: Jerry Rubin, who wants to empty the prisons; A.J. Weberman, who roots through Bob Dylan’s garbage for evidence of his betrayal of The Movement (and syringes).
“To me, ultimately, the message of the film is that they were very brave, John and Yoko, to go from singing songs to hanging out with the Chicago Seven, hanging out with the Black Panthers, and becoming real radical activists,” says Sean Lennon. “But you see that it goes too far. And you can feel that my dad is scared. I think a lot of people today remember my dad’s activism as aligning with the Jerry Rubins. But he moves beyond that when he realizes that they’re violent too, or they want to be violent. And it’s a cold splash of water in the face.”
Ultimately, it transpires that Lennon was right to be scared. The clicks and whirrs that we hear on the phone recordings really were FBI taps, and while the Lennons deployed private investigators to track down Yoko’s estranged daughter Kyoko they briefed lawyers to counter threats of deportation. A higher profile in 1972’s election campaign could conceivably have ended as it did for segregationist Democrat George Wallace – paralysed after taking four shots in Laurel, Maryland on May 15.
Sean Lennon, born in 1975, describes his childhood as having been shaped by this period of paranoia.
“My early childhood was very chaotic,” he says. “It was a very strange time. It felt like it was on the heels of this chaos that they had been going through in the early ‘70s. There were characters hanging around and things that happened that were sort of the echoes of that time when they were being harassed and monitored. There was this FBI agent named Doug MacDougall who came to, quote-unquote, ‘protect’ my mom and me, after dad died. Later, we wound up finding out that he been stealing things from us – my dad’s glasses, some guitars, things like that. And it turned out that he was, like, a bad guy. In fact, he had been working for Nixon to deport John and Yoko. It was really creepy.”
And yet, there was another side to the Lennons’ Greenwich Village period – aspects of mischief and creativity entertainingly captured by Macdonald’s film. Among the salvaged phone tapes there are recurring conversations around attempts to find flies for Ono’s 1970 film Fly, which required said insects to buzz around a woman’s naked body. At one point, someone suggests trying a pet shop.
“The idea that a pet shop would have flies is really funny,” chuckles Sean. “Like, who’s keeping a fly as a pet?”
“Working for John and Yoko must have been really fun and weird,” he adds. “Having May Pang running around Manhattan looking for flies seems like a kind of madness. But at the same time, that film, Fly, it’s such a beautiful film. It’s very beautiful and poetic and profound and interesting and radical. You know, living like college kids in a loft downtown, it was a really inspired time for them. I think it was maybe one of their favourite times, because they were having an adventure.”
Adventure is a good word. More than anything, One To One is a snapshot of a man on a voyage of self-discovery. What was John Lennon, if no longer a Beatle? For now, he was a revolutionary. Later, he would be a drunk, a penitent, a father, and a saint.
“It’s especially important to realize that John and Yoko moved past this period and they became artists again,” says Sean Lennon. “You know, when people ask me, ‘What would your dad think of this or that event, I always say, Look, whatever he would think now would not be what he thought then. That’s all I f**king know.”
One To One: John & Yoko is previewed in IMAX cinemas on April 9 and 10, and released to cinemas UK-wide from April 11.