Pawns In High Spain: In Defence of "Bluejeans and Moonbeams"

Yes, it has been a while since I last posted on this here blog thing.  But I’ve finally found the time to pick an unfairly maligned subject and try to prove that they have some worth.  This time, it’s the turn of Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band’s 1974 album Bluejeans and Moonbeams.

I have been a massive Beefheart fan since I was a teenager, going in right at the deep end with 1969’s monumental Trout Mask Replica.  Even now, there’s still so much to unpack, savour and marvel at – one-of-a-kind arrangements, supremely intricate musicianship and a truly mad genius front and centre, throwing words and musical notations around the room just to see what happens.

 

 
Enough has been written about Don Van Vliet – ranging from Bill Harkleroad’s revelatory “Lunar Notes”, Mike Barnes’ wide-ranging biography “Captain Beefheart” and John French’s long-winded “Beefheart: Through The Eyes Of Magic” – that there really is nothing worth adding, and let’s not forget Elaine Shepherd’s 1997 documentary “The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart” and the impeccable Captain Beefheart Radar Station website (www.beefheart.com) which is chock-full of information and resources.  So instead, let’s turn our attention to an album of his that is considered the lowest point of his musical career.  One that’s glossed over as quickly as possible.

1974 was possibly Mr Van Vliet’s nadir, at least in terms of his musical career.  Having decided to tone his musical output down with the aim of commercial success, he had cut two albums (The Spotlight Kid, Clear Spot) which showed that he and The Magic Band could make relatively commercial slices of uncategorizable rock without completely compromising and making a proper effort.  Clear Spot in particular is probably his most coherent and engaging effort, combining stellar musicianship and the perfectly attuned production courtesy of Little Feat collaborator Ted Templeman.  It was a miracle that they all pulled it off, however the record only made it to #191 in the US charts and failed to chart in the UK, where Beefheart had a loyal and dedicated fanbase.  Beefheart left his current label, Warner Bros, and tried to find a new manager that would finally give him the big break that he wanted.

The infamous Andy DiMartino came on board and got Van Vliet and co. signed to Virgin (in the UK) and Mercury (in the US).  The band at this time featured Trout Mask/Decals-era stalwarts Bill Harkleroad, Mark Boston and Art Tripp, as well as the returning Alex St Clair Snouffer, the man behind the original Magic Band’s formation.  The resulting album Unconditionally Guaranteed is a disaster.  To me, this album is THE worst Beefheart record.  There is no life or spark to the album whatsoever.  The songs are trite, the band have been shorn of their edge and creativity and even Don sounds bored and tired.

The Magic Band then quit on him prior to a European tour, so DiMartino corralled some last-minute replacements who then had to scrape together a set within days of departing.  The resulting line-up has often been referred to as ‘The Tragic Band’ but to be fair they did the best they could at such ridiculously short notice.  In fact, their performance of ‘Upon The My-O-My’ on the Old Grey Whistle Test is far superior to the LP version, if only for the more powerful and snarling vocal performance.  A live version of ‘Full Moon, Hot Sun’ from a French gig, while pedestrian is still more lively than the official cut.

Shortly afterwards, the band fell apart whilst Van Vliet and DiMartino figured out what to do next.  The former’s plan involved meeting up with ex-Mothers of Invention and on-off Magic Band guitarist Elliot Ingber and his brother Ira to write some simple catchy tunes, possibly as a last ditch Project: Mersh attempt.

In an interview for the “Captain Beefheart: Under Review” documentary from 2006, Ira Ingber explained: My brother, myself and a fellow named Mark Gibbons, a very gifted keyboard player, got together here in Los Angeles and I think at the time Don was still living in North California…so we started writing songs.  It seemed innocent enough…Don had some ideas, he had lots of lyrics as I remember.  We ended up rehearsing then started recording…I think consciously we were staying away from [the] Magic Band because I think anything even remotely resembling Magic Band for Don was something where he didn’t want to go…but because of who he is they went that direction anyway.

Hitching up with Tragic Band members Michael Smotherman (keyboards), Dean Smith (guitar) and Ty Grimes (percussion),  as well as Jimmy Caravan (keyboards), Bob West (bass) and Gene Pello (drums), this makeshift unit were shoved into Stronghold Sound Recorders, a budget studio within North Hollywood in August 1974 to put an album together.   Smotherman later recounted that the album took 2 days to record.

When interviewed for Mike Barnes’ 2000 book, Smotherman said: Don was just as confused as he could be throughout the whole process.  He would sit there in a chair and sing, and he had no idea when to come in or when to stop.  Count-offs didn’t mean anything to him,  One time, about two o’clock in the morning, I had to go out and sit beside him in a chair.  When it was time for him to sing, I had my hand on the back of his neck and I would push his face up to the microphone and he would start singing.  And when it was time to stop I would pull him back gently.

Of particular note, you may notice that aside from two co-writing credits, Elliot Ingber is absent from the credits on the album.  Van Vliet himself claimed that Elliot’s parts were wiped from the tapes by DiMartino, but as the man made bizarre and contradictive remarks about the same subject many times over who knows what the real story is.  If his claim is true and Dean Smith is responsible for all guitar parts, he does a more than serviceable job, with some neat Spotlight/Clear Spot fuzzy slide work throughout, and unlike his contributions throughout the ill-fated 1974 tour, he kept his proto-Knopfler licks to a minimum.

If Van Vliet was considerably disorientated throughout the sessions, his voice (for the most part) remains in fine fettle and is a damn sight more convincing and confident than on the previous album, particularly in the opening number: ‘The Party Of Special Things To Do’.  Even if the opening verse (“the cowboy wore a nightie in the party of special things to do”) doesn’t have the same original spark of Trout Mask the song is more than serviceable and still full of Southern-fried boogie involving the Red Queen and the One-Eyed Jill (“all the cards”).

A serviceable cover of JJ Cale’s ‘Same Old Blues’ comes up next, featuring a reasonably gruff and moody Van Vliet vocal accompanied on the choruses by Smotherman, who later elaborated to Mike Barnes that “All those obnoxious vocals that you hear in the background – that’s me.  There were supposed to be some other people singing background and then DiMartino thought he could get me to sing all the background for cheaper.”

‘Observatory Crest’ follows shortly after and is possibly the highlight of the album for me.  The musical accompaniment is full of open space and the guitar playing is appropriately tidy and tasteful.  Van Vliet sings about him and his missus watching a concert where they “heard all the best” before stopping near an observatory where “the sand was hot/she wanted to dance.”  Simple enough, but it has a nice laid-back melody and was often picked out by reviews as possibly being the brightest spark on the whole platter.  Mercury Rev later covered the session for a BBC Radio session in 1999, and even my wife loved the song (this song was playing in the registry office while everyone was being seated, so go figure…)

“Is he talking to me? Right…” asks a befuddled Captain as ‘Pompadour Swamp’ starts up.  Another pleasant (noticing a theme here?) number which is not as disposable as some reviewers claim.  For an album that was recorded in a hurry almost as an afterthought, this track is a fine example of some effort being made in song arrangement.  On the whole, the album has a bit more spark and life to it than the repetitive, uneventful plod-plod-plod of Unconditionally Guaranteed.  Van Vliet is in fine form with the rasping delivery of yore conjuring an abstract tale, the title of which was borrowed from one of many works-in-progress originally demo’d back in 1972 (the original music was eventually revised as ‘Suction Prints’ on 1978’s Shiny Beast).

The closing track on side 1 is still a bone of contention and somewhat of a mystery. ‘Captain’s Holiday’ may not even be a Magic Band recording.  Smotherman: “As a matter of fact, I think that track was on a 24-track reel that nobody had picked up.”  As an unidentified chorus of ladies coo “Ooh captain, captain/play your melody” the instrumental track goes on as some half-hearted harmonica playing and soft-rock guitar action take turns popping up here and there.  Maybe it’s me living in hope, but there may be more to the song than that: Smotherman’s main choice of keyboard during the Tragic Band tour was a clavinet which can also be heard on the track, and the harmonica playing does have a slight hint of Van Vliet.  There’s no doubting Andy DiMartino’s pragmatic pilfering of the multitrack, but overdubs may have been attempted as a way of trying to make it blend in with the rest of the album.  Is it worth elaborating further?  The track is nothing special.  As Don himself sang on the previous album “lazy music’s got me laying back and laying down.”

‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Evil Doll’ greets us at the start of side 2 with some fuzzed and wobbly slide guitar playing and squelchy clavinet as Beefheart weaves a simple tale of said doll chasing him down “rock ‘n’ roll’s evil hall”.  Yet again, nothing special but it’s serviceable enough.  Co-writer Ira Ingber makes a good stab at some bass work near the end, as does Dean Smith’s multi-tracked guitar work.

Don Van Vliet transmogrifies into the Walrus of Love for ‘Further Than We’ve Gone’, a self-penned ballad that honestly cannot hold a candle to the genuinely beautiful and tender ‘Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles’ from Clear Spot.  There’s no denying that this song goes on a bit and while frothy and syrupy it’s superior to the same year’s horrid ‘This Is The Day’.

‘Twist Ah Luck’ brings the pace up a bit and is like a livelier version of Unconditionally Guaranteed’s closer ‘Peaches’, as if the latter has had a quick gulp of Lucozade to get some energy going.

The closing number ‘Bluejeans and Meanbeams’ is a nice and gentle little slow burner, replete with acoustic guitar picking and what sounds like a Mellotron.  Like the rest of the album, there’s not much substance to this number but is a welcome change of pace to the usual Beefheart aural assault (or the “exploding note theory” as he later described it).  It really is quite lovely with some delicate electric guitar runs and a basic-as-basic-can-be snare and bass drum accompaniment.  Even the prominent synthesizer twinkles near the end don’t spoil the overall atmosphere of the track and is more proof that Beefheart could genuinely sing in tune when the mood took him.

Upon its release in November that year, reviews for Bluejeans and Moonbeams leaned towards the negative.  Melody Maker’s Allan Jones (and future alt country-enabler) mentioned that the title track was “almost worth the price of the album” but apart from that, he wrote that “this album has some difficulty in justifying its existence”, all under the headline “NO MORE MAGIC.”  Lou Reed’s best mate, Robert ‘Toefucker’ Christgau gave it a B-, preferring it to Unconditionally Guaranteed.

Retrospective reviews are still considerably negative but are not content to write the whole thing off.  In a 1999 review on the Perfect Sound Forever website, Scott McFarland remarked “the record has its moments of minor-league charm, but bears little relationship to the rest of Beefheart’s extraordinary catalogue” and also says that Bluejeans is much more preferable to its predecessor, though is still greatly flawed:  “The songs are less overtly maudlin, and the sound is more relaxed…the music is well recorded, which at times just highlights the vacuousness of the whole project.”

As for the musicians present in the sessions, Ira Ingber later commented: I was disappointed…it sounded like there [were] way too much gratuitous effects – there was some early synthesizer stuff that sounded just godawful to me.  The crispness and the tightness of Clear Spot was gone.  It seemed very watery to me, it didn’t seem to have the impact that I remember it having in the studio…I was very disappointed [with] the way it sounded and very disappointed obviously with the reviews that I saw here because they were predominantly very, very negative. (Under Review, 2006)

As for the Cap?  Once the album was done and dusted, he immediately went out into the desert and DiMartino exited the picture.  Before simply refusing to discuss his DiMartino-produced albums entirely, he moaned that Mercury put Bluejeans out without his knowledge, that the original drum parts he arranged were wiped and re-recorded by someone else, etc.  For all of his unique talents, Don Van Vliet had a most unfortunate habit of blaming others for any faults in his work – read up on his underrated 1968 LP Strictly Personal for more details – but as Barnes pointed out, Van Vliet should’ve been more honest and take an equal portion of the blame for how the record turned out.  He wanted a stab a commercial success and despite the dispiriting path it took him down, it was his decision and no-one else’s.

After retiring to the desert to think about things (and not become a lumberjack as he reported to the press at the time), he decided to put together another iteration of the Magic Band (featuring John French, Elliot Ingber, Jimmy Carl Black and Bruce Fowler) in time for a triumphant performance at Knebworth Festival in 1975 followed by a short European tour.  With these performances considered a true return-to-form, the reinvigorated Beefheart and his conveyor belt of Magic Band inductees recorded four more wonderfully inventive and spiky albums up until Van Vliet’s decision to retire from music in 1982 and concentrate on his art.

In French’s book “Through The Eyes Of Magic” he recounts a story of bumping into Don not long after the album was released.  Don remarked that “the only good thing about this album is the cover”.  Painted by Van Vliet’s cousin, Victor Hayden, the cover is quite delightful and seemingly features what could be a deer jumping or gliding over a fence.  Yet again, another plus over Unconditionally Guaranteed, whose cover was messy, poorly executed and with borderline unreadable text plastered on the bottom.  The Bluejeans cover, like ‘Observatory Crest’ is uncluttered, full of space and pleasing.

Over the past decades, a few affectionate nods towards Bluejeans and Moonbeams have appeared.  In an interview with Smash Hits Magazine in December 1980, Kate Bush nominated the album as part of her top ten favourite albums, claiming “…this is the Beefheart album where he writes love songs like nobody else.”  As well as Mercury Rev’s aforementioned cover listed above, The White Stripes covered ‘The Party Of Special Things To Do’ for a 2000 Beefheart tribute EP bearing the same title. 

While Bluejeans and Moonbeams certainly does not represent Captain Beefheart’s oeuvre as a whole, and I am certainly not trying to claim that it is, it is certainly worth reinvestigating and it has been a fun experience examining it and noting that it does have some redeeming features.  In fact, if you squint a bit, it can comfortably sit beside 1978’s First Taste by Juicy Groove, another gang of misfits including Mars Bonfire of Steppenwolf as well Beefheart alumni Gary Marker and Elliot Ingber.

What A Bastard The World Is: In Praise Of Yoko Ono

For more than 50 years, Yoko Ono has been the acceptable figure of hate for all. Subject of sneering, ridicule, hatred and outright racist vitriol for the flimsiest reasons.  The acceptable hate figure for office bores to lazy to look beyond received opinion and locked-in thought patterns and discredited gossip mongering.  She’s talentless, she’s a homewrecker, she hooked John on drugs to control him and make his work sound like shit.  Have you heard her music? Call that 'music'?  From puff pieces in the press to the lowest form of communication that is the comments section on YouTube, it’s the easiest and most culturally acceptable opinion that is safe to opine freely.

Even now, you have to really stand your ground when defending her.  To actively defend Yoko’s work seems akin to threatening another person’s life.  I happen to think that she is a genuinely original artist.  Her work has value and she has been unfairly vilified.  Even at home, the wife winces when her name is uttered.  However, over the last few years, possibly even as far back as 1992 when Rykodisc launched a reissue campaign in the form of the 6CD Onobox, the voices of support are steadily growing.

It would require a greater mind to cover her career in depth, and we’re still waiting for a thorough biography, so I strictly want to cover her musical career.  However, it’s worth highlighting her ground-breaking work in the world of conceptual art – the book Grapefruit (1964) and the performance art of Cut Piece (1965) – because her foray into the world of music would be rendered all the more striking considering her background of confrontational and unconventional art.  From there, the world of experimental films beckoned and the burgeoning romance with a Beatle would have a monumental impact that is still being felt ever since.

Between 1968-1969, three full-length avant-garde LPs were created by John & Yoko.  Musically, I don’t like them: they are more valuable as documents of their personal lives, from burgeoning romance (Two Virgins), the pain of miscarriage (Life With The Lions) to their burgeoning political outlook (The Wedding Album).  As listening experiences, they are not recommended, being formless and acting more as self-consciously muddled and confused efforts by Beatle John to appear radical.  It may appear that he was intimidated by Yoko’s artistic prowess but compared to the more radical and pioneering free-form efforts by Ornette Coleman and Peter Brötzmann, they are quite immature in contrast.

Live Peace In Toronto was the first glimpse of Yoko’s vocal gymnastics that a majority of the world encountered.  Whereas Side 1 consisted of hurried workouts featuring Generic Clapton and Alan “Beige” White amongst the backing band, Side 2 is Yoko’s domain, wailing through a maze of guitar feedback and relentless rock backing that put everyone in their place.  No Eric, you can’t take centre stage with your rudimentary racist fretwork, it’s Mrs Lennon calling the shots now.

Cue the so-called 'hip' underground press forming a united front of negativity, with only the odd journo daring to toe the line and let a positive comment creep out here and there.

By late 1969, it was time for John and Yoko to put together individual albums under the Plastic Ono Band moniker.  Both Plastic Ono Band albums came as a direct response to Beatle John’s Janov sojourn, but Yoko’s album is a true work of art.  It is the work of someone going through indescribable pain: you’ve had to suffer through some of the venomous attacks from critics, reporters and your husband’s fans, suffered through miscarriage and your first husband vanishing into thin air with your child.  Nobody’s offering any respite.  Everyone and their dog are on a colonial and thoroughly bigoted and misogynst trip, pointing the finger at you for destroying ARE BRAVE BOYS!  No matter what you say or try to prove, those pale, bacon-sandwich eating, ruddy-faced fucks are choosing not to listen.  They have an agenda.  The studio sessions you’ve booked are scuppered because the engineers are turning off the tape decks when you start singing.  What are the results? No compromise.  A full-on sonic assault.  Rage.  Anger.  Grief.  If you don’t like this, well tough shit.  Stick to George whining about having to pay his taxes while you smugly mutter “Good job sticking to the man!”

Yoko could’ve started off with something relatively accessible and commercial along the lines of Approximately Infinite Universe, but the press would have been out for blood regardless, maybe with even more venom and spite, along the lines of “HA! HA! CALL THAT SINGING?!”, so more power to her for what she unleashed, and more respect to her and John for having the guts to ignore the cloth eared cats at Apple Corps who just couldn’t comprehend what was coming out of the speakers.  Yoko simply dug her heels in, throwing fingers and shouting “FUCK YOU!!!”

'Why' immediately starts rolling down the hill as the play button is pressed.  John’s frenetic slide work melts into the red as Klaus Voorman and Peace 'n' Loov Ringo bash out a solid proto-Krautrock rhythm.  After the introduction, an abrupt edit takes us straight into the maelstrom, with Yoko pouring out tons of genuine anger and frustration like a beacon of truth.  A lesser musician would dribble out incomprehensible diatribes aimed at particular people, real or imaginary.  “WHY?” sums up far more than a standard laundry list of complaints.  It has more of a direct impact than “I don’t believe in Beatles”.  Yoko is pouring her fucking heart out at an unjust world, a world of isolation, and never lets up.  The red mist that overcomes us all when prodded and poked like a cornered animal has never before sounded so direct.  All throughout, the oh-so-familiar echo slap back utilised on many a Mopfabs recording from the era has never sounded so effective, full of the eerie quality that pervaded Ozzy’s vocals on 'Behind The Wall Of Sleep'.

 

Elsewhere, one listen to 'Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City' and you can hear where Bardo Pond’s whole sound comes from.  Wordless moans whirr their way through a reverb-heavy, downtuned outpouring of grief.  Yet again, Yoko proves that sometimes words just cannot do justice to a broken heart.  Ornette and co. accompany on her on 'AOS' a 1968 recording before the John/Klaus/Ringo trio reconvene for another spiky punk stab with 'Touch Me' and an exercise in unsettling ambience with 'Paper Shoes'.

I’m not the biggest John fan, and a lot of his work comes from feeling self-conscious and feeling like he has something to prove, combined with an unearned arrogance despite the fact that nobody would ever say it to his face unless they didn’t mind a few teeth being kicked out of their face.  Regardless, the man fully supported Yoko throughout, or at least until he decided to knock back Brandy Alexanders with Harry Nilsson.  A glance at the Apple discography goes to prove this.  While the likes of Mary Hopkin and Radha Krsna Temple released inoffensive platters, and Badfinger and Billy Preston released records sandblasted into inoffensive mediocrity, John signed Yoko and David Peel (Peel’s sole effort for Apple, The Pope Smokes Dope, is highly enjoyable and well worth checking out for his singalong tributes to marijuana and the varied and wonderful powers of the word 'fuck').  An absolute world apart and the nearest Apple got to their slice of the ESP-Disk cake.

A year later, Fly was unleashed.  A larger and far more intimidating canvas, it is also more of a surprisingly diverse ball of confrontational energy, with the first half of the set lulling you into a false sense of security.  'Midsummer New York' and 'Mind Train' are surprisingly playful and upbeat, with Yoko no longer greeting you with a few snooker balls wrapped in a sock.  As we go on, highlights include the proto-punk hysterical majesty of 'Don’t Worry Kyoko' – grabbing you the collar of your shirt for another harrowing ride through Yoko’s personal anguish – and the acoustic wistfulness of 'Mrs Lennon', even beating Miles Davis to the punch with 'Hirake' - a proto-On The Corner jam incorporating heavy funk and world music percussives.

The second half of this collection is admittedly quite an endurance test, one that can be still be quite difficult to sit through, but who said that art had to be tasteful?  Not all music works as background jams, and it certainly doesn’t have to be pleasurable.  You have the admire the courage of the artist to get it out there.  Fly is in the same company as Topography Of The Lungs (Evan Parker/Derek Bailey/Han Bennink), Odyshape (The Raincoats), Thank Your Lucky Stars (Whitehouse), The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks (A Flux Of Pink Indians) and The Olatunji Concert (John Coltrane). No compromise.  No prisoners.  Scorched Earth.

 

Yoko presumably felt like the only woman out there standing her ground in the face of an openly hostile man-heavy music industry.  Only contemporary female artists such as Nico (in particular, the timeless beauty of The Marble Index), the free jazz purity of Patty Waters, the Brechtian polemics of Dagmar Krause and the pure sexual aggression of Betty Davis were the only ones on a similarly unique and confident wavelength.  These singers proved you didn’t have wail the blues like Carol Grimes or Inga Rumpf, or be pretty and witchy like Sonja Kristina or Stevie Nicks.

Predating the likes of Lydia Lunch, Ari Up, Poly Styrene, The Raincoats, The Au Pairs, Delta 5 and Essential Logic, they proved that women didn’t have to be confined to any type of lyric or musical direction.  Be as direct or as abstract as you want.  The strummers high atop Laurel Canyon may have more of a profile and more power, but don’t back down.  You don’t have to resort to copying men to get your message across.  Be defiant, be yourself and your work will still hold up. 

The only act from the same time to attempt anything this radical in the rock world were The Stooges.  Listen to 'LA Blues' and you get the idea.  Radical disintegration and pure howling vitriol grabbing the listener by its neck and making sure the bruises show.  The originally unreleased majesty of Yoko's 'Open Your Box' is practically the mirror image of Fun House, Side 2.  Steve Mackay’s wonderfully taut sax playing and even the Asheton brothers' signature caveman stomp wouldn’t have been out of place on Plastic Ono Band or Fly.  Going back to ESP-Disk, I guess you could highlight the works of The Godz and The Fugs, but these acts had either ceased to exist or their earlier primitive no-shits-given majesty was way behind them once Yoko made her way onto vinyl.

By 1972, the Lennons were settling into their New York City digs and finding more sympathetic ears, ready to hip them to the more radical voices within the counterculture, ones that had lost hope in the carefree pacifist ideology of the 60s.  In the wake of government suppression and the wholesale watering down and destruction of hippy ideals, a more confrontational approach had surfaced, louder than ever.  Whilst John lapped it all up and released Sometime In New York City, a typically self-conscious and naïve effort to stay credible, Yoko took far more of a radical path: stripping back the harsh atonality and audience baiting of yesteryear, she recorded Approximately Infinite Universe, a surprisingly accessible and conventional double album.

Even Yoko herself knew that her voice was not capable of multiple octaves and operatic dives, but she knew what worked and has a really pleasing and effective singing voice.  Not only that, the radical feminist statemens of 'Yang Yang', the satirical boogie of 'I Felt Like Smashing My Face In A Clear Glass Window' and the brutal honesty of 'What A Bastard The World Is' settled quite nicely amongst each other.  It’s far more consistent than other double albums of the period.  Also, with John gradually receding into the background, Yoko takes centre stage and proves that she could deliver a diverse yet pleasurable listening experience, one that is deeply conversational and honest yet never feels forced or exaggerated.  The never-ending attacks in the press have made her stronger and Approximately Infinite Universe is the result of her ever-increasing confidence.

Whilst her follow-ups Feeling The Space (1973) and A Story (recorded 1974, released 1992) can be considered lesser works by many, they still have their moments.  She is finding her own voice, and although Elephant’s Memory weren’t anything like the likes of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, they made a credible and unique backing band for Yoko’s albums around this time.  If the quality starts to dip, then so what?  Most singers or bands have found it impossible to scale the heights of their first albums, maybe some failed to recapture the glory of their first single or their first John Peel session.

No matter the slightly more elevated reception she was given in the wake of Season Of Glass (1981) and her new found lease of life with recent works such as Blueprint For A Sunrise (2001) and Between My Head And The Sky (2009), as well as finally being recognised as one of the leading lights within the worlds of feminism and music, she still has detractors eager to spout the same old ill-informed shit.

Chief among their arguments is that she caused The Beatles to break up, but that is obviously a load of old toot.  Those Mopfabs did a good job of that by themselves, be it through egos unable to be contained within Abbey Road, the death of Brian Epstein or the coffer-draining arrivals of Allen Klein and Magic Alex.  From the shed where they have carefully nurtured their mansplaining chops, they only see women as being unable to create singular works of wonder (ie. “The Slits didn’t actually perform on Cut.  That was all Dennis Bovell’s work, obviously.”) or destructive forces (Yoko).

Another tedious argument is that she has no talent.  This is the woman who was already making waves within the art community while The Beatles had only just stopped tugging each other off in their mam’s house.  All the while, people quick to dismiss her have heaped praise on the likes of Ian Brown, for Christ’s sake.  She wasn’t at the mercy of songwriters, she knew what she was doing and she knew what to write.  Her husband may have put some pressure on the record label to put the records out, but artistically, she called the shots.

 

Fuck the xenophobic critics who couldn’t understand that their virginal British songsmiths were tearing themselves apart, and that a foreigner happened to be in the vicinity of the ensuing drama.  Fuck all those emotionally stunted rage-filled boomers over at the Steve Hoffman forum clutching their Beatles lunchboxes.  Fuck unfunny blowhard Bill Burr constantly calling her a cunt while ranting about her TV appearance alongside Chuck Berry and her hubby.  Fuck Frank Zappa and the legion of intellectual midgets that were his fans, bellowing for her to “shut up and sit down” because her hollering put an end to Frank & Flo & Eddie’s tedious sexist drivel about groupies and training bras.

Lesser beings would have been utterly destroyed from the outset and quietly walked away, but Yoko’s made of stronger stuff and has been through more than any human deserves.  She watched her husband get shot in front of her, all the while receiving very little sympathy in the aftermath.  This example as well as others outlined previously show how disgusting the pack mentality can be.

Yoko’s a fighter and she’s still here, creating in her own way and on her own terms.  As far as poetic justice, she has managed to outlive some of the loudest naysayers and doesn’t give the slightest toss about criticisms.  She should be an example for all to follow.  Her persistence and never ending levels of energy still shine through, but the main difference between now and then is that what often felt like the loneliest voice out there now has a few kindred spirits and like-minded souls out there to fight the good fight.

 

When punk rock and its post-1978 diverse roots and branches took shape, Yoko’s music suddenly had a lot of kindred spirits.  'Frankie Teardrop' by Suicide and 'Horizontal Hold' by This Heat all have elements seemingly influenced from Plastic Ono Band and Fly.  The directness, intensity and challenging nature of the material is plain for all to hear.

As challenging as it is, I think her work is unique, straight from the heart and has a lot to offer if you’re willing to go further.  Not all music is meant to be a comfortable experience.  Look at other vocalists such as Peter Hammill, Kat Bjelland, William Bennett, Linda Sharrock and Mark E Smith.  Look at the work of Scott Walker from Nite Flights onwards.  Look at An Electric Storm by White Noise: an awe-inspiring masterpiece co-written and performed by Delia Derbyshire, another woman whose work was neglected and brushed aside in her lifetime.

Personally, the worst crime in any medium is to be mediocre: whether your work is universally loved or loathed, it remains a talking point to be debated, examining the pros and cons and your reasoning behind your opinions.  Regardless of which side they sit in, the mind behind the work has done their job.  Take a side, listen to other’s contrary opinions and examine why you and they think and feel this way.  Yoko Ono’s work still has such a divisive impact that it will never go away.  Those who rant at great length against her music continue to make her work a talking point.  Works of mediocrity will quickly be forgotten and ultimately serve no purpose.

Open your mind (or open your box if you prefer), stand your ground and get stuck in. You may not find yourself changing your opinion, but hopefully you’ll respect what Yoko is trying to do. 

Yoko rules!