‘Imagine’ with Yoko Ono
Iconic artist takes a long, loving look back.
The archival photos are jolting – and heart-rending – because you know where John and Yoko’s life story eventually takes them. Dressed in olive drab and gazing intently into each other’s eyes, the two don’t look like political rebels or rock icons. They just look like a young couple in love.
“There was a lot of warmth around us, and we loved it,” Yoko Ono says by email, answering questions about her new book, “Imagine John Yoko” (Grand Central), a scrapbook-like, slightly romanticized remembrance of recording John Lennon’s defining album “Imagine” in
1971. “John and I are eternal lovers.” At 85, the artist and musician is busily organizing a crush of new projects around what would have been Lennon’s
78th birthday Oct. 9, including a six-disc box set of the remastered album, the rerelease of their films “Imagine” and “Gimme Some Truth” (the former in select theaters and both on DVD/Blu-ray/ digital platforms), and the just-issued John Lennon U.S. postage stamp. It’s a lot for an anniversary year that doesn’t end in an “0” or a “5,” but “it’s just the way things worked out,” she says.
Fans will be particularly enchanted with Ono’s oversized coffee-table book (out Tuesday), a comprehensive account of the album’s making at Tittenhurst Park, the couple’s Georgian country home in Berkshire, England. The book includes photos (80 percent of which have never seen before), Lennon’s handwritten lyrics, floor plans for the house, and insights from the musicians, celebrities, photographers and staffers who came in and out of the sessions.
Ono plays peacemaker as the book’s curator. Julian Lennon, John’s eldest son (with first wife Cynthia), contributes a warm essay remembering Titten- hurst as “a house of fun,” accompanied by shots of him riding his bike around the sprawling grounds. Ono calls the late George Harrison, who played electric guitar and dobro on the album, “the most handsome guy” of The Beatles and writes glowingly about his “incredible talent.”
It’s a role she fills more comfortably as past tensions fade into Beatles history. She’s met with roars of approval when she steps out on red carpets on John’s behalf, flashing peace signs for the cameras and outfitted in her signature black-and-white pantsuits, her hair cut sensibly short and tucked under a hat, dark sunglasses perched protectively on her nose.
Does it surprise her that fans, many of whom blamed her for the band’s breakup in 1970, embrace her now? “Some of them do, I’m sure, and I’m very grateful,” she says.
For young women – those born after Lennon, 40, was fatally shot in 1980 by Mark David Chapman outside the couple’s apartment in New York – she’s a revered feminist figure, one still capable of stirring controversy. Last week, Ono found herself at the center of uproar when Bette Midler paraphrased a Lennon-Ono song, tweeting “Women, are the n-word of the world” – words as fraught in 2018 as they were in 1972.
But Ono is pleased to promote activism, most recently with a “bed-in” she staged on the steps of New York City Hall with Ringo Starr and Jeff Bridges to inspire student activism.
“When John and I would watch TV, there would be a woman talking, and he would say: ‘ Look at her eyes! All of the women are getting very strong,’ ” Ono says. “That next generation is already happening in their eyes.”
She supports the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements because “it’s good that people are coming out saying what happened to them,” she says. “But we have to do more than that; we have change the world together, men and women.”
Even Lennon, for all his enlightenment, could be “a bit of a chauvinist,” she writes in the book. In a BBC interview shortly before his death, Lennon pointed out that Ono should be credited as a co-writer on “Imagine” because the lyric and concept were hers, blaming himself for glossing over her contribution because he was “selfish” and “more macho” in those days. Last year, the National Music Publishers Association corrected the record, adding Ono’s name.
“I had a reason to keep it as a Lennon song,” she says without elaboration. “So I hope now people who know that I was involved would not change their feelings about the song.”
“Imagine,” a staple of Ono’s live show, is included in her new album, “Warzone” (out Oct. 19), which revisits 13 of her songs (1970 to 2009) and reimagines them with minimalist arrangements.
Does she wonder how critics will regard her music when she’s gone? Probably not: “Well, I hope I will live longer than the nasty critics!”
She has little doubt about how John will be remembered. Sifting through his recordings, preparing for the “Imagine” remastering, “it’s very comforting to hear his voice,” Ono says. She gently deflects questions about what sort of music he would be making now or who his collaborators would be. “He would still be John Lennon,” she says.
And in a future when their son, Sean (who turns 43 on John’s birthday), is presumably left as the keeper of Lennon’s legacy, John’s hope that “the world will live as one” won’t change.
“Lennon songs are already songs of the world,” she says.