John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with Elephant’s Memory
Power to the People: The Ultimate Collection
UNIVERSAL/MERCURY
Imagine a John Lennon and Yoko Ono collection that encapsulates much of the marrieds’ transition into New York City’s divisive socio-political counterculture of 1971 and 1972 and subsequent period of crafting music steered toward peace and love. It’s easy, mostly because this new nine-CD, three-Blu-ray set produced by Sean Ono Lennon ties together his parents’ raw, grimy Some Time in New York City album with a pair of shows at Madison Square Garden designed as the ex-Beatle’s first full concerts after leaving the Fab Four. Power to the People does the work for you by cramming all of Lennon/Ono’s activist rhetoric, down-with-the-man pre-jam-band noodling, and love of early rock and roll balanced against the test-pattern tones of the avant-garde into one slick collection. And the world can live as one.
For the uninitiated—and for those used to hearing Lennon’s simple chord changes pasted against Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—the box’s use of Some Time’s happily sloppy music doesn’t attempt to over-mix its original sound. Purposely pulling himself and his missus from the ornate opulence of George Martin and The Beatles, the pair’s 1972 album is primally under-produced and as rare as a bloody steak in its screamo lyricizing on topics such as fellow travelers in the protest movement (“John Sinclair,” “Angela”), prison systems (both literal and figurative: “Attica State,” “Born in a Prison”), the violence existing between Ireland and Great Britain (“Sunday Bloody Sunday”), and the need for Feminist empowerment (“Sisters, O Sisters”).
By no means is Some Time a perfect album—manic imperfection being its point when it was initially released. Yet in its liberationist pre-punk brutality and its bluntness of sound and vision, the album is like a tight-fisted punch with a set of keys between each knuckle. Suddenly, hearing Lennon clinging to his love of rock ’n’ roll with destructed twitchiness on “New York City” is roughly refreshing as it re-bottles old wine into a new, bittersweet vintage. That Power to the People also includes way too many pseudo-traditional renditions of The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly tracks—live studio outtakes—and not Yoko’s classic (albeit controversial) horror-hollered Some Time opener is disappointing. Yet her atonal “Don’t Worry Kyoko” is here in all of its brain-rattling glory, as is the pair’s dreamy/dirgey noise freakouts with Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention and their slop jams with Elephant’s Memory.
From there, it’s a wealth of rarities—including the live ragga-rocking “Give Peace a Chance” on Jerry Lewis’ 1972 Muscular Dystrophy telethon with Lady Lewis in on its chorus—that carries the rest of Ono Lennon’s box set tribute to that time in history when his parents were the coolest hippie activists on the planet, intentionally pulling themselves away from the towering totemic glory of Beatlemania.
