Yoko Ono does not get a fair shot. She is one of the most famous people alive and one whose name-ID-to-listener ratio is possibly the worst of any massive celebrity and most of what is believed about her is either wrong or beside the point.
Host Nate Wilcox welcomes Madeline Bocaro author of “In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono.” The book is not a straight biography. It runs 558 pages of individual stories about the work - the artworks, the songs, the albums, one at a time - written over years for other fans and friends.
It is an appreciation by someone who has actually done the listening. Nate and Bocaro start where the story actually starts, which is not 1966 and not the Beatles.
Yoko was born to wealth and privilege in Tokyo, Japan. She received extensive musical training in both Western classical and Japanese traditions. Her first husband was Japan’s leading avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.
She first emerged in her own right after moving to New York where she dived into the avant-garde scene as a conceptual artist and musician: her loft at 112 Chambers Street hosted the concert series that helped establish La Monte Young, and she was working in the circle around John Cage and Fluxus while the Beatles were still in Hamburg.
Her sense that a work is not finished until someone else completes it - that the audience is the other half - is the premise under all of it.
Nate and Madeline get to the singing, which is the thing people think they are objecting to and mostly have not heard in context: the Japanese folk forms behind it, the enka tradition, a voice used as an instrument rather than a delivery system for words.
They get to Ornette Coleman. They get to the marriage, the myth-making, the Peter Brown book, and what the record actually shows about whether she broke up the Beatles - including Bocaro’s account of Paul McCartney, in her telling, being “really nice” about it and effectively saying: go be with her.
And they get to “Walking on Thin Ice,” which John Lennon was carrying home from the studio the night he was killed, and which is one of the best records either of them ever made.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE “
Sakura” - a traditional Japanese folk song, sung by Yoko on The Mike Douglas Show
“Don’t Worry Kyoko” - Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Band, featuring Eric Clapton
“Mrs. Lennon” - from the “Fly” album, 1971 whose melody might be familiar to Big Star fans from “Holocaust”, but Yoko wrote it and got songwriter’s credit for the Big Star song.
“Walking on Thin Ice” - 1981
The free cut runs 42:07 and stops just before Bocaro answers the question everyone asks - whether Yoko broke up the Beatles. That answer, “Walking on Thin Ice,” and the last quarter of the conversation are behind the paywall.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
