Yoko Ono was one of the 20th Century’s most polarizing figures— an edge-cutting conceptual artist maligned for capturing the heart of the Beatles’ John Lennon and daring to establish a musical union with him.With the publication of veteran author David Sheff’s new biography, Yoko, we are fully enlightened about her extraordinary life journey, all 92 years and counting. Sheff’s book goes a long way towards shattering the long-held caricatures and prejudices about this distinctive artist, peace activist, and feminist – someone who is far more intriguing for the time she spent outside the shadow of Beatledom than for her time within.
As mentioned on the book’s dust jacket, Yoko Ono has often been portrayed as “a villain – an inscrutable seductress, manipulating con artist, and caterwauling fraud”, perhaps best known, unjustly, as the “woman who broke up the Beatles”. Sheff’s book examines the full breadth of Yoko’s life – from her birth to wealthy parents in pre-WW II Tokyo, her harrowing experience as a child during the war, her pre-John notoriety in the avant-garde art scenes in London and New York to her joyous and turbulent years with Lennon, and the many productive ones that followed his death – both in preserving his legacy and carving out one of her own.
David Sheff is an interesting man to take on this assignment. He was long an intimate within Yoko Ono’s circle, a writer who met the couple when he spent three weeks with them to pen a feature for Playboy Magazine about their Double Fantasy album from 1980. He continued to socialize with and advise Yoko for years after John’s death… until they had a falling out. However, unlike other cast-offs from “Planet Yoko”, the dissolution of their friendship did not poison this writer’s pen. Indeed, the most eye-opening part of Sheff’s book is Yoko Ono’s pre-John Lennon years—her childhood and her long journey to becoming an artist.
Yoko Ono does come from wealth, at least for a time. She was the progeny of a distant mother whose banker grandfather was the wealthiest man in Japan, and a pianist dad who gave up music to join the family banking business. The arrival of World War II would shatter their luxurious existence. Yoko and her mother would flee their beautiful home to seek safety in the countryside, where they bartered family heirlooms for food. She would unknowingly stumble upon what would become her defining genre of art when she created “imaginary meal games” to stave off hunger for her and her siblings.
After the war, she studied piano, hoping to become a composer in the 12-tone mode, along with poetry, philosophy, and voice. By 1952, she went to Sarah Lawrence College in America, had a brief affair with Mel Woody, the lover whom Sylvia Plath wrote about in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar, then dropped out of college, married another music student, and moved on to a loft at 112 Chambers Street. Yoko Ono and her first husband, Toshi’s, loft would become a centerpiece of the developingFluxus Art and Minimalistmusic scenes frequented by composer and performance artist La Monte Young and art collector and socialite Peggy Guggenheim. Here, she would create “poetic instructional pieces” and “action events”; works that would help define the performance art genre, like her A Box of Smile (1984) and Painting to be Stepped On (1960/’61).
In November 1961, Yoko Ono debuted her theatrical and musical pieces in Carnegie Hall, eliciting some not-so-kind reviews. More shows would follow in Tokyo, where she received even more savage criticism, which drove her to a suicide attempt and a stay in a mental hospital. In 1964, her second husband, Tony Cox, pushed her to publish Grapefruit, a book of “event scores” that would become a classic of conceptual art, something you can buy today in the gift shop of every good museum on the planet. That year, she would debut another astounding work, Cut Piece. In this, Yoko sat silently on the stage as audience members were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing.It has been called “one of the 25 most influential pieces of protest art since WWII”.
Naturally, Sheff’s book covers the well-trod essentials of Yoko Ono’s time with John Lennon during and after the Beatles. It’s all here, in detail: from their first meeting at her show at London’s Indica Gallery, their love affair, and many artistic collaborations beginning with their controversial debut album, 1968’s Two Virgins. Yoko contains everything that any music-loving Baby Boomer has already burned into their frontal lobes. Sheff couldn’t tell the whole story of Yoko without going over this familiar territory. However, what he chisels into stone and makes abundantly clear is the quiet impact Yoko had on so much of John’s solo and their collective works.
The famous Bed-In for Peace performance piece in 1969 – that is pure Yoko Ono, as are the poetically simple lyrics and naïvely hopeful positivity of John Lennon’s famous song, “Imagine” (1971).The song, “Give Peace a Chance”was a line Lennon uttered in an interview that Yoko insisted be turned into a song. Their memorable week thrusting counter-cultural ideas into Middle American living rooms on The Mike Douglas Show” in 1972 –an event with many guest artists featured over the five-day telecast – was there primarily at Yoko’s insistence.
David Sheff on Yoko Ono’s Music
David Sheff devotes a lot of his book to Yoko Ono’s music.Her music is a side of the artist that, I have to admit, seriously diminishes all that she has accomplished as a conceptual art pioneer.While I can periodically take a wild ride on the 17-minute scream boogie helter-skelter that is “Mindtrain” from her 1971 album Fly, Yoko, the musician, is someone I have still not acquired a taste for. Neither did critics for a long, long time.
The New York Times and other media often savaged her string of albums and live performances, like her 12-show stint at New York’s Kenny Castaways in 1974. Sheff, however, dutifully notes the new generation of musicians who namecheck Yoko Ono and her distinct vocals as an influence, everyone from Lady Gaga and Diamanda Galas to the B-52’s, Yo Lo Tengo, and Sonic Youth.Yet, her music brings to mind great actors who think their creativity can translate into making great music or paintings. Sometimes, it’s best to stay in your lane…
The period after John Lennon’s death was fraught for a time: with thefts, betrayals, and attempted extortion by former assistants, a reliance on a series of duplicitous psychics, multiple death threats, and fallouts with lovers like Sam Havadtoy and friends like Sheff himself.Yoko Ono, the much-maligned musician, will find belated success on the dance charts in the 2000s, with remixes of her classics by artists like Danny Tenaglia (“Walking on Thin Ice”) and Super Chumbo (“Kiss Kiss Kiss”) and in collaborations with her very talented son, Sean.
Yoko Ono, the fine artist, would also re-emerge in a big way in the 2000s. The Japan Society’s YES Yoko Ono was the first career-spanning retrospective of her work, an astounding exhibit that would travel to 12 other major museums globally.I saw it at SFMoMA in 2002, an event that made me revisit all Yoko Ono had created with fresh eyes.
As the internet and social media emerged, she was also there. She joined Twitter in 2008 and became involved in many web art projects.She would keep John Lennon’s legacy alive with projects like the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland. In 2017, she would finally be recognized as a co-writer of Lennon’s most enduring solo work, “Imagine”. With the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, Yoko would leave her longtime New York City home, the Dakota, for a 600-acre farm in Upstate New York
In a way, I find it odd that Sheff didn’t weigh in on two of the most viral pieces of internet “memedom” starring Yoko Ono. The first is her screamy performance as John Lennon and a seriously bemused Chuck Berry play “Memphis Tennessee” on The Mike Douglas Show.
The second is Ono doing a surprise solo vocal extravaganza before a puzzled audience at a 2015 retrospective at MoMA in New York City. Both have been watched countless times on YouTube and social media. A Los Angeles musician, Andy Rehfeldt, created a cottage industry by producing dozens of videos where he mashes up Yoko’s MoMA scream with popular songs like Phil Collins’ “One More Night” and Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl”. It is ironic, sad, and amusing that these are among the top content fed by the unholy algorithm when you search Ono on YouTube.
However, as an artist, Yoko Ono has always lived by the adage that a response, any response, positive or negative, is what you should be after. She possesses a wonderful duality that I admire: an unrelenting positivity in her art and a very thick skin to criticism.
David Sheff relates another time when Yoko Ono’s powerful voice went viral. This was when she posted a 19-second video of her screaming at the top of her lungs to mark the 2016 election of another famous but not so beloved New Yorker, Donald Trump.
<!–
–>