Released December 11, 1970
By Madeline Bocaro 
© Madeline Bocaro, 2018. No part of this site may be reproduced or re-blogged in whole or in part in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner.
This is an excerpt from my Yoko Ono biography…
An all-embracing look at Yoko’s life and work in stunning detail.
Read all about it, see the reviews and
Order here:
Yoko’s first solo album (a companion to John’s post-Beatles debut) was recorded shortly after their recording of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. John’s original idea was to title his album Primal, and Yoko’s album Scream (they had attended Arthur Janov’s Primal Scream therapy sessions six months prior). They ultimately decided to self- title the albums, with each of their names followed by ‘Plastic Ono Band’. Both albums were released on the same day, December 11, 1970.
In Japan, John’s album was titled ジョンの魂 (John no Tamashii), John’s Soul and Yoko’s was called Yoko’s Heart. Album credits on John’s record include Wind: Yoko Ono.
The cover photo, taken by their assistant and friend Dan Richter with an Instamatic camera features Yoko leaning on John’s lap as he rests on the ground with his back against a huge oak tree at their home, Tittenhurst Park in Ascot. John’s POB album has an almost identical photo, with him leaning on Yoko. John did this purposely, first to illustrate that Yoko’s music was equally as important as his own, and also hoping that people would buy Yoko’s album, thinking it was his. The back covers feature a childhood photo of John (on his) and a photo of Yoko on hers.
The Apple Records label on both albums bear a white apple rather than the usual green. The instruction on Yoko’s reads, ‘PLAY IN THE DARK’.
John introduced a beat to Yoko’s music.
The vocals were especially raw, as the Lennons had just undergone Primal Scream therapy. The album was recorded in one day on October 10, 1970 (except for two tracks) and titled Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. It was produced by John and Yoko and Phil Spector.
Yoko’s album had not been planned. It was conceived out of a jam on October 10th which the musicians were having during the recording of John’s album. Yoko began vocalizing, John and the others were blown away. Luckily, it was all recorded.
The Plastic Ono Band was Yoko’s idea.
“I explained to John my idea of a show I wanted to do in Berlin – I had to give up because we got together. John liked the idea and said, “Like this?” and created a plastic band on the empty tape case, and told me that we will call the band ‘Plastic Ono Band’. What John built with all sorts of plastic things that were laying around disappeared a long time ago”
– Yoko
A Plastic Ono Band model was first created by Yoko and represented by small plastic objects. Her idea for the musical group is that “The message is the music and the communication of it is the performance” as stated in her POB manifesto. The POB “includes all minds of the world” and that it is the “most imaginative, and the most musical group in the world.”
John later made a sculpture in 1968. There are four objects including a microphone and a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a television set wrapped in transparent Perspex. These objects could refer to the Fab Four, or to any four band members. The television set was an homage to Yoko’s colleague, avant-garde sculptor Nam June Paik who was famous for his numerous TV sculptures.
It was a simple 3-man lineup; John on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr, who did some of his most inventive drumming on this album and considers it to be one of his favorites.
There is also a live recording, ‘AOS’. This was made at a rehearsal for a live performance in which Yoko participated at the Royal Albert Hall (February 29,1968) with jazz legend Ornette Coleman on trumpet and his band.
Yoko’s raw, desperate primal avant-garde vocals are derivative of hetai, a highly expressive Japanese vocal technique in Kabuki theatre. Here is a grown woman desperately screaming in pain. We can hear her crying inside. Although Yoko speaks two languages fluently, why does she choose not to use words?
BECAUSE THERE ARE NO WORDS!
The first track on Side One, ‘Why’ (originally called ‘Fast Rocker’) is one of my favorite songs of all time. My first hearing of Yoko’s incredible song was on a jukebox in 1970. John’s single ‘Mother’ was there, but I chose to play the B-side. The jukebox shook, rumbled and came alive (as did my whole body) due to Ringo’s incredible drumming.
On the Secretly Canadian/Chimera reissue (November 2016) we get the nearly 9-minutes extended take of this precious gem that almost was not recorded. After a false start with ‘no power’ John had told the engineer to stop recording. Thankfully, the tape began rolling again and captured this for eternity.
Yoko always tells the story of how the recording engineers would stop recording when she started to sing. This is apparent at the end of ‘Why’ when you can hear John say, “Were you gettin’ that?”
‘I thought my music was beautiful all along…When I say beautiful … well, the maximum beauty can be ugly to some people.”
– Yoko, The Guardian– Feb. 22, 2016
‘Why’ was John’s favorite piece of Yoko’s music. You cannot distinguish his guitar sound from her anguished vocal at the start.
Yoko explained to The Guardian in February 2016:
“…My mother said: ‘Don’t you ever go to the servants’ rooms, it’s very bad, because they’re talking about things you don’t want to know.’ And sure enough, I just sneaked up and listened to it. And these two teenage girls, they were combing their hair and talking. ‘My aunt had a baby yesterday.’ ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Yes, and she was making noises. And I just thought: ‘Oh my god, a woman does that when she has a baby?’ There was a totally sanitised image about a woman, you know, they were supposed to be just pretty and make pretty noises. … So I was scared, and I sneaked back to my room, but that really stayed with me. And years later, I started to create all sorts of sounds.”
I love how the lyrics appear on paper!
‘Why’
(John) Hey! Hey!
(Yoko) Why? etc…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IXviZRyz8
…” John is turning on the radio to hear Alex Bennett’s WMCA phone-in program on which tonight he’s playing tracks from Yoko’s album – the first time Yoko’s music has been featured on AM radio.
“There are people who are going to love it and people who are going to hate it,” Bennett says enthusiastically. “I think that in 1980 music will probably sound like this. Here’s a track called “Why,” so phone in and tell us what you think of it.”
“It’s Today’s Tutti Frutti,” John writes on a note pad…”
– Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice – Rolling StoneMarch 18, 1971
By Jonathan Cott
‘Why Not’ has a much slower groove, and a more subdued vocal. It speeds up and takes off in the last minute. There’s some amazing mirroring between Yoko’s vocal and John’s guitar.
‘Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City’
The concept is from a page in Yoko’s book Grapefruit (1964).
City Piece
Walk all over the city with an empty baby carriage
1961 Winter
The piece centers upon a sitar drone loop from one of George Harrison’s tapes which accompanies Yoko’s echoing ghostly vocal. An eerie echo was also added to Ringo Starr’s drums. In essence, there were three Beatles on this track.
“She’s the one who produced it. She put all the delays on Ringo’s drums and when he heard the song ‘Greenfield Morning…’ he said, ‘Who’s playing drums on it?’ She put so much delay on tit that he didn’t recognize his own drums… It was more on the avant- garde side but it connected to punk… It wasn’t like ‘fuck everybody’ it was like ‘let’s heal through expression’.”
– Sean Ono Lennon, Nero magazine 2016.
Yoko’s foreboding lyrics speak of several miscarriages and the kidnapping of her young daughter Kyoko by her ex-husband, both of whom she and John would spend many years trying to locate.
“Well, it is a song where I carefully collaged many live sounds and tapes and made it into a song that sounds like just natural sounds flowing. I could write a book about how I made it. But I was getting bored with just doing one, two, three, four, one two three four – four in the bar, so I went very far.
– Yoko Q&A 2017
‘Greenfield Morning…’ was later referenced on the song ‘Ask the Dragon’ on Yoko’s album Rising (1995). The two-note drone of ‘Are You Looking For Me?’ on Blueprint for a Sunrise (2001) samples the droning sitar loop and also the chirping birds.
“Do I like sampling? Well, you should go back and listen to Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. I sampled, I did a lot of electronic tricks. It was very much like dance music. I called it Unfinished music, which meant that you were supposed to put your own thing on, in the same way that remixers do today. Tracks like ‘Why’ or ‘Paper Shoes’ could be dance tracks. I don’t feel that any of these things are particularly new, because they were always there for me.”
– Yoko, To Martin O’ Gorman, Mojo – In the Beginning, July 2002
There is a really cool mix of ‘Greenfield Morning’ on the 2005 compilation CD, The Enochian Way presented by Super Numeri.
Listen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAAc10BpAqY
SIDE 2
‘AOS’
In 1968, Ornette Coleman invited Yoko to perform at Royal Albert Hall). ‘AOS’ is from a live rehearsal for this show with Coleman (on trumpet) and his band – one drummer and two standup bassists; Charlie Haden and David Izenzon. Ed Blackwell is on drums. Yoko titled her piece ‘AOS’ (from the Japanese word AO meaning blue(s) and OS from the English ‘chaos’). ‘Blue Chaos’ was possibly intended to deviate from Miles Davis’ album title, Kind of Blue (1959).
Yoko’s conditions were that it be her piece – not the musicians’. Foregoing musical notation, she scored her piece with written words to convey what the musicians should play. This was her score:
“…Think of the days when you had to suffer in silence for ten days of eternity before you could give, and yet you were afraid of giving because what you were giving was so true and so total, you knew that you would suffer a death after that…Think of the days when you allowed silences in your life for dreaming…This is no shit. No mood or whatever you call it. It’ s real…Forget about what you’ve learnt or heard in the music academy world.
Yoko vocalizes on the soundtrack to a Yoji Kuri film called AOS made in 1964. See more about this below…
Watch here:
A piece called AOS was also performed as part of A Grapefruit in the World of Park @ Carnegie Hall on November 24, 1961 (Restaged at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, 1962). ‘AOS – To David Tudor’ was performed in the dark, in total silence. The only audible sounds were inadvertent. Yoko wrapped two performers in gauze, back to back, with an assortment of empty bottles and cans dangling from their bodies. The instruction was to walk across the stage without making any noise. Yoko’s aim was to break the audience from habitual patterns of listening and thinking.
‘Touch Me’ was the B-side of ‘Power to the People’ in the USA, which replaced the censored ‘Open Your Box’). The breakdown in the middle of the track is fabulous!
On ‘Paper Shoes’ The opening sound effects of a train, thunder and rain give way to the crunching of paper shoes, which sound like footprints in crisp snow. During World War II, people actually wore shoes made of paper due to a shortage of leather and other materials. Moments of silence are punctuated by ghostly wailing and echoing vocals uttering only the words ‘paper shoes’. Yoko’s voice undulates like a cold wind.
“A stutterer is someone who’s feeling something genuine. So in ‘Paper Shoes’ I say: ‘Pa-pa-pa-a-a-per sh-shooooooes!’”
– Yoko to Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone – December 1970
“…The older you get the more frustrated you feel. And it gets to a point where you don’t have time to utter a lot of intellectual bullshit. If you were drowning you wouldn’t say: ‘I’d like to be helped because I have just a moment to live.’ You’d say, ‘Help!’ but if you were more desperate you’d say, ‘Eiough-hhhhh,’ or something like that. And the desperation of life is really life itself, the core of life, what’s really driving us forth. When you’re really desperate it’s phony to use descriptive and decorative adjectives to express yourself.”
– Yoko to Jonathan Cott, Yoko Ono and Her Sixteen-Track Voice,
Rolling Stone March 18, 1971
“… We knew we’d created something that was neither jazz, nor rock, nor classical, but an incredible new experience. I was proud, excited, overjoyed. It compared with how Marie Curie and her husband must have felt when they discovered radium together… How would a regular journalist know about music! I knew it was a specialized thing.”
– Yoko Ono, Mojo, August 2007
Sean Lennon told Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke (June 11, 1998):
“I don’t know when I realized that Plastic Ono Band was the greatest record ever. I don’t know if it was because it’s my mom or what. But I got it. Why do I like it? I don’t know why people don’t like it.
When I play “Greenfield Morning” or “Why” for anybody that I know my age who’s into rock, they are fucking floored. When that beat kicks in “Greenfield Morning” [does human-beatbox imitation of the drum pattern] – I would play it for my friends who were only into hip-hop. They’d be like, That’s fat. They want to hear Public Enemy rhyming over it.
My dad was saying to the world, “This is it, man. Yoko is it.”His inspiration came directly from her. And people didn’t get it. It’s intense how racist the world is. If she looked like Deborah Harry, I really think the reaction would have been different.”
An additional outtake, ‘Between the Takes’ finally surfaced on the 1998 CD reissue of Fly.
Yoko’s album was reissued on CD by Rykodisc in 1997 with bonus tracks; ‘Open Your Box’, ‘Something More Abstract’ (in which Yoko simply asks the band to play a more abstract accompaniment) and ‘The South Wind’ (a prototype of the soundtrack for her film Fly, 1971) . The album was remastered in 2016 by Secretly Canadian/Chimera Music with the same bonus tracks.
John requested the pressing of a single of ‘Open Your Box’ (OYN-1) / ‘Greenfield Morning’ (GM-1) labelled, ‘MADE SPECIALLY FOR YOKO ONO’. There are between ten and twenty copies known to exist, one of which recently sold on ebay for $1,000.
Another outtake, ‘Omaeno Okkaa Wa’ was subtitled ‘Slow Blues’ to contrast ‘Fast Rocker’ which was later titled ‘Why’. This is the prototype for the rocker ‘Midsummer New York’ which appeared on her next album Fly.
Yoko sings:
Omaeno okkaa wa kanashigatteiruyo
Omaeno okkaa wa kanashigatteiruyo
Omaeno okkaa wa Shinjimattoyo
お前のオッカアは悲しがっているよ
お前のオッカアは悲しがっているよ
お前のオッカアは死んじまったよ
Your mother is sad / Your mother is sad
Your mother is dead / Your mother has died
The track’s first unofficial release was in 1999 on the bootleg album Odds & Ends. The recording is from Abbey Road engineer John Barrett’s direct cassette dubs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCj-iQKRZM0
Other unedited and unreleased pieces recorded on October 10th include lengthy jam sessions including; ‘Life’ and ‘I Lost Myself Somewhere in the Sky’. There is an incredible twelve-minute take of ‘Paper Shoes’. Also, an almost double-length ‘Greenfield Morning…’ in which we can clearly hear Yoko’s echoing instructions at the end, about how the song should sound (“Keep doing it a bit more quiet, and a bit more Indian”) which are buried amongst the birds tweeting on the released track. This is not as eerie sounding as the album take, but more of a jam indicating what these tracks would have sounded like if they had been performed live.
Prior to the sessions Yoko recorded a vocal piece called ‘Poem Game’ introduced by John on the tape; “To Yoko with love from John, Tuesday July 28, 1970.” Without any musical accompaniment, Yoko sings some of her favorite words; Moon, mommy, you, send, cloud, tree, winter, find, forget… star, summer, sky, head, whisper, wish… read Grapefruit (a plug for her book)… imagine, John…
…A deluxe remastered edition of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is scheduled for 2021 with over one hundred demos and outtakes from his albums, including Yoko’s unreleased material from her sessions.
Prior to the POB sessions, Yoko had recorded a vocal piece called ‘Poem Game’ introduced by John on the tape; “To Yoko with love from John, Tuesday July 28, 1970.” Without any musical accompaniment, Yoko sings some of her favorite words; Moon mommy, you, send, cloud, tree, winter, find, forget… star, summer, sky, head, whisper, wish… read Grapefruit (a plug for her book)… imagine, John…
“I think that my mom brought my father to that place of pure, visceral expression. My mom was avant-garde and he was pop. She also gave that connection to a pure expression. Some of the ways my mom sings is almost like a baby crying. My father was very influenced by that and you can hear it in songs like ‘Mother’ on John Lennon Plastic Ono Band. He screams at the end. That was my mother’s influence. That was their new chapter, the new chapter of John and Yoko.”
– Sean Ono Lennon, Nero magazine, 2016
Here is a story about the film AOS by Yoji Kuri’s with Yoko’s soundtrack
https://www.awn.com/animationworld/keep-it-motion-classic-animation-revisited-aos
A piece called AOS was also performed as part of A Grapefruit in the World of Park @ Carnegie Hall on November 24, 1961 (Restaged at Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, 1962). ‘AOS’ was performed in the dark, in total silence. The only audible sounds were inadvertent. Yoko wrapped two performers in gauze, back to back, with an assortment of empty bottles and cans dangling from their bodies. The instruction was to walk across the stage without making any noise. Yoko’s aim was to break the audience from habitual patterns of listening and thinking.
A deluxe edition including both John and Yoko’s Plastic Ono Band solo albums is scheduled for 2021.
YOKO ONO / PLASTIC ONO BAND
Yoko Ono – vocals
John Lennon – guitar
Ringo Starr – drums
Klaus Voormann – bass
Additional musicians (on “AOS”)
Ornette Coleman – trumpet
Edward Blackwell – drums
David Izenzon – bassTechnical personnel
Phil McDonald, John Leckie & Eddie – engineering
Mal Evans – salad
YOKO ONO PLASTIC ONO BAND & RZA, Live at the Orpheum, Los Angeles, Oct 1, 2010
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This story is an excerpt from my Yoko Ono biography
In Your Mind – The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono
by Madeline Bocaro
An all-embracing look at Yoko Ono’s life, music and art – in stunning detail.
Read all about the book, see the reviews and
Order here:
Contact: conceptualbooks@icloud.com
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