Remembering John Lennon (October 9, 1940—December 8, 1980) today, I offer an excerpt from Keep on Pushing and a clip from The Dick Cavett Show.
“Upon the release of Some Time in New York City in June of 1972, critics and consumers decreed that a heavy does of politics with their music was not what the people ordered. The album became the couple’s worst-received recording in their catalog. “We thought it was really good,” says Yoko Ono. Though Dylan had a hit with “George Jackson” and the Rolling Stones wrote “Sweet Black Angel” for Angela Davis, Lennon and Ono took the most heat of all for supporting radical ideals in song, and Ono got her fair share of abuse. “I wasn’t heardthen. Ok, I was heard, and then they trashed me for it,” she says. And yet the prescience of the concerns that the Lennons reaised in the high-era of public protest and their position at the vanguard of musical revolution —-raising ideas like making art and music for peace, standing together, and suggesting we engage in small acts of human kindness as a way to change the vibration of the world—were deemed threatening to national security and rejected by fans. With his commercial potency at a low ebb and his position on nonviolence officially committed to government documents [translation: he was for peace], one might think there was no case for the US government against the Englishman and his Japanese wife. But their problems with the immigration service and the Nixon White House had only just begun…”
Filed under: Angela Davis, anti-war, Interview, Keep On Pushing, 1980, Another brother for peace, Dec. 8, Give Peace a Chance, John Lennon, Remembering Lennon, Some Time in New York City, Wearing of the newsie, Yoko Ono
Denise Sullivan 