At age 92, Yoko Ono has for decades been a celebrated artist with art installations and performances in galleries and theaters all over the world. Even songs from Ono’s reviled Plastic Ono Band albums from the 70s have been recycled by millennial bands collaborating with Ono and are dance club hits. Yet Ono is still remembered some as the woman who broke up the Beatles.
David Sheff’s new biography of Ono puts that falsehood to rest along with other gossip about her relationship and marriage to John Lennon. The animus she faced was just one more hardship in a lifetime of them, a lonely childhood, anti-Asian racism and sexism, and the tragic murder of Lennon.
Ono grew up in a wealthy Japanese family, her father Eisuke, was a bank executive working abroad and she didn’t meet him until she was 2 ½. Her mother Isoko was emotionally distant and Yoko often felt like she was left on her own in the care of nannies.
At age 12, Yoko, her mother and siblings living in Tokyo when the US firebombed the city, resulting in 100,000 deaths. They escaped to a remote prefecture in the mountains where they almost starved. Eisuke was working in Hanoi during the attack and they didn’t hear from him for a year, finally heard through a diplomat that he had been injured and interned in Vietnam.
After the war, as Tokyo was rebuilding, Yoko was encouraged by her parents to go to Tokyo College of Music, since Yoko’s had musical training in Japanese opera and classical piano but instead she deciding to study philosophy at Gakushuin University and was the first female student to be accepted, but she found the curriculum “failed to consider emotion and the psychological side” of life “it was theoretical, cold and dead.” She chose instead to enroll in the all to study at the liberal arts all female college Sarah Lawarence, where she flourished as an aspiring artist and activist.
By her 20s, Ono had been performing and creating art installations in Japan, London and New York, with middling success by the art press and establishment. The avant-gardist though, knew she was a rebel with an artistic cause. Lennon met Yoko in 1966 at the opening of her exhibition “Instruction Paintings” at Indica Gallery in London, and was complete enchanted with Ono’s viewer participant installations and concepts including “Painting to be Stepped On” “Eternal Time” “Sky TV” “White Chess Set” and Lennon was particularly intrigued by ‘Sky TV’ and ‘Bag Piece’ the last meaning that two people got inside a large bag and became morphing sculpture.
Her visual, performance and music often incorporated traditional Japanese ritual and craft, elements roundly ignored or dismissed by the art establishment. Ono’s primal-scream vocals were based on ritualize traditional music from Japanese classicism and performance. Within the art and music industries she overcame industry racism, misogyny and harsh criticism of her work.
One of her most famous performance art works in the US was ‘Cut Piece’ staged at Carnegie Hall in 1965, to the fascination and revulsion of audiences. Ono would sit in a Buddhist pose centerstage and audience members would be invited to cut pieces of her clothing off while she continued to meditate. The piece was a polemic on voyeurism, exploitation and the subjugation of women.
By the late 60s, John and Yoko became the peace and love bed-in activists of pop-rock with “Instant Karma” and “Give Peace A Chance” hit records. Behind the scenes, things were rocky in a different way..
Sheff doesn’t avoid writing about their rough patches including their drug addictions and Lennon’s drinking or their separation when John moved to the West Coast and had an affair, encouraged by Ono, with her assistant May Fang. The author also goes into detail about her previous marriage to artist and actor Tony Cox and their custody battle over their daughter Kyoko, which led to a long separation between mother and daughter.
John ended his ‘Lost Weekend’ in LA and he and Yoko reconciled. Their marriage blossomed into one of normal domestic life at the Dakota in New York where John became a stay at home dad looking after their son Sean. Few people acknowledge her as a collaborator on much of his post-Beatle music, including co-writing the lyrics of the internationally recognized peace anthem ‘Imagine.’ Ono had been taking care of the business end of her collaborations with John for years.
The couple was back in the studio in 1980 recording their album ‘Double Fantasy’ when Lennon was assassinated in front of the Dakota by a disturbed former fan of the Beatles.
Along with all the scary darkness engulfing Ono’s life as nothing seemed to drown out the negativity flung at her even in the wake of her husband’s murder. She continued to get death threats and there were even break-in attempts at the Dakota. She had to hire security guards for herself and Sean for years because of threats.
Grief was overtaking her life but she valiantly continued working, with close attention to managing John’s musical legacy, and also finding a way forward for herself and Sean.. There was help through colleagues and friends, including the surviving members of the Beatles. And before long got back to her own artwork as a way to cope. Ono’s experimental music initially ignored or ridiculed for her scorching vocals and by the 80s, performers and musicians from top alt-rock groups including The B-52s, Nirvana, Cyndi Lauper, et al. acknowledged her influence on their music.
David Sheff was a feature writer for Rolling Stone and other publications when he met John and Yoko agreed to a series of interviews. The author remained close to Ono and she granted him the rights to title his memoir and the film Beautiful Boy which dealt with his son’s drug addiction and the recovery. Even if there are spots a familial reserve, this is a fine line portrait of Ono that illuminates her life, art, and tumultuous times.
