Plastic Ono Band

• 1. Introduction

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  The Plastic Ono Band began not as a band at all, but as a piece of art. Yoko Ono first conceived the name in 1967 as an idea for an exhibition in Berlin. Her vision was a Fluxus-inspired concept: an open-ended, ever-shifting collective with no fixed membership. The audience itself was the band. Press materials for the group's first single carried the slogan "YOU are the Plastic Ono Band."

  When John Lennon and Ono began their personal and artistic relationship in 1968, the concept found its human engine. What followed was a six-year run of experimental recordings, surprise concerts, peace campaigns, and solo albums that reshaped how rock musicians could operate outside the constraints of a label-owned group. The questions the story raises are interesting ones. How does a conceptual art project become a touring rock band? How do two people use music to stage a global argument for peace? And what happens when a collective built on openness becomes the sound of a man dismantling the most famous band in the world?

• 2. A Machine Made of Perspex

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  In the 26th of July 1969 edition of Disc and Music Echo, Beatles press officer Derek Taylor offered what he called the "first and last technological press release" about the original Plastic Ono Band. It was not, he explained, a group of people at all. It was a set of four perspex columns, built in Hoylake, Cheshire, by an inventor named Charles Melling. Three of the columns were taller; one was shorter. Each could hold any device: a tape recorder, a closed-circuit television, a record player, a light show. Taylor pointed out that the units were fitted with electronics under the direction of Alexis Mardas at Apple.

  This physical installation sat in the Apple press office as a sound and light sculpture. The written and photographic evidence suggests this was the original Plastic Ono Band, and it captures precisely what Ono had in mind: not musicians on a stage, but a flexible system for producing sound and image, adaptable to any content, like the Beatles themselves. Taylor's parenthetical about being brought up separately in Hoylake to Selwyn Lloyd was the kind of dry English aside that made the description memorable. The columns could hold anything, he wrote. That sentence was the whole aesthetic program.

• 3. Give Peace a Chance

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  On the 20th of March 1969, Lennon and Ono married in Gibraltar, then flew to Paris and on to Amsterdam, where they staged their first Bed-in for Peace. The idea was to redirect the press attention their marriage attracted toward an argument against the Vietnam War. Journalists expecting a conventional honeymoon arrived at the Hilton Hotel to find the couple in bed, inviting conversation about peace.

  The second Bed-in, held in Montreal in late May and early June 1969, produced the first piece of music credited to the Plastic Ono Band. During that event, Lennon, Ono, and their guests recorded "Give Peace a Chance." The single was released on the 4th of July. It was the first record Lennon had put out independent of the Beatles, though his writing partner Paul McCartney still received a credit, both as a contractual arrangement and a personal one. The B-side was Ono's "Remember Love." The single's release had been preceded by a press launch on the 3rd of July. The Plastic Ono Band was presented not as a group with a roster but as a movement whose membership was whoever chose to join.

• 4. Toronto and Cold Turkey

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  On the 12th of September 1969, Lennon received a phone call from John Brower, who was organizing the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival festival. The event was set to take place the following day, and Brower had offered Lennon free attendance to raise the festival's profile. Lennon countered with an offer to perform. Brower agreed. Lennon then had roughly twenty-four hours to assemble a band.

  He first asked George Harrison to play lead guitar. Harrison declined. On Harrison's recommendation, Lennon contacted Eric Clapton, who agreed. Klaus Voormann came in on bass and Alan White on drums. The band rehearsed on the plane to Toronto. The set mixed rock songs sung by Lennon with experimental pieces led by Ono. A recording was released in December as Live Peace in Toronto 1969, the first LP the Plastic Ono Band released under that name. It was during the preparation for Toronto that Lennon privately decided to leave the Beatles, a decision driven by tensions that had been building inside the group for some time.

  The single that followed, "Cold Turkey," had started as a Lennon pitch for a Beatles release. McCartney rejected it. The track was recorded with a line-up close to the Toronto group, except that Ringo Starr replaced Alan White on drums. The writing credit carried only Lennon's name, a pointed departure from the Lennon-McCartney credit that had defined his work for years.

• 5. Peace for Christmas and Instant Karma

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  On the 15th of December 1969, with forty-eight hours' notice, Lennon and Ono assembled a group for a UNICEF benefit at the Lyceum Ballroom in London, billed as "Peace for Christmas." The Toronto core of Clapton, Voormann, and White returned. Clapton brought along Harrison, Billy Preston, and the Delaney and Bonnie touring group, which included saxophonist Bobby Keys, drummer Jim Gordon, and trumpet player Jim Price. Keith Moon of the Who joined as well. Lennon later called this gathering "the Plastic Ono Supergroup."

  Following the Lyceum show, Lennon and Ono funded billboards in major cities carrying the message: "WAR IS OVER! If You Want It - Happy Christmas from John and Yoko." The campaign set a template for treating mass media as artistic material.

  "Instant Karma!" was written and recorded on the 27th of January 1970, with Harrison, Voormann, White, Preston, and backing vocalists recruited from a nearby pub filling out the Plastic Ono Band that day. On Harrison's recommendation, American producer Phil Spector was hired for the session. The working relationship that began there extended across several albums for both Lennon and Spector. The single was released just over a week after recording.

• 6. The Studio Albums

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  During the summer of 1970, Lennon and Ono undertook primal therapy with Arthur Janov in Los Angeles. The experience shaped the writing on Lennon's solo debut in direct and unambiguous ways. When the Beatles publicly dissolved, the pair returned to London at the end of September to record two studio albums simultaneously: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band. Klaus Voormann played bass and Ringo Starr played drums on both. Phil Spector co-produced Lennon's record. George Harrison contributed sitar to Ono's. The two albums were released on the 11th of December.

  In the spring and summer of 1971, Lennon and Ono recorded Imagine and Fly respectively. Imagine featured contributions from Harrison, Nicky Hopkins, Voormann, White, Jim Keltner, and Jim Gordon, again with Spector as co-producer. On the 6th of June, Lennon and Ono performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in New York City, a collaboration they named "John and Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with The Mothers of Invention."

  The Christmas single "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," issued on the 1st of December 1971, carried the credit "John and Yoko/The Plastic Ono Band." The musicians included Jim Keltner, Nicky Hopkins, and guitarists Hugh McCracken, Chris Osbourne, Teddy Irwin, and Stuart Scharf. Klaus Voormann played bass on the B-side, "Listen, the Snow Is Falling."

• 7. New York, Elephant's Memory, and the Final Years

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  Lennon and Ono left the United Kingdom in the fall of 1971, settling in New York's Greenwich Village. The move deepened their political engagement. The album Some Time in New York City, released on the 12th of June 1972, was built on protest songs written in that context and backed by New York band Elephant's Memory. The group included guitarist Wayne Gabriel, bassist Gary Van Scyoc, saxophonist Stan Bronstein, and drummer Richard Frank Jr., among others. Spector co-produced.

  On the 30th of August, as the Plastic Ono Elephant's Memory Band, the group performed two "One to One" benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden. The event was organized by Geraldo Rivera to raise money for children with mental challenges. The concerts were filmed and recorded, later released in February 1986 as Live in New York City. The last project with Elephant's Memory was Ono's double album Approximately Infinite Universe, recorded through the fall of 1972 and released in January 1973.

  By mid-1973, Lennon and Ono's relationship had fractured. Lennon called the separation that followed "the Lost Weekend." He recorded Mind Games with a group he called "the Plastic U.F.Ono Band," and later Walls and Bridges, credited to the "Plastic Ono Nuclear Band." Walls and Bridges, completed in August and released in September 1974, was the last new-material release under a Plastic Ono Band name during Lennon's lifetime. The compilation Shaved Fish, issued in October 1975 following the birth of Sean Lennon, was his final release credited to the Plastic Ono Band.

• 8. Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band

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  In 2009, Yoko Ono revived the Plastic Ono Band name with the EP Don't Stop Me!, a preview of the album Between My Head and the Sky. The new core group centered on her son Sean Lennon, musician Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada), and Yuka Honda. Regular touring members included bassist Shimmy Hirotaka Shimizu, horn player Michael Leonhart, cellist Erik Friedlander, and drummer Yuko Araki.

  In 2010, a concert titled "We Are the Plastic Ono Band" brought together Ono and Sean Lennon with Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, and Jim Keltner, reconnecting the new group with its founding figures. The following year, the band collaborated with the Flaming Lips on an EP. Guest performers during this period included Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Bette Midler, Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Paul Simon, and Gene Ween.

  The last studio album credited to the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band was Take Me to the Land of Hell, released in 2013. The band continued performing live into 2015, forty-six years after that first single was credited to the collective at the Montreal Bed-in, and forty-eight years after Ono first sketched the concept in a proposal for an art exhibition in Berlin.