The first installment of Secretly Canadian’s Yoko Ono reissue series presented a creative partnership, with two albums credited to Ono and her husband John Lennon and a third featuring him in her Plastic Ono Band. The second set, comprising three Ono albums released between 1971 and 1973, shows her gradually breaking free from that association. Though Ono was at least Lennon's creative equal from the start of this series, it's fascinating to hear how, as he becomes less involved in each subsequent album, her vision widens and strengthens, both personally and politically.
This development coincides with Ono’s music becoming broader and more accessible. The 1971 album Fly is a natural followup to Ono’s 1970 Plastic Ono Band, filled with raucous freak-out jams and conceptual experiments, with lots of Lennon participation. Things take a turn on 1973’s Approximately Infinite Universe, which adopts rock, glam, and funk tropes for sociopolitical protest. Later that year, Ono made Feeling the Space during a split from Lennon, and she embraced pop music in a subversive work of feminist flag-bearing.
On paper, the most experimental of these three Ono albums, Fly, might also be the least ambitious. But there are still plenty of big ideas on Fly: one side is a 22-minute soundtrack to an Ono film consisting primarily of her uncategorizable vocals; “Toilet Piece” is a half-minute of flushing sounds; and all of side three consists of abstract soundscapes made with the Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Co., a group led by one of Ono’s comrades in the art collective Fluxus. Still, by this point, Ono was already a well-practiced conceptual artist, meaning Fly is less about stretching than honing.
That honing is consistently interesting, especially on tunes that further the loose, charging avant-rock that Ono first launched with Plastic Ono Band’s bursting opener, “Why.” “Midsummer New York” and “Hirake” are spilling blues supporting Ono’s escalating screams, while on the 17-minute “Mindtrain,” her rhythmic chants ride a groove that evokes Can’s extended jams. Most mesmerizing is “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow),” Ono’s hymn to a daughter from her first marriage who essentially disappeared when her ex-husband won custody. The song’s only words are “Snow/Don’t worry/Kyoko,” but the way Ono stretches them into impressionistic shapes is hypnotizing, as are the sliding riffs from her backing band, which—for just this track—included Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Eric Clapton.
One song on Fly presages Ono’s next move. “Mrs. Lennon,” featuring Ono’s somber singing over Lennon’s slow piano chords, shows her growing interest in both conventional songwriting and glammy balladry. She extends that mode on Approximately Infinite Universe, infusing drama into piano-led tunes such as the majestic “Winter Song,” the hymn-like “I Want My Love to Rest Tonight,” and the impassioned “What a Bastard the World Is.” The latter, a breakup song that morphs into a political screed, is a gripping example of Ono’s strident attack. “You know half the world is occupied by you pigs,” she spits. “I can always get another pig like you.” Yet she can also be vulnerable and questioning, as on “I Have a Woman Inside My Soul,” which views personal identity as an elusive target.
The somber ballads on Approximately Infinite Universe are mixed with slow rockers, funky workouts, and show-tune style numbers (all played mostly by New York band Elephant’s Memory; Lennon appears on a few tracks under a pseudonym). There’s a breezy thrill in Ono’s omnivorous songs, performed with both committed seriousness and campy humor. Over the samba-ish beat of “What a Mess,” she sings, “If you keep hammering anti-abortion/We’ll tell you no more masturbation for men... If you keep laying on money and power/We’ll tell you meanwhile your sprinkler is out of soda.” Even funnier is the horn-propelled “I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window,” wherein Ono playfully grapples with her parents’ influence, eventually questioning their sanity as well as her own.
Ono’s parents show up again on Feeling the Space, when soft opener “Growing Pain” begins with the lines, “I’m a battleship/Frozen by my mother’s anger.” From there, Ono persistently explores feminist struggles in ways both poetic and polemic. Some tunes, like the lifting “Coffin Car” and the theater-worthy “Woman of Salem,” paint metaphoric pictures of life as a woman. But more often, Ono confronts problems with bold brashness, in songs with titles like “Woman Power,’’ “Angry Young Woman,” and “She Hits Back.” The latter succinctly explains Ono’s anger: “My ears get tired of listening all the time/They’ve been taking lots of garbage all their lives.”
Feeling the Space’s only weakness is the conventionality of the music, played by a rotating collective of seasoned session musicians. There’s a generic quality to the compositions here, which feature little in the way of noisy guitar, unpredictable structures, or sonic abstractions. But that can also be a strength: Ono’s decision to play things so straight after years of experimentation is rather daring. Setting radical diatribes to familiar sounds is a statement itself, living proof of what ’70s rock could’ve been if more voices were represented, and loudly so.
On one of Feeling the Space’s bonus tracks, a live version of “Coffin Car” recorded in 1973 at Harvard’s First International Feminist Conference, Ono talks openly about how she’s been perceived. “What I learned from being with John is that society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man,” she says. “Some of his closest friends told me I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should give up my work, and that way I’ll be happy... I was lucky I was over 30 and it was too late for me to change.” It’s true that she was too strong to succumb to the opinions of others, but these three albums show how much she could change, at her own will, to follow her muse. In the process, she asserted her independence not just from Lennon but from expectation. By subverting pop forms, she extended her vision without compromising it.
