Credit: Far Out / Tony Barnard / Los Angeles Times / UCLA Library
Throughout The Beatles’ career, John Lennon never claimed to be the greatest musician.
He liked the idea of making the music that he could, but since he was working with the chords that his mother showed him when he was starting out, it wasn’t like he was breaking new ground on the instrument like Jimi Hendrix would have been doing. And even when he was one of the biggest stars in the world, Lennon was always a bit wary about going into the studio with people who were much better than him.
Then again, that’s the reason why so many musicians try to test themselves in the studio. The best thing that someone can hope to do is surround themselves with better musicians, and while Lennon definitely had more than his fair share of great bandmates with the rest of the Fab Four, he needed someone who could help translate what he was trying to say on his instrument half the time he was performing.
No one could really understand what he was getting at from a technical point of view, but that didn’t matter so long as he had conviction in what he was doing. Those triple strums in the middle of ‘All My Loving’ took a lot of dexterity and concentration to pull off, but the fact that it’s actually quite difficult is often lost when you start talking about Lennon’s skills as a guitar genius. And if Lennon was overshadowed in his own band, he didn’t think he would be any good going out.
So for the first time, he actually got the chance to play on his own, Lennon was absolutely mortified. The fact that he and Yoko Ono were making experimental projects was one thing, but getting up onstage with another band that wasn’t his friends was going to be daunting no matter how good they were. But it did certainly help to have someone like Eric Clapton by his side when they touched down in Toronto to perform for the first time.
This was practically the unveiling of the Plastic Ono Band, but since there was no rehearsal, Lennon was convinced that the whole thing was going to be a shambles, saying, “We didn’t know what to play because we’d never played together before. So for that record, which turned out to be a good record, we were rehearsing in the airplane with electric guitars. Not even acoustic, [so] we couldn’t hear. We just wrote this list. I hadn’t got the words to any of the songs. We were so nervous because we didn’t know what we were doing.”
Lennon could easily put up a brave front whenever he was onstage, but from the sound of the gig, you can still tell that he sounds a little bit nervous. There are more than a few times where the Yoko Ono performance can get a bit grating on the ears, but compared to everything that they were covering, the fact that they could pull off a song like ‘Cold Turkey’ with little to no rehearsal is really a good example of what Clapton could do when improvising.
Further reading: From The Vault
He didn’t care what the rest of the band were playing as long as he had a key to anchor himself, and Lennon seemed more than happy to keep himself busy just playing the chords. In fact, the kind of whirlwind energy of the entire show feels like something that would have come out of the days when Lennon was still performing in the Cavern, only this time with a much bigger beard and a whole lot more eyes on them.
It was going to be trial by fire, but Lennon managed to make it through the set bravely enough and even walked away with one of the first great Beatles solo performances. The rest of the world didn’t realise that the band was done yet, but it was clear that Lennon needed a better outlet at this point than the rest of the Threetles.
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