Give Yoko A Chance...

I didn’t get the T-shirt and I’ve been sorry ever since. Now I can’t even find the brochure. I keep these things, and I have a file to keep them safe, but this is the second piece of memorabilia to disappear.

The event was called “Get Back! A Celebration of Winnipeg Rock” and it ran from November, 1995, until February, 1996. It was at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature, and it was way cool. Memorabilia from so many long defunct Winnipeg bands, The Shondels (no, not Tommy James & The Shondells), The Mongrels, The Eternals, The Dawgs, featuring future crown attorney George Demoissac, with whom I had several dust-ups in various criminal courts, The Fifth.

The show piece was John Lennon’s psychedelically painted Rolls Royce, the only exhibit that wasn’t Winnipeg based.

And so I was thinking about that this week while I meandered through Imagine Peace, an exhibit sponsored by Yoko Ono, commemorating the life and career of John Lennon (and Yoko Ono of course, but mostly John) during his “peace” years – 1969 – 1972. It is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des beaux arts) and it is free.

The first thing that strikes me about it is that I’m not at all sure that it’s art, and I’m not sure that it’s meant to be art. But then, in a perverse kind of way, that in itself may be a kind of art. Yoko, after all, has always been an advocate of the promotion of the ordinary to the realm of art. There is a piece called “apple,” which is, and one can imagine it, an apple – an actual real edible apple, sitting on a plastic pedestal. This is a reproduction of a piece that originally appeared in 1966. The original, one may assume, has long since decayed, or has, perhaps, been eaten. There is also an exhibit called “The Wall Phone,” and it is, predictably, naught but a wall phone.

So here we have an exhibit which consists, apart from the odd Yoko-created apple or telephone, of wall mounted photos of John, John and Yoko, John Yoko and others etc, LP covers, picture sleeves from 45s, TV screens showing vintage footage of the Montreal bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the interview on Dick Cavett, documentary footage, etc, a sound system playing Give Peace A Chance, a white piano which was not Lennon’s (it’s just a white piano), and bed in which John and Yoko did not lie (it’s just a bed), a few dozen chess boards set up for real playing (it took me a while to realize that all the pieces where white), a promotional shelf hosted by Archambault with books that wouldn’t you love to go down to the store and buy, and the overriding theme is peace, Lennon the humanitarian, Lennon the idealist, Lennon who stood for causes and was abused and mistreated by the establishment, they wouldn’t let him get married in Paris, and the Americans would not let him in because of his criminal record (drugs, of course).

I was 12 when Give Peace A Chance had a spot on the local top 40, and I remember it well. And I remember Cold Turkey (which, now that I think of it, I don’t remember seeing any reference to at the exhibit). And I remember all those solo albums, especially Imagine and Some Time In New York City and Plastic Ono Band. And I remember hearing Happy Xmas (War Is Over) on the radio, and I remember how moving it was.

Imagine Peace, though, was not moving.

I was looking for the Lennon that I knew as an adolescent, the Lennon that who sang “those freaks was right when they said you was dead” about his erstwhile partner Paul McCartney, the Lennon that produced all that white noise on I Want You (She’s So Heavy) on Abbey Road, the Lennon that let his wife scream her head off in front on an undoubtedly bemused audience at the Toronto Rock And Roll Revival Festival in 1969, the Lennon that said he hoped Decca A & R man Dick Rowe “kicked himself to death” when asked by an interviewer if he thought said Mr. Rowe was kicking himself for turning The Beatles down in 1962, that same Lennon that campaigned for peace and meant every word of it. I was looking for the Lennon that would buy a Rolls, a symbol of affluence, and paint it in psychedelic colours, telling the world this is what I think of your symbols…

I was looking for the ambience, the feel, a sense of genuinness, something that would put me back there, get the feel of the bed-in, the real white piano, the real John Lennon, the smell of dope, the crumbling of The Beatles, of the “dream,” Nixon, Kent State, Revolution 9. I was looking for the Rolls Royce. What I got was a documentary presentation of something that happened long ago, about a wonderful guy gave himself selflessly, used his artistic talents for the betterment of the world. Very nice, but not very real, and not very convincing.

And they didn’t even sell t-shirts…