The Ballad of John & Yoko – Julie Kathryn
Recorded on July 22, 2010, original version recorded on April 14, 1969.
Julie Kathryn: Vocals
Roger Greenawalt: Ukulele, Bass, Programming
Produced by Roger Greenawalt at Shabby Road Studio in Brooklyn, NY
About the Song
Turn on your TV. Nevermind, it’s already on. Somewhere playing at all times is a program about a house with cameras in every room. Desperate celebrities are interacting in an artificial construct of isolation. The engine behind everything is some sort of never ending competition. We the viewers are riveted; we want to answer the same questions about the show that our distant primate ancestors needed to answer about their own lives. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who has the resources I need? Who’s having sex with whom? Will anyone ever have sex with me? Who is my ally? Who is my enemy? Where do I stand in the hierarchy? What is my best strategy?
In other words, we crave imaginary exercises in situational awareness.
The Ballad Of John And Yoko is a remarkable artifact in The Beatles Canon, and like so much of their work, completely “of” its time while shockingly prescient and relevant now. It is a slight but catchy tune, a rather dry and factual account of the recent activities of our heroes, John and Yoko. The lyrics are dashed off, and reflect the mad cap pace of the real life of the protagonists. The poetry is unremarkable, in fact the chorus; “Christ You Know It Ain’t Easy” is grandiose and cringing. It’s the story behind this song that bears retelling.
Lennon had a complicated relationship with fame; hell he had a complicated relationship with reality. That is, he could see right through it, and it all smelled fishy to him. The certain knowledge that thousands of girls around the world were masturbating to his voice and picture gave him insufficient solace. And his fame had grown to such absurd proportions that even he could see that it was, in the end, absolutely absurd.
It was Lennon who woke up in 1968, like the youth culture around him, and said, “Enough of this shit.” No more pretending. He never was the non-threatening male sex fantasy that early Beatles embodied, and in fact, he hated that pose, and himself, for complicity in the entire concoction. His depression by 1965 was palpable, this role was killing him, in retrospect his puffy appearance and songs like I’m A Loser are heartbreaking testaments to his active suffering.
John had the realization that if his life was destined to be theatre anyway, he might as well treat it as such, and start to actively script the performance. And what his partner in crime, Yoko Ono provided him, was the key to decoding the world. Art. Specifically, Fluxus style Performance Art. What we do is no longer the essential; it is the reaction to our piece that is of most interest. Also, taking the courageous leap of appearing the fool or the villain, prefiguring the important work of Andy Kaufman and others, was a seminal achievement. Lennon had the insane bravery of one who truly didn’t give a fuck. He was perfectly prepared to be the scorned court jester to the paranoid power elite.
Lennon was of the Mad Man 60’s; typically he described the John And Yoko road show as an “Ad For Peace.” Darlings, this simple statement of fact demands restatement. The Vietnam War was an evil, pernicious, sick and vicious exercise in hubris and human sacrifice. The slaughter of millions of Asian peasants and tens of thousands of our own children proved conclusively one and only one thing, that is, that The American Empire was capable of killing millions of Asian peasants and tens of thousands of our own children. The message, reduced to its simplest form was this. America was capable of anything. Don’t mess with America. America sending the unenlightened message of Thumpy The Bouncer, constantly saying to the frightened passersby, “Yo, what you lookin’ at! Are you disrespecting me?”
Bouncers make me nervous. Anyway, John And Yoko became a reality show. The Bed In For Peace was a hilarious piece. The Lennons had already released an album with a full frontal nudity cover, and also released as an audio object the last fluttering heartbeats of their dying in utero fetus. It doesn’t get much more exposed than that. The assorted press who were invited to their hotel room in The Amsterdam Hilton were fully expecting live inter-racial fucking. Instead they got two rich longhaired freaks talking about the war. The arduous performance? Laying in bed in pajamas eating room service. The activity? Talking. About one thing. That the war was wrong.
They were right then and they are right now. Nation states need to go; they are nothing more than anachronistic legacies of wars, famines, and plagues. Like The Roman Empire, or The Feudal System, let them be consigned to the realm of history. Nations have outlived their usefulness in the face of staggering problems that are global in nature. They must be reined and forbidden from engaging in human sacrifice as a means of asserting their dominion. The world is small, and in big trouble, and in need of imagination, tolerance, and reverence for the only social units that matter, that is, the entire human species, and the individual. These are the values that John Lennon stood for, and as an all-encompassing message, it doesn’t get much better than this…
Love, And Peace.
The New Improved version of The Ballad Of John And Yoko features a redux appearance from the lovely and talented Julie Kathryn. Lennon’s 3 chord blues is transformed from a Dominant Seventh flavored country rock song into a 3 chord Major Seventh Bassa Nova. The flavor is Robot Brazilian. Above all it is important to remember that John And Yoko were madly, deeply in love. As Brazil is generally understood to possess the sexiest of all possible cultures, and as people in love tend to have loads of sex, this seemed like the most sensible way to proceed.