"Henry Ford sold his cars with advertising. I'm selling peace. Yoko and I are just a big advertising campaign. That might make people laugh, but it also might make them think. Really, we're Mr. and Mrs. Peace.
During one week in 1971, John Lennon records his second solo album, "Imagine", with Yoko Ono and Phil Spector in their home in Tittenhurst. A surealist atmosphere composes the film of the recording, and John states "If we could imagine a world of peace, without culture or religion - not without religion, but without that thing "My God is stronger than yours" - then it could exist". "Imagine" has kept it's power of subversion in George Bush's America ; when Neil Young sang it in memory of the victims of September 11, the song was censored.
In 1971 after their enclave at Tittenhurst, John and Yoko move to New York, spending time with Bob Dylan, frequenting Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (leftist leaders of the Youth International Party and the Black Panthers), supporting Women's liberation ("Woman is the Nigger of the World"), and participating in numerous political demonstrations. In spring of 1972 John and Yoko record "Some Time in New York City" which reflects their political engagements. They are ordered to leave American territory. Pursued by the Nixon administration and the FBI, it would be four years before John received his green card. During a separation from Yoko in 1973 and 1974, he spends his time with Ringo Star, Harry Nilsson (who released the album "Pussycats") and Keith Moon, drummer of the Who. He collaborates with David Bowie on Young Americans, co-writing the the hit "Fame", and also recording the albums "Walls and Bridges" and "Rock'n'Roll".
In 1975 John and Yoko rejoin, living in an apartment of the Dakota Building in New York, and John learns they are having a child. Avant-gardist, he decides to become a house husband, drawing, making collages, writing, baking bread, travelling and working in 1978 on a musical comedy, The Ballad of John and Yoko. "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans", he would sing on his final album "Double Fantasy", released in November 1980, which alternates autobiographically between his own songs and Yoko's.
Speaking of his 5 year retirement, John would say "the hardest thing is to really look at yourself. It's easier to hide your head in the sand, to shout 'Revolution' or 'Power to the People" than to look at yourself and try to discover what's true inside and what's not.
On December 8th, one month after authoring an impressive media comeback, John Lennon was assassinated in front of his residence at the Dakota by a mentally unstable man to whom he had signed an autograph only a few hours earlier.
Raymond Depardon would film the week following the assassination, and the ten minutes of silence given in homage by thousands of fans in Central Park.
"I always dreamed of writing Alice in Wonderland. I think I still have that secret ambition. And I think I'll do it, when I'm older." A dream he would never realise.
This third exhibition dedicated
to Rock (Jimi Hendrix Backstage in 2002 and Pink Floyd Interstellar in 2003),
John Lennon Unfinished Music was made possible through exceptional loans made
with Yoko Ono Lennon's permission. The exhibition is not a mausoleum, but
a living homage to a major artist who's life and work we can discover, in
it's many facets, in 900 m2.
traducer: John Conley
From 20 October 2005 to 25
June 2006
Commissariat : Emma Lavigne and Grazia Quaroni assisted by Alice Martin
Press contact : Hamid Si Hamer hsiamer@cite-musique.fr
www.cite-music.fr
Opening hours : from tuseday to saturday from 12 pm to 6 pm. Sunday from 10
am until 18 pm.
Tarifs : Individual 7€, Under 18 3,5€
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News
From 20 October 2005 to 25 June 2006 In the midst of an air raid, John Lennon first saw the
light in Liverpool, England on 9 October 1940. Born to a father he never
knew and an artistic, musical mother, he was orphaned at 3 years old.
Raised by his maternal aunt, brought up to strict middle-class values,
he soon began to break with establishment rules and to imagine a world
in Technicolor through his self-published journal, the Daily Howl. "I
must be a lunatic or a genius". At 16, John Lennon was fascinated by Elvis Presley, who had just released 'Love Me Tender'. He loved Bill Haley's 'Rock Around the Clock' and learned his first song on the guitar, 'That'll Be the Day' by Buddy Holly. At 17 he formed the Quarry Men, a musical group which played skiffle (a form of popular music, played on home-made instruments, led by Lonnie Donegan and followed by the pioniers of rock 'n roll). Quickly joined by Paul McCartney and then George Harrison, they played hits by Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. In 1958 John is 18, the Beatles play their first concerts and within two years they are the stars of Mersey Beat in Liverpool. They quickly become serious showmen, playing in larger and larger concert halls in England, and in 1964 the US. Soon they play only in the largest arenas, such as Shea Stadium in New York. Groomed as stars, they become demi-gods to their public, and their shows become rights-of-passage where screams, crying, states of trance and riots become systematic. It's known as Beatlemania. Of their stardom, John would say "The Beatles are more important than Jesus Christ". Their public is polarized, they themselves are isolated. They are too much adored or too much despised. In America, record-burning parties are organised, and the Beatles are publicly denounced and vilified. Harassed by fans, repulsed by the appalling technical conditions of concerts in such enormous stadiums, the Beatles perform their last concert on 29 August, 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, to an audience of thousands. "You have to let yourself be unbelievably humiliated to be what the Beatles were. You end up doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand." he later said. From 1966, the Beatles musical exploration would only occur in recording studios. "Rubber Soul" was recorded in 1965 on a four track deck. (Today, as many as 180 tracks are used.) With a cover illustration - anamorphic photographs - by Robert Freeman, the album thrust them to the forefront of the new pop culture. Through important technological advances in recording technology (stereophonics, acoustical experimentation, tape distortion) they used the studio environment to create music which was impossible to produce on stage. In 1966 they record "Revolver" at EMI Records' Abbey Road studios and establish their inventiveness : psychedelic effects, reverse recordings (Tomorrow Never Knows), and an oriental influence. The album jacket is designed by Klaus Voorman and rock's prehistory comes to a close. In November of 1966 John Lennon meets Yoko Ono, an encounter which would definitively mark his life. Yoko Ono, a japonese artist linked to the Fluxus group, was holding an exhibition titled "Unfinished Paintings and Objects" at the Indica Gallery in London. She initiates John into American counter-culture, the cinema of Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, free jazz and the experimental music of John Cage. 1967 is the year of "Seargeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's
Club Band", a true masterpiece. Considered a manifesto of liberty
throughout the entire world (and notably in Cuba), the album in censured
in America due to allusions to drug use in "Lucy in the Sky With
Diamonds". The album cover, created by Peter Blake, makes allusions
to rock, pop, indian and classical music and brings together the words
'popular' and 'art'. A new life before him,
it's a time of avant-garde, of conceptual art for John and Yoko, who compose
two experimental albums for four hands and two voices, "Unfinished
Music", and create radical happenings and contemplative videos. It's
the time of sexual liberation, of "anything goes", but also
a period of extreme racial tension (the assassination of Martin Luther
King) and escalation of the war in Viet Nam. Since 1965, members of American
counter-culture and the British intelligentsia have been mobilising to
denounce the war (Peter Brook, with a play in 1966), and John had accepted
a role in "How I Won the War" by Richard Lester. He continues
this combat with Yoko with "Give Peace a Chance" and "Power
to the People". His songs become slogans, his daily actions become
demonstrations. Using his own notoriety as a tool, he organises bed-ins
during his honeymoon and invites the press to join him. The first, in
the Amsterdam Hilton, followed by a second in Montreal where he records
"Give peace a Chance".
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