Morgan Enos is a musician, essayist and music journalist specializing in classic rock. He records and performs as Other Houses and has bylines in Billboard, HuffPost, the Recording Academy, Vinyl Me, Please, TIDAL and more. He is also the co-founder and editor of North of the Internet, a series of conversations with creative people. He can be found at his website.
Despite critical enthusiasm, John Lennon’s “New York City” is decidedly not one of his most iconic tunes. It’s conspicuously absent from best-of collections like Shaved Fish, Power to the People, and Gimme Some Truth: The Ultimate Mixes; on the blue John Lennon Anthology box I’ve had since childhood, it only appears in a 55-second snippet.
Yet this barreling, Chuck Berry-channeling goof on the Liverpudlian’s new home base has always been among my very favorite Lennon songs. (At the very least, it’s the best song on Some Time in New York City, which took a beating in 1972 and is scarcely better loved today. I happen to vigorously defend it.) Every battle rap-style one-liner connects, from, “The pope smokes dope every day,” to “God’s a red herring in drag.” It’s funny, poignant, and totally electrifying.
Which is why I flipped out when One to One: John and Yoko, a Kevin Mcdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards documentary coming to IMAX April 11, kicked off with “New York City.” Onstage at Madison Square Garden with the Elephant’s Memory Band at the titular, free 1972 concert — a benefit for developmentally disabled kids at Geraldo Rivera’s bequest, and the only full concert he performed between the Beatles and his death — Lennon sounds downright hellacious.
Then things get truly interesting. With the concert at its core, One to One inventively zooms out on the city in question. Specifically, Lennon and Yoko Ono’s year-and-a-half in Greenwich Village, a stopgap between London’s Ascot and the Dakota that proved wildly interesting: Vietnam, yippies, Nixon, the specter of deportation.
Ono’s missing daughter, Kyoko, also hangs heavy in the story. “These themes of missing children or lost childhoods, throughout the film, permeate John’s character. I think they permeate Yoko’s character too,” Macdonald tells me. “And that gives a kind of an emotional weight to the film.”
Despite the momentousness of the One to One concert, it’s only been released in haphazard fashion. (Live in New York City, released six years after Lennon’s 1980 death, was largely, criminally scrubbed of Ono, including her solo pieces.) Thankfully, not only do we have One to One: Macdonald reports that the concert in its uninterrupted entirety is also on the way.
“There’s so much here that even the biggest John fan will not have seen before,” Macdonald promises — and I can confirm. Here’s my full interview with the director; grab IMAX tickets in advance here.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Morgan Enos: What’s your impression of Lennon’s output from this time in his life?
Kevin Macdonald: I think he said at the time, when he made the New York City album, that he saw himself as kind of a troubadour, reporting on the times. That these songs weren’t polished in the way as some of his earlier, solo work — and, obviously, the Beatles’ work. He kind of took pride in the fact that they were about the moment. They were instant reflections that weren’t necessarily super sophisticated — because when you’re talking about such important political issues, you don’t want to be too suave. But then, when the album bombed, he was devastated. People really hated it: What happened to the great songwriter, you know? And I think nobody understood that directness was the point.
I think you understand from watching One to One that this is a moment in John’s life where he’s trying to find himself after the Beatles, and figure out who he is. Yoko is sort of recovering from all the racism she experienced in the UK, in the aftermath of the Beatles. It’s a time where they engage with the world, engage with politics, more than any other point in any of their careers. We’re just very lucky that we chose to make a film about this particular moment. They’ve moved to New York, and they’re getting to know this crazy cast of Village characters, and they’re really engaged in politics. For about 18 months, they were recording phone calls, recording themselves on home video, inviting film crews to attend various functions of theirs. So, there’s this huge body of archive that we could draw on, and I think it’s unique for that reason.
It’s a sort of transitional period — one of those moments which are usually the most interesting in anyone’s lives, where you’re going from being one thing to being another. Where the new world is not yet born.
Morgan: Your use of a channel-hopping TV as a framing device, or narrative engine, is self-explanatory. Yet it almost made me want to put on my media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff hat. If social media existed back then, it’d be this 20-dimensional other thing….
Kevin: The idea of using TV in the way that we used it in the film came from two sources. One was because I read these quotes that John gave — a couple of which are in the audio of the film — where he talks about TV. He loved TV so much. It was how he learned about America. It was the window on the world for him. He always had TV on, even if he wasn’t watching it, just as this cozy background.
But the other thing was actually my own experience of coming from the UK to America in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I was in the US once or twice a year visiting my family, and I’d stay all summer with my grandmother. In the UK at that time, we had three TV channels which only broadcast in the evening, and switched off every night at midnight with a rendition of “God Save the Queen.” And then you came to America, and you had this crazy, raucous cavalcade of 180 channels. You could see all human life there, for good or for ill. That was really exciting and compelling and sort of a fairground ride, in a way. I think I sensed that’s what John felt as well, coming from Britain at that time.
And I will say, I kind of feel like it is social media. I’ve been interested in showing this film to some much younger people — my children, and their friends who are late teenagers. And they really got it. People have said to me, “Oh, you need more explanation. Explain who everyone is.” They didn’t need that. People in their teen years felt totally comfortable with this kind of rolling cavalcade of imagery from all different places, because it’s the experience of Instagram reels or TikTok. It’s very similar. You’re sort of thrust into this world where you don’t quite know what’s going on. You don’t know who this person is, and you’re going to make sense of it very quickly — then move on to something else.
Morgan: In the press materials, [producer] Peter [Worsley] mentioned the cleverness behind your choice of commercials, which you may not pick up on until multiple viewings. Without spoiling anything, can you speak to that methodology?
Kevin: Well, the television we use is kind of a combination of news stories, commercials, some bits of pieces of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and all these popular TV shows of the time. I think the commercials serve a really interesting purpose. Because, first of all, commercials haven’t really changed. They’ve become more visually sophisticated, but actually, the tricks of the trade to sell you things are very much the same as they were in the early ‘70s. We tried to make everything interrelate in some way. There’s a character called AJ Weberman who’s stalking Bob Dylan and going through his garbage — it’s a complicated story to explain what’s going on — and he pulls out, amongst other things, a bottle of Clorox bleach. And previously to that, we’ve seen the advert for Clorox bleach.
So, there’s these little subtle connections that go through the film, thematically and otherwise, which I think you only pick up on later in the viewing. But I want an audience to think, Wow. This is a very different kind of music film, but it’s really entertaining. And part of the reason is because although it appears like it’s chaotic and random, you actually feel different narratives unfolding, and different connections happening. We were always looking for subtle connections that the mind will latch on to, whether those be in terms of movement, color, or music.
For instance, we’ve got a thing where Richard Nixon is the antagonist of the film, but we never present Nixon as a kind of malevolent person. He’s always associated with music. We wanted him to feel like he was the rock star here. So we always have him with a choir, or dancing, or with all the crowds. I mean, when he’s campaigning for the 1972 election in this beautiful Super 8 camera footage that one of his associates shot of him, people are screaming at him — babies wanting to be kissed. So, it’s basically the idea that it’s a battle of the rock stars, between him and John.
Morgan: I love the juxtapositions between song and subject matter. “Imagine” is “Imagine” is “Imagine,” but when it’s about disabled kids for a minute, it takes on all this other resonance. “Cold Turkey” is no longer just about withdrawing from heroin; John seems to channel all the suffering in the world.
Kevin: Yeah, that was the idea. Obviously, the center of this is this incredible One to One concert, but we wanted to put it into the context of the time, so that the songs help explain the imagery you’re seeing — what’s going on in America in 1972. You see a song like “Cold Turkey” in a different way, where it’s not about how hard it is to kick drugs, but how hard it is to kick an idea that you’ve adopted. At that moment in the film, John has fallen in with the yippies and Jerry Rubin and all these sorts of comedic radicals of the time, and he’s been kind of duped by them into becoming their useful idiot. He’s woken up to that, and he’s kicking them out of his life.
Morgan: John also just sounds killer. So does Yoko, on “Don’t Worry Kyoko”… My god.
Kevin: I think that might be my favorite. My favorite two points in the film might be with her. That song is so directly emotive and emotional; she’s sort of pulling her own guts out onto the stage.
People always accuse Yoko of, “She can’t sing, she wails!” What they don’t realize is that this is a performative tactic. She’s a conceptual artist. This is part of a sense of, How do I express emotion when it’s in a conventional, melodic kind of fashion? It feels like a brilliant pre-punk piece of punk. It’s full of anger and rawness. It’s incredible. I think that’s where my editor, Sam Rice-Edwards, did an epic job — cutting that sequence with her into Kyoko, her missing daughter, and footage from their life together. I think it’s beautiful.
The other one is at the end of the film; there’s another Yoko song where she’s incredibly confessional. It’s called “Age 39 (Looking Over From My Hotel Window)”; it’s on one of her albums [1973’s Approximately Infinite Universe]. This is a live performance at the first International Feminist Conference, and she’s dragged John along, and he’s the only man in the room, and they have a vote to say whether they should throw him out or not, [which is] hilarious. But she sings the song to the assembled feminists — how hard it is to be married to John, how hard it is to be an artist in her own right, how hard it is to deal with her thoughts of suicide. It’s incredibly potent. And one of the things I was so pleased with was when I showed the finished film to Sean Lennon. He said to me, “Oh, this is the first film that really understood who my mom is.” I took that as a real compliment.
