The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • Page Z018

The reviled political screeds of John Lennon Imagine this scenario. December 1971 and President Richard Nixon is sweating like a maniac in some underground White House bunker. just read an FBI report on a concert in Ann Arbor, about 15,000 screaming hippies raising their unwashed fists and singing along with an ex-Beatle to demand that some pot-smoking antiwar crank be sprung from prison. The president shivers as he reads every word the FBI agent had written down: gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta set him It end there. Nixon knows that bastard John Lennon is intent on uniting with crazy radicals and marijuana addicts.

Not just to disrupt the convention and lead the youth vote against him in next election like some sinister, foreign pied piper, but to force him to strip naked and dance with Mao Tse-tung. He has to be stopped. The FBI is trying but doing enough. The INS is impotent. Liddy and the boys are busy with other projects.

only one he can turn to, someone who had warned him about those nefarious Beatles, their drugs, and their communistic ways. Someone who had offered to help and had already been commissioned as a special law-enforcement officer. Nixon calls in press secretary Ron Zeigler and beats him with a fly swatter until he draws blood. That feels better, Nixon sighs. He picks up the phone to make the call.

get me Elvis On Dec. 8, the 25th anniversary of John murder, I awoke to a radio interview on Democracy Now with Jon Weiner, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has written two books about political activism in the early and the Nixon attempts to have Lennon deported. wanted to be part of what was going Weiner told Amy Goodman. was going on in New York was the anti-war movement, and he became friends with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale and other activists. what got him in trouble with the Nixon And yes, according to Weiner, an undercover FBI agent actually attended a John concert starring Lennon and actually down every word John Lennon said, including all the words to the song including gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta set him (Sinclair was the manager of the MC5 and leader of a group called the White Panthers.

been sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana joints.) After hearing the interview, I knew that I gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta get myself a copy of Some Time in New York City which was rereleased last month on CD. So I did. This work, in which Yoko Ono wrote and sang about half the songs, generally is reviled as worst album. The basic rap on the record is that a mighty Beatle, the mad genius responsible for Fields and Am the had been reduced to writing third-rate, radical-chic political screeds. Writing protest songs is tricky business.

Recently I received a CD called Christmas in Fallujah by someone called Jefferson Pepper. I figure out how someone could make a song about the ravages of war sound so smug and banal. On the other hand, the Iraq war has produced several top-notch protest songs Terry Baby Joined the written by Ry Cooder; Make It by James McMurtry; Robert also shown that a good protest song can be timeless. Pete Deep in the Big Bob of Creedence Clearwater and Mose surreal of the (revived recently by Stan Ridgway), with lyrics about and their hags out there waving still resonate. For the most part, Lennon and lyrics on Some Time in New York City fall well short of of or of the Only a few of them are outright embarrassing.

The worst undoubtedly is about jailed radical professor Angela Davis. With a goopy, string- sweetened arrangement, Lennon sings, gave you gave you gave you everything but However, Some Time in New York City nearly as bad as detractors say. And some of the songs are good old-fashioned kick-ass rockers. band for the record was a gritty and greasy New York group called Memory, led by sax maniac Stan Bronstein. and are high- powered stompers featuring Lennon on a mean National guitar.

Bloody about the troubles in Northern Ireland, might also have its roots in rivalry with Paul McCartney, who had recently released a tepid and polite tune called Ireland Back to the song, aided by weird warble and sax, blew song to smithereens. And the autobiographical York is good, mindless fun. The frequently vilified Ono even makes a couple of good contributions. is the type of retro girl-group charmer that would have fit in David Mulholland Drive Her song All with its crazy images may not be much difference between Chairman Mao and Richard we strip them should have made everyone forgive her for breaking up the Beatles. some wonderful live bonus material, including a powerful My only beef is that in this release Capitol Records cut some of the Lennon jams with Frank Zappa that appeared on previous versions of Some Time in New York City, replacing them with the bland Yoko song the Snow Is and Xmas (War is This is a great holiday hit, but already included on who knows how many Lennon compilations.

In the end, Tricky Dick really have much to worry about with regard to John Lennon. But what a time of wonder, when a rock roll star could make a president shake. TUNE-UP Steve Terrell pop cd reviews 18 Dec. 16 22, 2005 Plastic Ono Memory, 1972 (with Invisible Strings).