Step into “Jam On It,” members of Newcleus rocking the mic, beat is fresh. Then read Lennon Remembers, a two-part interview with John Lennon conducted by Jann Wenner for the December 1970 and January 1971 issues of Rolling Stone. Lennon begins the interview a bit rancorous and sour grapes. The Beatles had broken up eight months prior, and Lennon seems convinced that the 1960s cultural revolution failed to produce real change. “Nothing happened except that we all dressed up,” he says. “The same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything, it’s exactly the same. […]. We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game” (12). The band’s final years were in Lennon’s view humiliating and awful. People were thrust on them and would touch them. To recover, he made his first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, released the same month as the interview. The album cover features John and Yoko relaxing under a tree beside a lake at Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park estate. A church bell rings in the opening seconds of “Mother,” the first track on Side A.
By the time of “Working Class Hero,” my thoughts are of primal scream therapy and psychic restitution. That’s what one seeks through psychotherapy, is it not? “Psychic restitution”? It all seems a bit too rooted in the past. It is time instead to re-read Eroding Witness by Nathaniel Mackey.
Trance-Scripts 