He said it like a man who’d just seen God in a parking lot.
“Lennon’s going to be here!” he shouted, voice cracking with the kind of hope that only rock and roll or religion can summon. “I just heard it—John Lennon’s gonna be here. Hot damn!”
He jittered in his seat like a man with too much caffeine and not enough conviction, eyes darting between the Padres game and the stage that loomed like a concrete altar. “What inning is it? The ninth? How many more are there?”
The city had been baited. KPRI, with all the subtlety of a carnival barker, had promised “the most significant musical event of the year.” A phrase so bloated with self-importance it practically begged to be deflated. Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band were the headliners, but the real draw—the unspoken seduction—was the possibility of Lennon. No one needed to say it. It was in the air, like ozone before a storm. Lennon would come. He had to. He’d played for the retarded children in Central Park. He’d sung for John Sinclair, the jailed poet-activist, and turned protest into melody. Surely he’d show up for San Diego’s sickle cell clinics. Surely.
Jimmy Smith, “The Incredible,” took the stage first. Forty minutes of jazz noodling that circled itself like a dog chasing its tail. Smith, a man whose fingers had once inspired rock gods, now seemed to be playing for himself and a ghost audience that had long since moved on. He stitched together fragments of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, but the seams showed.
The crowd was restless. The stage towered fifty feet above them, a monolith of bad planning. Crew members loitered in front of the platform like bureaucrats at a revolution. The people craned their necks and squinted into the sun, and when they couldn’t see, they jeered.
Papa John Creach came next, electric violin in hand, backed by a band called Zulu that was tight but uninspired. The audience had already checked out. They played Frisbee on the baseball diamond. Someone ran the bases. Another slid into home. The music was background noise to a game of make-believe.
Creach saw it, laughed, and played on. He was a professional. He’d done this with Jefferson Airplane, with Hot Tuna. He knew the drill. But the crowd didn’t care. They were waiting for a Beatle.
“Where’s Lennon, goddammit?” someone growled.
The air was thick with catcalls and war whoops, the kind of primal noise that comes not from joy but from the slow boil of disappointment.
And then she came.
Yoko Ono, flanked by three bodyguards in black, walked to the mic like a priestess to the pyre. She wore white—pants, shirt, the whole ensemble—and raised her arms in greeting. The Plastic Ono Band struck up a beat, mechanical and methodical, and Yoko began to wail.
It wasn’t singing. It was something else. A high-pitched warble, raw and unfiltered, like chalk dragged across a blackboard in a hurricane.
“Hello, San Diego,” she said, peeking up from her lyric sheets. She spoke of expectations, of how the city was nicer than she’d imagined.
“Where’s John?” someone muttered behind me.
She introduced a song for her missing daughter, Kyoko. “Don’t worry Kyoko,” she shrieked, again and again, until the words lost meaning and became sound. Then came “Woman Power,” a feminist anthem with a Miles Davis groove and more of Yoko’s vocal acrobatics.
The exodus began.
People streamed toward the exits like ants from a burning hill.
“Let’s do a slow blues,” Yoko said.
She sat at the edge of the stage, hair falling over her face like a veil. She didn’t sing. She moaned. She sighed. She mimicked the rhythm with breathy theatrics, and midway through, she feigned an orgasm—gasping, writhing, a performance that felt less like art and more like a dare.
The song ended.
She stood.
“All right, see you later,” she said, and vanished.
No Lennon.
“Let’s hear it for Yoko in her first San Diego appearance,” someone announced.
“And her last,” came a voice behind me.
I turned and shook his hand.
Originally published in the San Diego Reader.
