{"id":633,"date":"2025-03-26T14:16:59","date_gmt":"2025-03-26T14:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/?p=633"},"modified":"2025-07-14T12:18:37","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T12:18:37","slug":"104-the-ballad-of-john-and-yoko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomhartley.me.uk\/beatles\/104-the-ballad-of-john-and-yoko\/","title":{"rendered":"104: The Ballad Of John And Yoko"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Ballad Of John And Yoko was the A-side of a single released in May 1969. The song is Lennon’s autobiographical account of his recent wedding<\/a> and the (largely self-imposed) furore surrounding it. <\/p>\n\n\n

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A snapshot of the events surrounding John Lennon\u2018s marriage to Yoko Ono, \u2018The Ballad Of John And Yoko\u2019 was recorded in a single day by just Lennon and Paul McCartney.<\/p>\"TheContinue reading on Beatles Bible \u2192<\/a><\/div><\/div>

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"The Ballad of John and Yoko" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a non-album single in May 1969. Written by John Lennon[3] and credited to the Lennon\u2013McCartney partnership, the song chronicles the events surrounding t…<\/div>Continue reading on Wikipedia \u2192<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

John and Yoko had begun their intense relationship in May 1968, around the Beatles’ return from India, just as the White Album project was taking shape. John had arranged for his first wife, Cynthia, to take a holiday in Greece and during her absence he invited Yoko to stay at his house in Surrey. They recorded the avant-garde sound collages that were later to be released as Two Virgins<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Well, after Yoko and I met, I didn’t realize I was in love with her. I was still thinking it was an artistic collaboration, as it were \u2013 producer and artist, right?\u00a0… My ex-wife was away\u00a0… and Yoko came to visit me.\u00a0… instead of making love, we went upstairs and made tapes. I had this room full of different tapes where I would write and make strange loops and things like that for the Beatles’ stuff. So we made a tape all night. She was doing her funny voices and I was pushing all different buttons on my tape recorder and getting sound effects. And then as the sun rose we made love and that was\u00a0Two Virgins<\/em>. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The Unfinished Music No 1: Two Virgins album cover<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cynthia arrived home unexpectedly and found the couple in matching bathrobes staring into one another’s eyes. Cynthia and John divorced by November 1968, by which point Yoko was pregnant (the pregnancy was ultimately lost to miscarriage). Yoko’s own divorce was finalized in February 1969. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile John and Yoko’s artistic and romantic relationship had intensified even further. They were now, almost literally, inseparable. Yoko had been present in the studio throughout the recording of the White Album and Let It Be sessions. Her presence had at least contributed to an erosion of the band’s formerly unshakeable unity and to the disruption of their relationships with the technical team and producer. John would sometimes defer to Yoko in discussing the Beatles’ artistic and business decisions, she would make uninvited contributions to such discussions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John’s enthusiasm for the Beatles projects visibly fluctuated, and at the same time he and Yoko had, effectively, turned their shared daily lives into a piece of performance art. The Two Virgins album (including its sleeve, in which they literally bare all) was the first and stunningly clear example of this new direction, which was to remain a theme for the couple, as individual artists and collaborators, for the rest of their lives. It was really a continuation of Ono’s existing programme, she had already been a conceptual and performance artist before meeting Lennon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this context, their own wedding was to become part of the show. Although they wanted a degree of privacy and were trying to escape press intrusion, they also wanted to exploit the unavoidable attention the event would receive to get an audience for their performance art and its underlying messages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They planned to marry quickly and away from the public eye but had difficulty arranging it; because of legal considerations relating to Ono’s nationality and citizenship, they had to be married in Britain. Perhaps it would have been possible to arrange a quick and secret registry office wedding as Paul and Linda McCartney did in March 1969, but Ono and Lennon took a different route, travelling to France (they hoped to marry on the ferry – but that was not allowed), and then finding their way to Gibraltar – a British Overseas territory on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula (“near Spain” as the song lyrics diplomatically put it). Having gone through the formalities of the marriage very quickly, they then travelled to Amsterdam where they used their honeymoon as a platform for their first bed-In<\/a> (a combination of performance art and anti-war protest). They then visited Austria where they conducted a press conference from inside a large bag<\/a>. On their return, they sent acorns to world leaders, another project combining peace protest and art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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John Lennon and Yoko Ono in a bag.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It’s easy to see that these behaviours were troubling to people who thought they knew Lennon (Ono was pretty well known in artistic circles but nowhere near as famous as Lennon). He had previously seemed like an accessible, grounded and outspoken pop star, making unambiguously brilliant and sometimes challenging music. He was funny if somewhat acerbic and occasionally earnest, always independent-minded. After meeting Ono, he transformed very rapidly into a new an unfamiliar form, making inaccessible art that was deliberately eccentric, self referential, self-absorbed, and sometimes quite dark. He was no longer independent-minded, instead presenting himself as part of a two-headed organism (where the other head did a lot of the talking). Whether he was being earnest or ironic was not always clear. This was unsettling to the press and public. The Lennons came in for a lot of mockery and Ono was also the target of misogyny, xenophobia and racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This misunderstanding, mockery and abuse had a galvanising effect on Lennon, and who wrote the Ballad Of John And Yoko in the days following the wedding and its aftermath. Returning to England he was keen to finish and release the song as quickly as possible. Harrison and Starr were unavailable, Lennon and McCartney completed the writing at McCartney’s St John’s Wood home and then recorded the song in a single session at Abbey Road. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite the absence of two of the Beatles, the session went very well with McCartney playing the drums and George Martin and Geoff Emerick being involved again. It is a nice simple, clean production which has a 1950s feel to it. However turbulent Lennon’s life may have been, he seems energized, argumentative and witty, as if to say “I’m still the same guy, you’re just not getting it.” McCartney had, like Starr and Harrison, been disturbed by Lennon’s private transformation and especially by Ono’s continuaL presence in the studio; although he had come to accept it, their partnership was strained almost to breaking point. The fact that he collaborated so closely on this personal song dealing with the subject, was supportive and generous. It was probably important in keeping the band together at least for a little longer. Ono later commented:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“Paul knew that people were being nasty to John, and he just wanted to make it well for him. Paul has a very brotherly side to him.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While the verses of The Ballad Of John And Yoko describe the events of the wedding and unusual honeymoon, the lyrics of the chorus compare Lennon’s tribulations with those of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Christ, you know it ain\u2019t easy
You know how hard it can be
The way things are going
They\u2019re gonna crucify me<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The words have the kind of multiple overlapping interpretations that had always appealed to Lennon and McCartney and which they must have found irresistible: first “Christ!” can be read as an exasperated exclamation. In British English this is a fairly mild utterance that has become more or less completely detached from it’s original meaning and is used to express surprise or frustration. In the late sixties it would have still been mildly titillating to use in a song lyric, but no more so than “knickers”, “pornographic”, “Cold Turkey” or “I need a fix”. But putting the phrase into the chorus, linking it to “crucify” leads to an alternative reading in which “Christ” is being addressed in a (metaphorical and rather blasphemous) prayer, directly comparing Lennon’s predicament with the pivotal event in the foundation of Christianity. It ups the ante a little. Britain in the late sixties was already pretty secular, but Lennon and McCartney were keenly aware of the international ramifications of such comparisons after an incautious quote from Lennon had led to “the Beatles are bigger than Jesus” crisis<\/a> in 1966. So the chorus would have given Lennon the perverse thrill of crossing that line again. Even McCartney might have taken some transgressive pleasure from it (probably against his better judgment).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A final intriguing layer of meaning is that the comparison with Christ might be taken literally, that Lennon sometimes thought of himself as like Jesus in a “messiah bringing peace to the world” sense. This idea is unpacked a little in a recent article by Ian Leslie<\/a>. It’s a pretty nuanced topic, but one I think that will have crossed many Beatles fans’ minds. As Leslie says: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I doubt that John carried around a consistent conviction that he was the messiah. But ever since he was a kid, he had felt special. As an adult he was always looking for ways to cope with his often painful experience of childhood – to understand his psychic suffering. I would guess that John\u2019s idea he was Jesus, or a Jesus-like figure, flickered in out of his consciousness, a daydream he sometimes took seriously during times of stress. After all, John was prepped to believe. He had lived a life in which his most outlandish dreams proved real. If a boy from Liverpool could become more famous and successful than anyone on the planet, what other crazy things might be true?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I can understand this point of view and it is tricky to write about without overstating things. Lennon was a great artist and a very flawed but honest, intelligent and thoughtful man. I don’t think he seriously entertained the idea that he was a supernatural messiah*. But he did compare his situation with Jesus Christ’s. Knowing that his words and actions carried a great deal of weight, what should he say and do? Sometimes he felt he had the answers, and at those moments perhaps it is fair to say he started to think of himself as a Jesus-like figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If so, as Leslie suggests, such feelings were not consistent; at times, he may have felt he had the answers, but with Lennon the answers changed from one time to the next. At times, Lennon dressed in white, grew a long beard and he wrote idealistic songs that talked about love and peace. At times, he did think he was special. At times he could appear to have a messianic stance. As comedian Richard Herring used to joke: “I’m not saying I’m Jesus… that is for other people to say.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more consistent element of Lennon’s outlook was his realistic assessment of his near unique situation; his words really did carry a lot of influence with a great many people, and he really was special in the sense that he had created an unprecedentedly influential body of work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair to Lennon, there are probably millions of comparably ingenious and innovative creative minds around the world who we never heard of because they did not believe they were special. He knew he was an ordinary person, but he also knew from personal experience that an ordinary person can only achieve amazing things if they have self-belief. I would argue that every creative genius is just an ordinary person who is willing to believe they are special. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This video (excerpted from the Imagine documentary) is quite telling:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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