Power to the People (The Ultimate Collection)

John Lennon and Yoko Ono adopted New York City as their home in 1971, just before the release of Imagine. Crammed into a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, they immersed themselves in the city’s counterculture, absorbing progressive politics whenever they weren’t glued to the television set. Lennon’s celebrity secured the duo a large platform to espouse these ideas—they even spent a week co-hosting The Mike Douglas Show when it was the biggest syndicated talk show in America. He and Ono used their stint on the show to introduce mainstream America to Yippies co-founder Jerry Rubin and Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. That activist sensibility permeates their 1972 album Some Time in New York City, where Lennon and Ono sing about feminist solidarity, the Irish Troubles, marijuana, Attica State, and other important concerns of the time. It’s a greasy rock’n’roll record designed as an underground press bulletin, a deliberate political provocation intended to stir listeners into action.

John & Yoko continued their activism that August with One to One, a pair of benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, where they performed many songs from Some Time. Power to the People—a new nine-CD, three-BluRay set produced by Sean Ono Lennon and Simon Hilton—is built around these performances, adding demos, home recordings, live appearances, and studio sessions to the mix. Although Some Time’s songs are at the heart of this box, this isn’t precisely an expanded edition of the record—even if it’s part of a line of deluxe editions of the key albums of Lennon’s post-Beatles career. In total, Power to the People is a vivid document of that brief period when he and Ono reinvented themselves as radicals, running around with the Black Panthers, yippies, hippies, and assorted scumbags teeming in the New York City underground.

At the One To One concerts, Lennon displayed a certain nervous energy, which pairs well with the sleazeball boogie of Elephant’s Memory, a local NYC band best known for its contributions to the soundtrack of Midnight Cowboy. Elephant’s Memory served as the backing band for Some Time, but were too slack and lackadaisical to get through the One To One concerts without the reinforcement of drummer Jim Keltner, who helps give the performance a serious, heavy swing.

Frontloading Power to the People with the One To One performances—the two sets are here, along with a hybrid highlights disc—illustrates how Lennon spent the early ’70s wallowing in the pleasures of old-time rock’n’roll. Even when he and Ono are having an improvisatory freak-out with Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, it’s rooted in basic three-chord changes. Almost all of the songs John and Yoko wrote during this period are deliberately simple: “Sisters, O Sisters” is a revved-up girl group number, “Attica State” and “John Sinclair” are straightforward blues, “The Luck of the Irish” is a folk ballad, ”New York City” is high-octane Chuck Berry boogie.

The exception to the rule is the one song of the period that isn’t here: “Woman is the N***** of the World,” an overblown wall-of-sound homage intended as an anthem of feminist solidarity, inspired by a slogan Yoko Ono likely adapted from a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The box set ignores that track (despite the fact that Lennon chose it as Some Time’s single), cutting it out of the new mixes of the album and the accompanying concerts. Its absence helps shift the story towards Lennon’s continued return to the big bang of 1950s rock’n’roll during this volatile period. Left to his own devices, he sings oldies: the last song disc here is a “Home Jam,” where he’s sitting around the house strumming Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly tunes. On its cousin “Studio Jam” disc, Lennon leads his band through Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley rockers. These passages are loose, maybe even to a fault, but they’re charming, capturing one of the greatest rock vocalists singing unencumbered by an audience.

These two discs of informal jams are the ideal coda to Power to the People, which chronicles the era when Lennon was keenly aware that he was performing at all times. It wasn’t just that he was playing his first live shows since the breakup of the Beatles. Lennon and Ono were omnipresent in 1971 and 1972, heading off to Ann Arbor to play a rally to free John Sinclair, strumming songs with Phil Ochs in a hotel room, accepting seemingly any offer to appear on TV, as evidenced by their appearance on the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy telethon. A rousing reggae-fied version of “Give Peace a Chance,” plucked from the telethon, features Lewis himself as part of the onstage chorus; his appearance crystallizes the essential oddness of this period. Even as he got his hands grimy in the leftist underground, Lennon remained one of the most famous men in the world, using mainstream platforms to preach politics to the masses. The dissonance of this intersection remains intriguing, long after the headlines have faded away.

John Lennon, Yoko Ono, The Plastic Ono Band & Elephant’s Memory: Power to the People (The Ultimate Collection)

$65 at Rough Trade

$65 at Amazon