John Lennon / The Plastic Ono Band - Live Peace In Toronto (1969) [2006, MFSL, UDCD 763] Repost

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John Lennon / The Plastic Ono Band - Live Peace In Toronto (1969) [2006, MFSL, UDCD 763] Repost

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The public is starved for music from the Big Three of rock and roll — an album and maybe a single a year isn't enough, and the rest of the musicians on both sides of the Atlantic are not providing enough excitement on their own to let us take what we get from Dylan, the Stones and the Beatles and be satisfied. We want more, and as the slogan goes, "find a hole and fill it," and thus it's being filled up fast.

Of the two new Dylan pirate albums, John Birch has much better fidelity than the original Great White Wonder set, while Stealin' sounds just fine. LIVE r Than You'll Ever Be, the album of the Stones' Oakland performance, is superb. It almost begins to make one think that in at least one case these are really "pirate" tapes — that is, stolen, from Columbia's vaults. Live Peace in Toronto 1969, by John, Eric, Yoko and friends, was bootlegged for a short time in Michigan, but Apple has put out the real thing, a sort of John Lennon Tour Through the History of Rock and Roll, and it's more fun than anything he's done in a long while, with a great deal more vitality than Abbey Road, in fact.

In a way, the bootleg phenomena may well force artists to respond to what the public wants — or lose a lot of bread. One obvious way to squelch the Great White Wonder album, without arousing any bad feelings, would have been to issue the basement tape; the way to kill the new live Stones' album would be to release a similar LP that was even better.

There are at least two reasons why this isn't happening. First of all, an artist is supposed to be able to select what he wants to release to the public, regardless of what his record company, or the public, thinks it wants; and secondly, it's never too good an idea to flood the market with too much good stuff. Or is it? That's how the Beatles barnstormed their way into our hearts — albums all over the place, singles onetwothreefourfive on the charts.

But the bootleggers might well force more albums out of the Stones and Dylan, in particular. They might also have an opposite result: the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan might decide that it just isn't worth it to go on the road if any and perhaps every performance is going to be covered and released by the local bootleg squad, without concern for their knowledge, consent, artistic control or financial prerogatives.

John Lennon is the one man who seems to have escaped this dilemma without much trouble at all. With Abbey Road; Two Virgins; Life With the Lions; "Give Peace a Chance"; rock and roll's first day-after-Thanksgiving single, "Cold Turkey"; The Wedding Album; and now Live Peace, he and Yoko are simply documenting their careers, musical and personal, with a total abandonment of privacy and complete genuflection to The Public. It's hard to think of something newsworthy that John has done in the past year that has not been set down, in one way or another, on record. Whatever else you might want to say, they're not holding much back. Except Get Back; but that is exactly the point; with an LP as good as Live Peace to play, we can wait for the next one.

As for these four albums themselves, consider them new records by the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan (though less so is this case). They aren't going to be around for very long, and simply on the basis of their musical quality, they should be bought right now. None of these albums is a mere "collectors' item," like the Great White Wonder stuff — all of them are listenable and exciting on their own terms.

RollingStone

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John Lennon / The Plastic Ono Band - Live Peace In Toronto (1969) [2006, MFSL, UDCD 763] Repost

Close

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John Lennon / The Plastic Ono Band - Live Peace In Toronto (1969) [2006, MFSL, UDCD 763] Repost

Close