The Bob Dylan song that comforted Yoko Ono on the night John Lennon humiliated her
John Lennon and Yoko Ono‘s relationship is not measurable by normal standards. They met at a point when he was the most famous person in the world, or perhaps more accurately, the most famous person in history, and he was little more than a boy. They quickly fell in love, but everything unfurled in the public eye, casting their existence into an unprecedented realm.
Nothing was straightforward from then on, even his widely documented Lost Weekend days when he fled the relationship with his assistant. If you ask May Pang, she’ll tell you there was always tenderness at the heart of their galavanting days—even from the beginning. “Listen May, John and I are not getting along. We’ve been arguing. We’re growing apart,” her book, Loving John, startingly opens, documenting a discussion between the young assistant and Yoko Ono. Contrary to all conventional imaginings, according to Pang, the whole thing was largely started, orchestrated, and terminated by the Japanese artist.
The cracks had begun to show in a damning public display a few months prior to this supposed chat in 1972. Lennon and Yoko Ono were at a party at Jerry Rubin’s apartment in New York. The premise was an election watch-along, but alcohol soon began to take over. This became particularly apparent when it became clear that Richard Nixon – a candidate that Lennon loathed – was about to win. In fairness, Lennon was right to be wary. Unsealed documents years later would prove that Nixon was actively plotting to have the former Beatle deported during his tenure.
However, this can serve as little excuse for his reprehensible behaviour that night—even if his relationship was decidedly unique. While the party was still in full swing and his wife was chatting to the fellow guests, a drunken Lennon slunk away from the crowd to a bedroom with another party guest, where they began loudly having sex.
The couple’s friend, Elliot Mintz, was also at the party and he recalled in his memoir, We All Shine On: John, Yoko, and Me, the sad night. ”They proceeded to have such loud, raucous sex that everyone sitting around the TV in Jerry Rubin’s living room — including Yoko — could clearly hear them going at it.”
It was loud, unmistakable and shameful. Worse still, it was inescapable. Lennon had chosen the room where all the guest’s coats were being stored. So, everyone was trapped in the living room, listening. “Throughout it all, Yoko sat on the sofa, in stunned, mortified silence, as other guests began awkwardly getting up to leave,” Mintz added. They soon realised they, because their keys were being held hostage at the scene of the crime.
Their only hope was to drown it out. What song do you turn to in such a moment? What track could possibly mask the unspooling, awkward shame? And be long enough to guarantee that it masked it in its entirety? Well, one guest clutching at straws decided to play Bob Dylan’s classic ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’. It certainly has an 11-minute runtime in its favour, but it was perhaps a rather solemn song for the situation. Still, it was a gesture that brought a small semblance of comfort to Yoko Ono.
She would later tell Mintz that she could indeed forgive Lennon for his behaviour but that she was not sure she could forget the harrowing incident that cast a dark shadow over their future. Soon after, the pair would take a break from each other, and he would set off on his Lost Weekend.
When he returned, and they rekindled their relationship against the odds, he commented, “It’s like – and this is no disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with – but I feel like I was running around with me head off, and now I’ve got me head back on.” All it took was a phone call from Yoko Ono saying come back home. They marked the new chapter of their marriage with a small ceremony.
“It’s like I went out to get a coffee or a newspaper somewhere and it took a year – like Sinbad. I went on a boat and went around the world and had a mad trip, which I’m glad is over,” he told NME. “Yoko and I have known each other for nine years, which is a long friendship on any level. It was a long year, but it’s been a nine-year relationship and a seven-year marriage. Maybe it was the ‘seven-year itch’. And apart from the pain we caused each other it probably helped us.”
He concluded: “We knew we were getting back together. It was just a matter of when. We knew. Everybody else might not have, but we did.”
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