50 years on from the 1972 John Lennon and Yoko Ono concert at Madison Square Garden
50 years have passed since John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed two legendary benefits gigs at the Madison Square Garden in New York. The couple played separate shows in the afternoon and the evening with The Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory band.
The 1972 concerts took place in aid of the Willowbrook School for Children. However, rumours had begun to circulate prior to the event, claiming that the money raised would be going to the artists involved, rather than the children themselves. This led to an unnamed act dropping off the bill.
ABC TV reporter Geraldo Rivera organised the concerts, which also featured performances by Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack and Sha Na Na. John Lennon reportedly bought $60,000 worth of tickets and gave them to the event’s volunteer fundraisers free of charge. Several members of the audience were given a tambourine upon their entry and were asked to play them during the performance.
When the John Lennon estate posthumously released the Live in New York City album in 1986, several of the tracks were recorded during the concerts, including ‘Come Together’, ‘Imagine’ ‘Instant Karma’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Well Well Well’. A short piece of ‘Give Peace a Chance’ also appears on Lennon’s compilation album Shaved Fish, released in 1975. Yoko’s performance of ‘Move On Fast’ would also be given airtime on BBC2 in 1973 on The Old Grey Whistle Test.
The concert took place just over a year after George Harrison had set up the first rock show in aid of a humanitarian cause at the Madison Square Garden. The show was the Concert for Bangladesh.
Just a few weeks prior to the event, there had been a planned disruption of the Republican Convention during Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign from August 21st – 23rd. Lennon and Yoko had been rumoured to be part of the disruption, but Lennon denied their involvement on the Dick Cavett Show in May of that year. Lennon had been associated with radical political ideals, and this had led to the US government wanting to organise his deportation.
Then, a few weeks after the benefit concerts, Lennon and Yoko appeared on Jerry Lee Lewis’ Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, another concert in aid of charity. Lewis would refer to the pair as “two of the most unusual people in all the world, and I don’t mean just in the world of entertainment. They fit no patterns, meet no standards except the standard of excellence.”
