The best concert that John Lennon ever played: “I never felt so good”
The last thing that John Lennon wanted to do was go on tour after The Beatles broke up.
He liked the idea of playing music to anyone who would hear him, but when you look at the way that he worked in the 1970s, he wasn’t going to do anything that involved him going on the road for years at a time or trying to get back on the same cycle of album-tour-album-tour. He had finally earned his freedom once he quit the Fab Four, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still have some fun from time to time as well.
But it’s not like Lennon was one of the most reliable live acts that anyone had ever seen. Some Time in New York City already had some of his most pointed political material being played live, but there were also more than a few people pissed off about having to listen to Yoko Ono’s more avant-garde material every single time he took to the stage as well. When he had the spotlight on him, though, you would have sworn that he had lost nothing since the days of the Cavern Club.
He was always ready to jam with anyone and everyone that he worked with, and when he got up onstage with Elton John, you would have thought that he was given a hero’s welcome when he set foot onstage at Madison Square Garden. He didn’t miss a beat whenever he played but it was going to take a while before he was ready to go back onstage after spending his days in the studio for so long.
He didn’t feel the need to put on shows all that often, and since he did the most damage in the studio, it made more sense for him to focus on making his songs sound perfect. But aside from the odd television appearance with The Beatles or their final concert on the rooftops of Apple Corps, his show at the Toronto Peace Festival with The Plastic Ono Band was his way of reintroducing himself to the world all over again.
The Fab Four hadn’t yet called it quits, but Lennon was clearly testing the waters for what a solo outfit could have looked like. He didn’t want to play anything all that complicated, but even without having any proper rehearsal, he fit in perfectly with Klaus Voorman and Eric Clapton when tearing through those old rock and roll tunes. He felt better than he had in a long time, and while he was racked with nerves leading up to actually playing, he felt the kind of adrenaline rush that day that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
Even after playing the gig, Lennon considered it to be one of the greatest concerts that he ever played in his life, saying, “The buzz was incredible. I never felt so good in my life. Everybody was with us and leaping up and down doing the peace sign, because they knew most of the numbers anyway. When we did ‘Money’ and ‘Dizzy’ I just made up the words as I went along. The band was bashing it out like hell behind me. We did ‘Yer Blues’ because I’ve done that with Eric before. It blew our minds. And we did a number called ‘Cold Turkey’ we’d never done before and they dug it like mad.”
But a lot of that probably came from the fact that he didn’t have to deal with tons of screaming fans. The Beatles had already dealt with moments where they couldn’t even hear themselves half the time they played, but when you listen to them performing on the live record of the night, Lennon was happy enough playing to fans that didn’t have to cause a frenzy every time he uttered a word into the microphone.
He could finally be free to play any song that he wanted to, and while he did have some stiff competition with Alice Cooper and The Doors playing that night, there was no way that anyone was going to forget seeing a Beatle in the flesh. This was the first time in a while that anyone got to hear one of the Fabs playing live, and while some were heartbroken that his bandmates weren’t by his side, this was the first sign that things were changing in Lennon’s life.
