663. well (baby please don’t go)

As already noted, John and Yoko’s Some Time in New York City has to rate as mostly disastrous, there being far too much Yoko Ono in the mix, and the sort of one-note politicking that feels like a repeated kick to the head. And yet there are a few moments such as the live take on Well (Baby Please Don’t Go) which happens to include Frank Zappa (and at least some of the Mothers) tearing things up with all due savagery and respect. Even Yoko’s saxophonic wailing kind of works, at least for a while.

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931. John Sinclair

In which ex-Beatle John cries foul at the imprisonment of his friend John Sinclair (artist, shit-disturber, manager of the MC5) who was busted for two joints of marijuana, thrown in jail for ten years. Welcome to Richard Nixon’s America. Found on 1972’s Sometime in New York City, an album which was not well received at the time. Or as Philip Random puts it, “Definitive proof that Yoko really can’t sing and John, for all his musical genius, still has to at least try for a album to be even half-way good. Feel free to skip this one, except John Sinclair, of course.”

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