When John Lennon was murdered on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in December 1980, it was a tragedy that took place in that strange winter hinterland between the defeat of a Democratic presidential candidate and the inauguration of a Republican one. Ronald Reagan had just won a landslide victory over the beleaguered incumbent Jimmy Carter, whose 1977 inauguration Lennon and Ono had attended. The election concluded a tumultuous decade where America was, as Democratic Socialist thinker Michael Harrington termed it, ‘moving vigorously left, right and center at the same time.’ The attrition and possibility of the 1970s was over, if you wanted it.

Kevin MacDonald’s surprisingly good film One To One: John & Yoko turns back the clock to Lennon and Ono in 1972, at the height of that decade’s radical flux. The two One to One concerts in Madison Square Gardens that summer were Lennon’s first (and only) solo full-length concert after leaving The Beatles. Lennon in the 1970s may have been the laziest former Beatle, but that same distracted and media saturated quality — a constantly throughout the singer’s adult life — provides MacDonald’s film with its formal hook. 

‘I heard this interview with John, where he talks about how when he first arrived in America, all he did was watch TV,’ the director told The Guardian. ‘I thought, “That’s a way into this. Let’s make the film about them watching TV and learning about America.”’ One to One: John & Yoko, a montage movie that is partially about a concert, to its immense improvement, serves as a dizzying archival tour through Nixon’s America. 

The Working-Class Dream

At the start of the 1970s, Lennon was in flight from what he refers to in the film as ‘the working-class dream’ — in his case, an enormous and lonely mansion in commuter belt Surrey. New York City had been Ono’s home since the late 1950s, and the now married couple moved to a two-bed rental on Greenwich Village’s Bank Street. 

Here, MacDonald’s film shows them at the centre of a maelstrom of left countercultural activity, enhanced through archival audio tapes of the couple’s phone calls, which they taped out of fair suspicion that they were being bugged. With anti-war activists Jerry Rubin and the Chicago 7 defendant Abbie Hoffman, Lennon and Ono plot to organise a voter registration drive tour. This is before Lennon is served with deportation papers seemingly due to a historic British drugs offence (FBI communication, made public in the 1980s, confirmed that the termination of Lennon’s visa was internally framed as a ‘strategic counter-measure.’) And then there is AJ Weberman, the activist locked in a bizarre and wrongheaded Oedipal rage against Bob Dylan — who he believed had awoken his generation’s politics only to abandon them — and convinced that the route to the revolution could be found in the folk singer’s bins.

A Hallmark version of this story is available in this year’s jukebox musical A Complete Unknown, which, as Leo Robson has written, sheared the story not just of any meaningful politics but of ‘thinking of any kind.’ In that film, someone is always turning on the television to see the assassination of JFK or news of the Cuban Missile Crisis. What is so refreshing about One to One is its largely cliché-free association of non-contextualised information: late night chat shows, The Waltons, showgirl performances, adverts for Coke and for Cadillacs, the Black Liberation Army’s hijacking of a flight, shellshocked reporters outside the Attica prison riot.

John and Yoko in Nixonland

All of these images would become the gift of the film’s other protagonist, Richard Nixon. The Nixon strategy, particularly in the run up to the 1972 election, was to foster white grievance against the perceived chaos of that era’s discontents. Civil rights activists, countercultural hippies, feminists, Black Panthers, liberal pop stars, anyone against whom Nixon could contrast his own humble background, utilising his immense capacities for personal grudge. As part of this, Nixon in 1972 warned his advisors that there should be ‘no more rhetoric from the Administration (that) contained any kind of anti-union implications,’ brokering a temporary détente between capital and labour to help peel union workers away from bread-and-butter economics and into his socially conservative, Silent Majority coalition. 

You can see this in the film, when Nixon introduces a White House gala to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the not entirely countercultural Reader’s Digest magazine, with wholesome entertainment provided by The Ray Conniff Singers, an all-American interwar-style big band. If the music is square, grins Nixon, ‘that’s because I like it square!’

But the event goes stunningly off-script: Canadian singer Carole Feraci holds up a sign saying ‘Stop the Killing’ and directly addresses Nixon: ‘President Nixon, stop bombing human beings, animals and vegetation. You go to church on Sundays and pray to Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ were here tonight, you would not dare drop another bomb.’ It is the most brilliant, daring moment of activism in the film. 

God Bless The Establishment

Outside a New York City courtroom to contest his deportation, we see Lennon instruct a TV news camera to capture a ‘hard-hat’ who he swears just gave him the peace sign. This returns during the concert, when Lennon, Ono and band are shown wearing industrial yellow hard-hats. In Nixon’s America, the hard-hat had become a symbol of blue-collar conservatism, which the musicians were playfully adopting. In May 1970, tens of thousands of New York construction workers turned out on the streets to protest ‘red’ Mayor Lindsay — the city’s pro-civil rights, anti-Vietnam War civic leader — and support Nixon’s foreign policies, holding signs declaring ‘God Bless The Establishment’ and ‘Lindsay For Mayor of Hanoi’. 

It is those most brutally forgotten by the American establishment, though, to whom MacDonald’s film turns its attention in its final third. The One to One benefit concert was to raise money for the children of Willowbrook State School. This was a Staten Island institute for disabled children — built for 4000, but housing 6000, making it the largest in the US at the time. Its horror conditions were briefly a political issue in the 1960s (Robert F. Kennedy had toured the site and declared it ‘less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo’). Nothing changed. In 1972, investigative reporter Geraldo Rivera conducted a series of WABC-TV reports on the overcrowding, physical and sexual abuse in the institute. The images, displayed in the film, are horrific. Lennon and Ono caught the reports on television, and organised the One To One benefit shows with the aim of funding one to one care for the children. 

The show is a compelling overview of the best things about Lennon’s scatty early 1970s output — the tubthumping, leftist pop of ‘Instant Karma’ and ‘Power To The People’, a jaw-dropping and intense ‘Mother’ — but it’s Ono’s songs that are most recognisably exciting and disruptive. A tightly wound version of ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ recalls the avant-garde funk of Miles Davis’ 1972 masterpiece On The Corner. Shockingly, when the One To One show was first released in 1986, after Lennon’s death, all of Ono’s songs were deleted to create a purely Lennon album, her backing vocals mixed out of tracks like ‘Hound Dog’ (shown here accompanying a slow-dancing Nixon). Some of the most powerful footage in the film is Ono’s presence at the first International Feminist Conference at Harvard University in 1973, discussing how British racism — upgrading her from a “bitch” to a ‘witch’ — first led her to develop a stammer and miscarry, before informing her feminist politics and activism.

Get Their False Teeth and Their Health Looked After

Of course, the film — a product of the Lennon and Ono estate, with remastered sound by their son Sean Ono Lennon — is steely in its omissions. It is not too unfair to point out that, while saving America’s children, Lennon was at the same time fully estranged from his own infant son Julian. On election night 1972, as Nixon won 49 out of 50 states (the ‘squares’ had spoken), a grim instance of infidelity from Lennon at an activist party attended by his wife led to a fracture in their marriage. Though they moved upstate to the Dakota building, the couple separated, and Lennon spent the middle 1970s marooned in soft rock, cocaine, and a more orthodox relationship with celebrity. 

In the wider country, the hope and possibility of the early 1970s did not survive the oil shocks and miserable inflation that followed. Ono and Lennon reunited, and their appearance in black tie at Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inauguration was not just a personal outing for a now respectable famous couple, but emblematic of liberals and the left getting in line behind the Democratic presidency (AJ Weberman needn’t have worried: Carter was a huge Dylan nut). In 1978, Lennon wrote regretfully of ‘the biggest mistake’ that he and Ono made in becoming ‘influenced by the male-macho ‘serious revolutionaries’ and abandoning their bed-ins and billboard campaigns. 

In the end, the Democratic Party could not successfully resolve its blue-collar base and the 1960s demands for racial and gender equality, or at least not against a backdrop of rising prices and corporate America retooling for a more nakedly interventionist role in politics (something US historian Rick Perlstein termed ‘the boardroom Jacobins’).

It’s indicative of how far Lennon and Ono had moved on from that early 1970s moment that, when they were promoting their new album Double Fantasy in the winter of 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan passed without comment. Lennon did describe himself to Playboy magazine, though, as an ‘instinctive socialist’, which meant that ‘people should get their false teeth and their health looked after, all the rest of it.’ 

Instead, the forty-year old John Lennon kept fidelity to the countercultural dream in his own quiet way: getting yellow taxis instead of a chauffeur, signing records and chatting to fans, and walking unaccompanied without a bodyguard in the New York City night.