SXSW Interview: Yoko Ono
Austin Convention Center, Friday, March 18Yoko Ono’s been called many things, but was it Dorothy Parker who said, “I don’t care what they say about me, as long as it isn’t true”? Her son Sean Lennon’s Chimera Music label is what brought her to Austin, and they’ll be reactivating the Plastic Ono Band tonight (Saturday) at Elysium. In conversation with longtime local friend and deejay Jody Denberg, she spoke about art, aging, and activism – and was quite funny. When asked about John Lennon’s powerful guitar playing on their collaborations, she responded, “Well, he was competing with my voice.” That voice has been a source of derision for decades, as has her music. Ironically, when she told her father she wanted to be a composer, he encouraged her to sing instead. “I avoided being an artist,” explained Ono. “My mother was a repressed painter.” There were touching stories, as when Denberg brought up Ono’s 1964 book Grapefruit, which includes instructions for a lighthouse. John Lennon, fascinated, asked her to build it for him. Some four decades later, it became the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavík, Iceland. And then there was Ono speaking to her gender in a time of strife: “Half of the world is women, and we’re not using their power. We have some great stuff.”
This article appears in March 18 • 2011.