Pitchfork : Season of Glass Yoko Ono 1981 (by Jayson Greene)
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the first album Yoko Ono recorded after the death of her husband, a brittle and gorgeous capsule of hope triumphing over grief.
They wouldn’t stop playing “Imagine.” In the immediate aftermath of John Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980, Yoko Ono lay staring at the ceiling of her apartment in the Dakota building in Manhattan while the inescapable sound of the song she’d co-written with John—a credit he’d denied her for years—leaked in on a nightmare loop, played by mourners congregating on the street below. “What I learned,” she said later of this time period, “was that I didn’t have much control over my destiny or fate.” After 24 hours, she got up, shakily, groping for a tape recorder. As the vigil continued below her—composed largely of the Beatles devotees who until this moment had been her greatest tormentors—Ono hit record and howled the first words that came into her mind: “I don’t know why/It was getting so good for us.” Precisely one day after she’d held her husband’s dying body in her arms, she’d written her first song about the experience.
That song, called “I Don’t Know Why,” was harrowing and plainspoken. “You bastards!” she wailed. “Hate us! Hate me! We had everything!” her voice trailing off into a sob. The “bastards” could be anyone standing in front of the world she and John envisioned—war profiteers, for sure, as well as politicians, corporations, the usual suspects. But it’s a fair bet that, for Ono, more than a few of those “bastards” were standing outside her building.
Ono had always treated trauma as raw material. In 1964’s famous Cut Piece, she invited audience members to scissor off pieces of her clothing while she stood motionless. On “Baby’s Heartbeat,” she incorporated tapes of her miscarried child’s fetal heartbeat. Ono’s fearlessness in confronting the dark places in her psyche is a large part of what traditional audiences hated about her, but she made it a lifelong mission to choose the idea that terrified her most and then pursue it. “For art,” she once said, “I would do just about anything.”
So when Ono headed back to the studio in March 1981, barely three months after Lennon’s death, it was entirely in character. The band that she and John had hired to record their comeback record, 1980’s Double Fantasy—the album that was meant to reintroduce the couple to the world—was assembled and ready to work. Ono still had songs left to record. Her life with John was over; her lifelong work as the widowed “Mrs. Lennon” was just beginning.
Ono fashioned her fifth solo album, Season of Glass, as a survivor’s statement, a kiss from the Dakota’s balcony to the mourners below. For the cover, she photographed Lennon’s blood-smeared wire-rimmed glasses on the table of that balcony, placed next to a half-drunk glass of water, the foggy view of Central Park’s trees and the Manhattan skyline behind it. She framed this as an act of demystification—“This is what John is now,” she said pointedly—but it was just as easy to see the bloody glasses as the presentation of a relic, the mortal remains of a pop-cultural saint.
The world might have imagined what Yoko Ono in mourning would sound like—shrieking, moaning, howling—yet this was not the face she turned to the world. On “Goodbye Sadness,” “Toyboat,” “Silver Horse,” and “Mother of the Universe,” Ono sings in gorgeous, long-breathed melodies, often multi-tracked in harmony, while the music gently rocks and sways, offering muted variations on her husband’s beloved doo-wop and soul ballads. It is, in a word, glassy—smooth, brittle, transparent. She was no longer using her voice as a “warrior” might wield a sword, as she once put it. These were lullabies to hope, delivered with the beatific calm of a dying opera heroine’s final aria.
Rubberneckers or armchair psychologists could easily impute trauma. Perhaps this was the sound of shock, numbness, resignation. The lyrics are full of unanswered prayers: The “Silver Horse” that arrives to bear her away someplace beautiful has no wings, while the tiny triangular sail on the horizon turns out to be just a toy boat. But one of the most fascinating things about Season of Glass is that apart from “I Don’t Know Why” and the savage “No, No, No,” the majority of it was written years earlier, at a time when Ono was not the Dear Leader’s widow but the most hated spouse in the history of popular music. The album is less a eulogy than a piece of unfinished business, and any relation to John’s murder are mostly tricks of the light.
The heart-rending opening ballad “Goodbye Sadness,” for example, stems from Lennon’s infamous mid-’70s “Lost Weekend, ” a bender that lasted more than a year. After Ono sent him packing, Lennon disappeared into drinking and drugs, getting shitfaced with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and sleeping with the paramour Ono had handpicked for him, May Pang.
The wistful second track, “Mindweaver,” cannot help but scan, in context, like posthumous mythmaking (“He was a mindweaver…”). But Ono wrote it in 1980, when Lennon was in Bermuda, and the song depicts their relationship at its most exhausting and draining (its original title was “Mindfucker”). The lyrics to “Extension 33” might seem coarse or shocking in the context of John’s murder—“Once I had a love, it nearly killed me/But now I have my freedom”—but the song dates from the same mid-’70s time period as “Goodbye Sadness,” when Ono briefly exited the toxic cloud of Beatledom and, as her 1975 album title had it, was Feeling the Space.
Save for the exception of the gunshots that ring out at the beginning of “No, No, No,” these songs didn’t spring from Lennon’s murder, but they did pointedly address his absence. Yoko Ono was five years ahead in everything—in conceptual art, staging loft concerts, punk rock. Now, ironically, she was five years ahead of her own grief. If John Lennon seems maddeningly alive in these songs, it’s because when she wrote them, he was.
Season of Glass hit No. 49 on the Billboard charts, the highest of any of Ono’s solo records. Critics who had spent the previous decade sneering at Ono suddenly found themselves full of charitable things to say: Stephen Holden called it her “most accessible and assured album” in Rolling Stone, while Mark Cooper, writing for Record Mirror, said that “Yoko has made a record of fragility, grief, and ultimately, of great human strength.” That same year, Double Fantasy, which alternated songs between John and Yoko, won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
The gimlet-eyed Ono was far too attuned to savage ironies to let this reversal pass by unnoticed. “For 10 years I was the devil, and now suddenly I’m an angel,” she noted. “Did the world have to lose John for people to change their opinion of me?... If it brought John back, I’d rather be hated.” She was aware, no doubt, that had John not been killed, Season of Glass would likely have been just another Yoko Ono solo record, dismissed savagely by critics when it wasn’t outright ignored. She wasn’t saying anything that she hadn’t said before; this time, the only difference was that people were, momentarily, listening.
For much of the ’70s, she and John had been carrying out a public conversation about gender roles. It was loud, heated, and messy, and for a good portion of the decade, the public seemed to barely tolerate it. After the dissolution of the Beatles brought a premature end to the greatest pop-cultural show on Earth, John and Yoko became something like the decade’s equivalent of a hate-watch. John wrote songs to and about Yoko on every album, and Yoko returned with songs of her own.
But did anyone, really, listen to her half of the conversation? The press treated Ono’s presence like an insult, upon which her albums heaped injury. Beatles kids had not taken kindly to this severe new stepmom—her frightening ululations, her weird macrobiotic diet—nor did they much enjoy being exposed to Dad’s lustful zeal for her: Did they really need to put the nude pictures everywhere?
With the Beatles, the psychosexual lines were always blurred. Ono always suspected that her husband’s feelings for his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney, were more intense and tangled than a simple best friend, and Lennon both made disturbing offhand comments about his Freudian lust for his mother and clung to Ono in ways that were unmistakably childlike. On the morning of his death, Anne Liebowitz photographed him clinging to his wife, nude, in the fetal position, a pose Lennon said summed up their relationship dynamic “perfectly.” Just as Beatles fans saw their idols as some combination of older brother, parental figure, and sex object, John worshiped Yoko, calling her “Mother” while also sketching erotica of her.
Now that this conversation had been violently silenced, it suddenly seemed precious in retrospect. Before, Ono had been an obstacle, blocking access to the Great Man; now she was his only living representative. Overnight, she found herself transformed from, as she once said from the stage while introducing the song “Coffin Car,” “this ugly Jap who stole your monument or something from you” to Lennon’s emissary—“the keeper of the wishing well,” she called it. If the world ever wanted to know anything of John Lennon ever again, it would have to go through her.
The day that Lennon was shot, he and Ono had been working on a song of hers called “Walking on Thin Ice.” It was a freezing blast of post-punk, a song so alien to the world of the Beatles that it takes effort to remind yourself that it’s John Lennon playing guitar on it, wrenching gasping sounds out of a 1958 Rickenbacker. The song’s inspiration came from Lennon’s Bermuda visit, when he went downstairs to some hip club and saw people losing their minds to the B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster,” a song full of the same blood-curdling cries that Ono had unleashed to a sea of frozen faces during Plastic Ono Band’s live concerts. When the final session wrapped for “Walking on Thin Ice,” Lennon could be heard saying: “I think you just cut your first Number One, Yoko.”
“Walking on Thin Ice” doesn’t appear on Season of Glass; it was released as a single, instead, three weeks after Lennon’s assassination. (It did eventually make it to No. 1, in remixed form, although it would take 22 years to get there.) The omission of “Walking on Thin Ice” from Season of Glass feels like a glitch in the historical record. The song straddles the same uneasy divide as the album, gesturing towards a future that contained no Lennon, no McCartney, and really, no more ’60s at all, made by one of its last living representatives.
“Walking on Thin Ice,” along with Season of Glass’s “No, No, No,” lived in the same chilly meat locker that hosted a new generation of British bands, like Joy Division, who formed in the deindustrialized grayscale town of Salford, an hour away from Lennon and McCartney’s Liverpool. These people had no picaresque “Penny Lane’’ to fondly gaze back on, no nourishing childhood memories of hope, and their music reflected it. Lennon, for all his fondness for tart-tongued comebacks and surface shocks, would probably never have been able to bear a band like Joy Division. This was music that never even knew contentment existed, let alone exhibited a desire to strive for it. Contentment, meanwhile, was the only thing Lennon’s songs ever yearned for, and his best late-period solo work often sighed with it—“Borrowed Time,” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “Watching the Wheels.”
If Lennon was unable to participate in the future that he saw coming, to his continuing frustration, he had a surprising eye for spotting it. He grasped early the significance of the conceptual art that Ono helped pioneer with her work in Fluxus. He heard the violent, shuddering energies she unleashed onstage, even if he could only gesture toward them on his own—“Mother” is a classic, one of his most powerful solo songs, but the screaming he assays on the coda is a bunny-slope ride compared to the shrieking, face-first cliff plummet that his wife uncorks on “Don’t Worry, Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow).” He played guitar on all these songs, even the ones where she was directly rebuking him for his occasionally shameful behavior, as on “Death of Samantha.” Indeed, for all his possessive rages, his bursts of machismo, Lennon was, in the end, just a fan.
“No No No” and “Walking on Thin Ice” pointed forward to the increasingly bleak decade Lennon would never see: Thatcherism in his homeland, Reaganism in his adopted one, the AIDS crisis sweeping through the artistic demimonde of his and Ono’s downtown New York scene. Lennon, prone to depression and easily discouraged, would likely have foundered in this bleak climate. But Ono was prepared to breathe in it.
The collision of future and past lasted up until the grisly moment Mark David Chapman dropped to one knee and fired five shots at Lennon’s back, sending Lennon staggering into the lobby of the Dakota, shouting “I’m shot!” while Ono screamed for help. As he fell to the ground, the finished tape of “Walking on Thin Ice” fell from his hand, skittering across the lobby floor.
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