Yoko and John enjoy the nightlife

Photo taken by Oscar Abolafia

 

The Liberation of Paul McCartney (1971)

 The Top of Pop

By Lillian Roxon

Daily News

September 5, 1971

    Poor Paul McCartney. One year the prettiest face in rock and roll. This year, the man everyone loves to hate. Everyone's at him. His old friend and workmate John Lennon has a nasty song about him in his new album. His old girlfriend and housemate Fran Schwartz has 20 pages about him in her just-finished and still very hush-hush book. His most devoted fans get into fights with him, and now Rock Liberation has chosen him as its next big target.

     Rock Liberation? Oh yes! If you think women's liberation is heavy, wait till Rock Lib gets really steamed up this fall. It was Rock Lib that staged that big party in the street outside Bob Dylan's house on his birthday this summer. Not that he was there or anything, but he sure as hell heard about it. And the next thing we know, there he was, liberated as all get out, up on stage at the Bangladesh concert with George Harrison, singing all his old songs and pouring money into the pockets of the poor and needy. Incredible.

     Maybe Rock Lib has nothing to do with it at all, but you can't blame them for feeling encouraged. So flushed with success, they have now turned to Paul, not early enough to get him to Madison Square Garden, alas, but still. 

    In what must have been more than a casual coincidence, the day the Liberators chose to shake up the former Beatle was also the day the women of New York chose for their second annual mass march up Fifth Avenue. What I think the rock people were trying to tell us was that they are all kinds of oppression, and that it is probably better to be born female than to have to listen to another Paul McCartney solo effort. 

    In any case, there they all were at 79th and Park, where the McCartneys sometimes stay when in town, waving placards and making speeches designed to goad Paul like Dylan back into the land of the living. It was no use telling them it's not nice to parade noisily outside people's homes, and that besides Paul is getting a band together with the talented and beautiful Denny Laine.

    It was no use pointing out that anyone truly interested in liberating rock might do better to use that energy promoting new, fresh artists instead of trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to old ones. It was no use because Rock Lib does have a point. Paul has been snotty and isolated. If musical aristocrats like Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts could come out of their isolation to back Howlin Wolf in one of the most magnificent and important albums of the year, the London Hall and Wolf Sessions, then it's hard to see what Paul has been trying to prove all alone there in Scotland. The sooner he's liberated, if you ask me, the better

Let's go see a Broadway Show

 

I have often read that John didn't mind if you snapped a photo of him when he was spotted out in New York but he wasn't going to pose for you.  This is a good example -- John sees the camera and looks at it but didn't put on a show or anything.  

Materinty clothes

 

Film Festival

 

September 27, 1975

Date night out

 September 25, 1970

Expecting

 

Water Wings

 

Their lives would change in a month.....

These photos were taken on September 9, 1975.   We all know that Yoko will give birth to Sean one month from this date and thing will drastically change in the Lennon household.   In the last few months before Sean's birth John and Yoko seemed to have hit the town several times.    Notice the blond woman in the top photo?  She seems happy to have been spotted by this photographer!

Same Time Next Year part 2

A fan named Sonia sent me this photo from when John and Yoko went to see the play, "Same Time Next Year" in 1975. I really appreciate it, because it is one that I did not previously have, but I believe in the "comments" section it was being talked about. So here it is!

Same Time Next Year

"Same Time Next Year" is the name of a comedy play that was on Broadway from March 1975 - Sept 1978. During the summer of 1975 (for some reason I have July written down), John and Yoko went and saw this play. Yoko is very much pregnant with Sean, so August might be a better guess for the day the Lennons saw this production. Along with the two previous photos I posted of John, I also won two photos taken from the day they saw the play. I notice that John is wearing a neat beaded necklace in all but one of the photos. I wonder if he took the necklace off and gave it to a fan??? The two colored photos are the ones I just got. But I am adding all of the photos of this event just for the fun of it.