John Lennon always described himself as a rock star before anything else. Regardless of how many avant-garde experiments he embarked on with Yoko Ono or the off-the-wall projects that he took on with The Beatles, he was still the same old kid who got the fire after listening to Chuck Berry and Little Richard perform back in the day. But that was the past, and he considered the future of rock to come from Yoko Ono singing the song ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ at the start of the 1970s.
Then again, any discussion around The Beatles is bound to get testy when it comes to Ono’s treatment. Although she has garnered the unfounded moniker of the destroyer of the Fab Four, she was more or less just a creative companion for Lennon most of the time, serving as his muse on half of his greatest hits and eventually working her way to collaborating with him on records like Some Time in New York City.
When ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ was being made, though, Ono was in the process of putting together her version of Plastic Ono Band, featuring all of the members of Lennon’s album of the same name. As opposed to the straightforward tracks Lennon put together, though, this was a controlled jam session that let every member noodle around and go wherever the song took them.
Although ‘Why’ does bleed a little bit more into pure noise half the time, it’s not all that dissimilar from what ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ entails. If anything, this is her response to what Lennon was doing on ‘Cold Turkey’, especially when she almost tries to match Lennon’s ferocious guitar lines with her own voice.
It’s no surprise that this would be one of the live staples whenever Ono went out with Lennon and their backing group. Despite being one of the more atonal pieces that they would ever create, it’s easy to imagine that it would go off in a live setting, especially with the musicians stretching out and the groove getting time to become hypnotic.
For Lennon, this was the kind of track that could start an entirely new musical revolution, telling Rolling Stone, “Don’t get the therapy confused with the music. Yoko’s whole thing was that scream. ‘Don’t Worry, Kyoko’ was one of the fuckin’ best rock and roll records ever made.” And it’s not like the rest of the world wasn’t listening.
Looking back on both Ono and Lennon’s projects from around this time, there are more than a few pieces that seem to predict the future of rock music. Yes, the screaming can get monotonous, but the seeds were being sown for the punk and grunge movement decades later, almost as if Kurt Cobain got his entire screaming schtick by listening to what Yoko was singing here.
So, for all of the Beatles fanatics who swear by everything the Fab Four have done and insist that anything with Ono’s name on it is garbage, let them know that this track isn’t just a bunch of screaming nonsense. Given the major surge in noise rock acts to have come out since the 1960s, ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko’ might be even more influential than The Beatles are in some circles.
