December 18, 1968: Countdown to the Get Back sessions

15 days until the start of the Get Back sessions

It was the dawn of Bagism.

The Royal Albert Hall played host to the Alchemical Wedding, a benefit for the Drury Lane Arts Lab, a multimedia exhibition space for alternative arts. ­

Somewhere between 600 and 3,000 people (contemporary accounts vary widely) reportedly attended the “Celebration in December – A Community Event” – which sounds more like a Christmas tree lighting in the suburbs than the event that took place.

David Mairowitz set the scene in the January 1, 1969, issue of International Times :

So the Albert Hall was booked, thousands arrived, not one with a clue as to the evening’s events. There were rumours of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles, the Stones showing … Such promises of glory.

There was, however, one Beatle in attendance. We’ll get to him soon.

The event presented several acts on stage: poets, Hare Krishna chanting, musicians.

Hey, John Lennon is a musician, and he was there!

This is true. But even before John took the stage, the big news coming out of the evening unfolded not on stage but in the audience. Remember a week earlier, when John and Yoko Ono appeared on BBC, and in promoting this event, Yoko said “go naked”? (See the December 11 entry.)

From the front page of the December 19, 1968, Daily Mirror, under the headline “The girl who stripped off at the Albert Hall:  Police called to a ‘happening’ in the audience”:

Blonde Elizabeth Marsh sits serenely in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall … without a stitch on.

She stripped off her ankle-length black dress last night when Indian music was played during a “hippy happening” at the hall called “An Alchemical Wedding.”

Then 24-year-old Elizabeth, from Texas, sat completely naked in the third row while hall official pleaded with her to get dressed.

But some of the 600-strong audience formed a human shield around Elizabeth – and started to take their clothes off as well.

A UPI wire story published two days later fleshed things out further:

“It was the funniest thing you ever saw,” said Jack Henry Moore, of Sulphur, Okla., co-director of the art theater group which sponsored the happening …

Moore said at least 50 men and at least one woman had taken off all their clothes above the waist by this point to show their solidarity with Miss Marsh.

[Co-director Jim] Haynes, of Haynesville, La., said Miss Marsh’s “thing” was one of the high points of his $2.80 a ticket “happening” staged to raise funds for his Art Laboratory Theater.

…

“I don’t know why I did it, but there were good reasons at the time,” [Marsh] said.

This offstage act served as an opener for who would serve as the headliners: John and Yoko. But there was no poetry, no music. And if you wanted to see these two naked, you had to go to the record store.

The couple walked on stage and subsequently entered a white bag. And they were there, but gone, for a half-hour. Here’s a lengthy account from the January 1, 1969, International Times:

Finally, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came out in black robes and disappeared under a white-sheet sacking. Nothing happened. Simplicity was having its day. Another Void. Another filling up. Every fourth member of the audience had his say, a mass hysteria of John Lennon jokes. Then a lousy poet read some lousy poetry. In the midst of all this, the glorious moment of the evening occurred. Someone bound in a white sheet threw himself off the stage into the pit. Finally we were not being conned. It seemed a pure act of madness. It was savage tortured meat hurling itself among the vague love children transfixing each other on a spread of cloth. Perhaps. Only Perhaps.

John and Yoko emerged after about half an hour, fully clothed, again WE were the event. The lights came on, but then a specrte of fury and wrath poured down into the abyss. On its neck was an enormous hand-made sign saying The End of the World is at Hand for 7,000,000 people in Biafra. It approached, the symbol of the Death of the Evening, imploring John Lennon to cease his interest in making money and speak out on behalf of Biafrans. One’s first impression was it was part of the show. But no, such a military downer, it was unlikely. Rather the bloated conscience of England, hidden somewhere in the Victorian rafter of the Albert Hall, appeared as God from the Machine to bring the levity of England’s children to a halt. John Lennon was gone by then, but wouldn’t have replied anyway. And who could? One only wished the rock group called the Sun would come back immediately and ‘accompany’ his plea.

A flautist, Neil Oram, was on stage while John and Yoko were in the bag, and performed. As he recalled in Lennonology:

People were booing, and they were calling out for me to read and play my flute and read my poems. And after an half an hour, they were inside this fucking bag, then they got out to people booing them and everything and John Lennon was really pissed off. I don’t know why they turned up with such a boring stunt at such a fantastic event.

I had no idea what they were up to, and then they got their bag out and got inside it.

Wire accounts said otherwise, that they “were applauded wildly” – but those same accounts said the audience stripped during John and Yoko’s performance, which is false.

John later spoke highly of the event. From a 1971 International Times story, via Lennonology:

It was all a beautiful thing, but very nerve wracking. I mean I was scared shitless going into a bag we couldn’t see out of. It was worse than singing, going on stage and doing that.

Why get in a bag at all? When they more formally introduced Bagism as a concept the following March, they described it as an example of “total communication.”

Among the members of the audience counted the Hell’s Angels, who were still making Apple their temporary headquarters. (See the December 13 entry for more on their arrival.)

“We went to the Albert Hall where he got into the bag with that Oriental bird,” an unnamed Hell’s Angel told DISC and Music Echo, as reported in the January 4, 1969 issue. “What’s that all about, man? Does it mean he’s in his bag?”

Paul McCartney wasn’t at the Royal Albert Hall (as far as we know), but he certainly knew all about the bag. On January 10, 1969, during the Get Back sessions at Twickenham, he asked John about the logistics of Bagism.

“Can you see each other in the bag?” Paul asked the couple — seemingly apropos of nothing, at least on the tapes — during one of the day’s early takes of “I’ve Got a Feeling.”

“Yes,” John said, laughing. “We’re together in the bag.”

“I know, but can you see each other inside, when you’re in the bag?”

“It’s just like being under the sheets. … She generally used to use black bags where you could see out, but we couldn’t see a thing.”

Two pages into the same newspaper that buried John and Yoko’s performance in a story more about the naked American, the Daily Mirror touted another Beatle with a very high honor:

“RINGO STARR … THE SCREEN’S NEWEST ‘GREAT LOVER’”

The feature reviewed “Candy,” which enjoyed its world premiere the day before (see the last entry), and hyped our drummer as someone “as efficient with the female variety as Valentino, Boyer, Novarro and Gable.”