"Mrs. Lennon" Released: 29 September 1971 (US); 29 October 1971 (UK)
"Mind Train" Released: 21 January 1972 (UK)
Fly is the second album by Yoko Ono, released in 1971. A double album, it was co-produced by Ono and John Lennon. It peaked at No. 199 on the US charts.
The album includes the singles "Mrs. Lennon" and "Mind Train." The track "Airmale" is the soundtrack to Lennon's time-lapse film Erection,[3] while "Fly" is the soundtrack to Lennon and Ono's 1970 film Fly.
Recording and songs
The album was recorded around the same time as Lennon's Imagine.[3]
In an article that Yoko wrote for Crawdaddy magazine, she explained that the songs on Fly are divided into two categories:
Side 1 and 2: "Songs to dance to - Rock and songs with physical beat".
Side 3 and 4: "Songs to listen to - mind music with mind beat".[4]
Yoko described most of the songs on Fly as being "pieces [...] centered around a dialogue between my voice and John's guitar".[4] She commented that John had "brought in musicians that are fine samurais", who he pushed to "fly with me".[4]
Side One
The first side of the album includes two songs, "Midsummer New York" and "Mind Train".
"Midsummer New York" was about a deep insecurity that Yoko felt which she associated with her time in New York City before she met John.[4]
"Mind Train" is the second-longest track on the album, lasting for nearly 17 minutes. Yoko described "Mind Train" as an "intricate conversation" between Yoko's voice, John's guitar, Jim Keltner's drumming, Klaus Voormann's bass and Chris Osbourne's dobro.[4] A cut-down version of the song was used for the single release in January 1972.
"Mrs. Lennon" is the most conventional song on the album, described by The Spill Magazine as a "traditional ballad [song]".[5] The lyrics were written in 1969 and the music was written in 1971.[4] The song was, in Yoko's words, meant to be "a joke on me" and an Anti-war song.[4] "Mrs. Lennon" features piano played by John Lennon.
"Hirake" is a partially re-recorded version of the B-side "Open Your Box", completed in response to a managing director of EMI calling the lyrics "distasteful".[3] The verse "Open your trousers, open your skirt, open your legs and open your thighs",[3] was changed to "open your houses", "…church", "…lakes", and "…eyes".[3] Lennon and Ono didn't complain about the change of words, and only "wanted to get the record out", as a spokesman said.[3]
Side Three
Side three of the LP features Ono performing with various automated sound machines created by Fluxus musician Joe Jones and pictured in the gatefold. In the liner notes for the album, Yoko commented that she was "always fascinated by the idea of making special instruments for special emotions - instruments that lead us to emotions arrived by our own motions rather than by our control".[6] Joe Jones built eight new instruments specially for the Fly album which could "play by themselves with minimum manipulation".[6]
"Airmale" and "You" represented Yin and Yang, and "Don't Count the Waves" represented the water that connects them.[4] Yoko explained that "Airmale" represented the "delicateness of Male" while "You" expresses the "aggressiveness of Female".[4] At the end of "You", there is the sound of "wind blowing over a sand hill over white dried female bones", which was created using tape feedback.[4]
The song "Airmale" was used in John Lennon's film Erection.
Side Four
Side four consists of the nearly 23-minute long title track and a 30-second track titled "Telephone Piece".
"Fly" mostly consists of Yoko's vocals with some guitar by John. It was the first track recorded for the album and Yoko intended for it to be used for her film of the same name.[4] The track was recorded in one take in Yoko and John's room at Regency hotel around Christmas 1970 on a Nagra, shortly after the completion of Yoko's debut album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band.[4]
Yoko explained the structure of "Fly" as consisting of the following:
Section one - monologue
Section two - monologue in "dialogue" form (John played guitar against the playback of Yoko's voice in section one. The guitar tape was then reversed and put together with Yoko's voice, so that the voice and guitar ran in two opposite directions as "separate monologues".)
Section three - monologue in a "trialogue" form (John played guitar against the reversed playback tape of section two. John's guitar during this process was then reversed and played along with Yoko's voice. When the guitar tape was finished, John played the radio against Yoko's voice for the remainder of the track.)[4]
Yoko described section three as "a guitar solo with voice accompaniment" rather than the other way around.[4]
Each edition of the US, UK and Japanese albums utilized that country's distinctive telephone ring in the track "Telephone Piece" (i.e. each edition of the album used entirely different recordings). The Japanese version also had Yoko speaking in Japanese. CD pressings of Fly use the US version, and the other two versions have never been released on compact disc.
Out-takes and other material
"Will You Touch Me" was first recorded during the Fly sessions. It was later re-recorded for Yoko's shelved 1974 album A Story and for 1981's Season of Glass. The original demo version was included on the Rykodisc reissue of Fly in 1997.[3]
Two singles were released from the album. The first single "Mrs. Lennon" was backed with "Midsummer New York" and received a release in the United States in September 1971, followed by a UK release in October. The second single was "Mind Train", which was released only in the United Kingdom and France in January 1972. The single features a substantially cut-down version of the song on the A-side while the B-side was "Listen, the Snow Is Falling", which had previously been released as the B-side of "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" in the United States a month earlier.
Four songs from the album were part of the Imagine film, these were "Don't Count the Waves", "Mrs. Lennon", "Mind Train" and "Midsummer New York".
Fly peaked at number 199 in the Billboard 200 and stayed on the chart for 2 weeks.
On 1 February 1972, Lennon and Ono Lennon performed "Midsummer New York" backed by Elephant's Memory for an episode of The Mike Douglas Show, which aired on 15 February.[3]
Tim Ferris of Rolling Stone magazine gave a mixed review of Fly. He described Yoko's music as having "considerable potential" and being "serious work" which could be rewarding with "close attention" from the listener.[9] Ferris praised the "top-rate" studio work of the musicians, and highlighted the songs "Mind Holes", "O' Wind" and "Mrs. Lennon", as well as the "fascinating" Joe Jones tracks on side three.[9] However, he summarised by saying "all in all it just doesn't hold up", stating that Yoko and John should take a more "dispassionate" attitude towards producing her work, and feeling that no one involved in the making of the album had "asked hard questions about what is first-rate and what is not".[9] Ferris felt that "Don't Worry Kyoko" and "Mind Train", despite being "livened by a strong rock accompaniment", did not show much progression from Yoko's first album and he did not rate the "Toilet Piece/Unknown" and "Telephone Piece" tracks highly.[9]
Retrospective reviews of Fly in later years have been more positive. Ned Raggett of AllMusic stated that "Perhaps the best measure of Fly is how Ono ended up inventing Krautrock, or perhaps more seriously bringing the sense of motorik's pulse and slow-building tension to an English-language audience. There weren't many artists of her profile in America getting trancey, heavy-duty songs like "Mindtrain" and the murky ambient howls of "Airmale" out."[2] In a review of the 2017 reissue, Aaron Badgley of The Spill Magazine praised the album and called it "complex" and a "a work of art", noting that if people took the time to listen to her music they would be surprised at how "brilliant and intelligent" it is.[10] Badgley stated that "Don't Count the Waves" was "30 years ahead of [its] time" and highlighted "Mind Train" as a "brilliant piece that leaves you breathless."[10] Marc Masters of Pitchfork named the 2017 reissue as "Best New Reissue" of the week along with Approximately Infinite Universe.[8]
2017 reissue bonus tracks (previously released on Onobox)
No.
Title
Length
8.
"The Path"
5:43
9.
"Head Play" (Medley: You/Airmale/Fly)
2:35
For unknown reasons, John Lennon was credited as co-writer of "Mind Train", "Mind Holes", "Toilet Piece/Unknown" and "Telephone Piece" on the disc faces of the 1997 Rykodisc reissue.[12] Lennon has not been credited as co-writer of these tracks on any other release of Fly.
Personnel
Yoko Ono – vocals, claves on "Airmale" and "Don't Count the Waves"
John Lennon – guitar, piano on "Mrs. Lennon", organ, automated music machines on "Airmale" and "Don't Count the Waves"
Klaus Voormann – guitar, bass guitar, bells on "Mrs. Lennon", cymbal on "O'Wind", percussion on "Don't Count the Waves"
