AllMusic

For one week in early 1972, national television talk show host Mike Douglas featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono as co-hosts. In addition to performing on the set and showing music videos of their own, Lennon and Ono were interviewed on part of each broadcast by Douglas. The five shows are now available (minus commercials, which have been edited out) on video as a five-cassette box on Rhino, each installment lasting about 75 minutes. Although they do make for an interesting part of both television and music history, be aware that Lennon and Ono were only interviewed for parts of each broadcast. While they are present almost all of the time, the shows followed the usual variety format of several guests per hour, some chosen by John and Yoko, some not. Thus, you get such outrageous (for the time) interviewees as Jerry Rubin and Black Panther Bobby Seale, as well as left-leaning choices like Ralph Nader, comedian George Carlin, and filmmaker Barbara Loden, bouncing incongruously off more conventional figures like U.S. Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld and comedian Louis Nye. The musical performances are erratic, if spontaneous; Lennon's songs with Elephant's Memory (which in any case are not among his best tunes) often sound awkward. Highlights include (on day three) duets between Chuck Berry and Lennon on "Memphis" and "Johnny B. Goode"; although Yoko insensitively puts in some of her avant-garde backing vocals at one point, Berry is gracious enough not to let on if he's disturbed. Douglas' interviews with John and Yoko alone, usually lasting for a few minutes near the beginning of each show, are often interesting, but peel off before really probing in great depth. It would have been great if they could have devoted just one show to only John and Yoko, or if the question-and-answer session between them and the audience (Lennon's responses about "How Do You Sleep" and his relationship to Paul McCartney are especially interesting) had been allowed to go on much longer. This was television, though, which meant frequent commercial breaks and a rapid turnover. What might have shocked Middle America in 1972 seems ordinary now: Bobby Seale is reasonable and unthreatening when explaining the Black Panthers' goals to improve inner-city African-American life, and Jerry Rubin is feisty but by no means totally off the mark in his critiques of U.S. defense and domestic policy. Lennon comes off throughout as a likable, benign figure, in contrast to the Rolling Stone interviews he had given shortly before; Ono is more enigmatic, but well-spoken. The box comes with an interesting 48-page book with behind-the-scenes accounts of the shows' production, as well as an interview with Douglas about the broadcasts and a little-read interview (not from the show) of John, Yoko, and Jerry Rubin.