Clock

As a teaser for the upcoming “Power to the People” DeLuxe boxed set, the Lennon estate has released a little bit of the film, “Clock”, where John and Yoko are sitting on a sofa, with John strumming his guitar and reminiscin’ about some of the early rock’n’roll songs of his youth. The bit released has Lennon singing Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t”, a song John used to sing with the Beatles before Ringo was given the song (see how much Carl Perkins’ Dance album influenced The Beatles in this earlier post).

On 10 September 1971, John & Yoko were staying at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. They were busy filming and editing “Imagine” – the music film – a sort of collection of music videos – to accompany both the “Imagine” and the “Fly” albums. Before they went out to film the beach scenes that day at South Beach, Staten Island, they made two new films, “Freedom” and “Clock”.

“Freedom” was Yoko’s idea – a mid-shot of a woman struggling to escape her bra.

“Clock” was John’s idea, filming a carriage clock for an hour, with John & Yoko in the room, in the mirror. The concept was that different actions could happen at different times in the hour, and the film could then act as an hourly clock. For the post part, John & Yoko ended up chatting, or John was singing and playing guitar whilst Yoko was organising her upcoming exhibition at the Everson Museum, or John was horsing around having fun.

“Honey Don’t” by Carl Perkins is one of twenty songs performed by John in that hour – from the soundtrack of the film – that are featured in the Deluxe Box Set of “Power to the People” → https://bit.ly/JOLstore.

JOHN’S DIALOGUE FROM THE ORIGINAL FILM

John: Just relax, you know, you don’t have to be in or out of the picture. Just do whatever you have to do, OK? It’s gonna be a clock, you know, so it’s not like a proper movie. It’ll just be like a background. We’re gonna be one hour doing this. On the quarter past, you should walk through and then they know it’s quarter past, you know what I mean? Whenever there’s a quarter of an hour, somebody should do something specific, right, so people get to know it by the picture of what’s going on… Must be getting near half past, John walked out of the picture again. At exactly twenty-to, he lit her cigarette. At 3’35’, Karen called. At quarter-to, he broke the lights! [laughs] At the hour we should just go completely barmy or something. On the hour, we’ll just run out hysterically, OK? Directly on twelve, we’ll run right out the room. On the count of three, we’ll just get up and run out. One, two, three…

This release is the first time we actually get the correct date for the making of this film. The film itself was never released and hasn’t been circulating widely among fans, but the soundtrack has been bootlegged and several songs were also broadcast in the radio series “Lost Lennon Tapes”, which the Westwood One station syndicated between 1988 and 1992.

A “Clock” bootleg from 2022.

The songs included from the film in this upcoming box set are “Shazam”, “Honey, Don’t”, “Glad All Over”, “Lend Me Your Comb”, “Wake Up Little Susie”, “New York City”, “Wake Up Little Susie”, “Hey, que pasa?”, “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)”, “Vacation Time”, “Heartbeat”, “Peggy Sue Got Married”, “Peggy Sue” (twice),”Now we’d like to change the mood a little…”, “Maybe Baby”, “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues”, “Rave On!” and “Twelve Bar Blues”. These, along with a recorded phone call, are the first twenty tracks on CD 9, “Home Jam”, and all are also included on Blu-ray 3.

In an unboxing video, Andrew from Parlogram Auctions is leafing through the entire hardcover book which accompanies the DeLuxe set. If you go full screen and pause each page, you can probably make out every word that’s written in the book’s essays.