Drummer Alan White on John Lennon:
"I played with John for over two years. If anything came up with the Plastic Ono Band he called me to play drums. The first thing I did was Live Peace In Toronto. He'd seen me play somewhere and it was a call out of the blue. This voice on the phone said, "Do you want to do a gig with me - it's John Lennon" and I thought it was a friend of mine playing a trick on me.
Actually it was him and he called me back five minutes later and said, "No ... it's me man, John Lennon. We're gonna do a gig tomorrow. Do you wanna do the gig?" Then I realised it was the real thing.
All the guys in my band got really annoyed because we had a gig that night and we had to cancel it because I was going to play with John Lennon.
The Plastic Ono Band was John & Yoko, Klaus Voormann, Eric Clapton and myself. It was a unique band. Very unique. Eric had never played with John before, either. So nobody had played with each other in this band that was on a plane flying out to Canada. We rehearsed everything on the plane and when we got to Toronto we just did this gig. It was recorded for the album.
But the first studio thing I did with John was 'Instant Karma'.
After that it was Jim Keltner or myself who played on his stuff.
I played on 'Imagine' and 'How Do You Sleep' .
It was all done down at his house at Tittenhurst Park. I spent ten days down there. We'd get up each morning and work in the studio all day. John would come up and give me the lyrics to the song we were doing that day and say, "This is what we are saying to the whole world. You can play on it or not".
He was very open about things. He'd either have some kind of rough demo, or he'd play through the song on the piano and we'd gradually get into it. Everything seemed to work really well. He'd never say to me, "No, no, don't play that." He'd say, "Just play what you feel."
Everything you hear on the records is what we just got into playing. There was no controlling factor and playing with John was a very friendly, enjoyable experience.
He was very serious about the band and the album. He was totally into it and he knew exactly what he wanted to do. It was as if he had already been through the album in his head and knew what he wanted it to sound like.
He was very happy then because he was doing his own thing and had probably wanted to do that for a long time. Now he had freedom and was very happy about everything that went down. He was having all this building work done.
Alan remembers clouds of dust and lots of rubble everywhere. One night John wanted to watch something on TV and there was only one set working. So he lay watching TV with the band on a huge king-sized bed.
There was me with Eric Clapton, John and Yoko Ono and I'm thinking, 'I'm sitting on John Lennon's bed watching TV". It's one of those moments you can never re-create. During that whole period in my life I was so young and naïve I didn't realise what I was experiencing until years later. Wow . .. I was part of history! It was mind blowing at the time and I was living in a kind of dream world.
From 'Close to the Edge: The Story of Yes' by Chris Welch
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/184772132X/ref=as_li_tl...ip0a-20&linkId=2IORUMB6LBAY5BPS
