Greene County native recalls time he spent working with John Lennon, Yoko Ono
John Lennon performs on the keyboard during "One To One", a charity concert to benefit mentally challenged children at Madison Square Garden, Aug. 30, 1972, New York. Greene County native Gary Van Scyoc was in the band that backed Lennon at the concert.
Gary Van Scyoc graduated from Waynesburg High School in 1964, just a few months after the Beatles exploded in America’s consciousness and made being a musician one of the coolest jobs around.
As “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” were blasting out of thousands of transistor radios, Van Scyoc had no way of imagining that in just a handful of years he’d be the one playing bass alongside John Lennon and not Paul McCartney, Lennon’s fellow Beatle and songwriting collaborator.
“It was just so cool to work with John,” Van Scyoc recalled during a recent phone conversation from his home in the Poconos. “He never told me one thing to play, I had total freedom.”
Van Scyoc worked with Lennon and Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, thanks to being a member of the New York band Elephant’s Memory. The group mixed radicalism and “a rough sound,” according to a review that appeared in The New York Times in July 1971. It was shortly after that review appeared that Lennon and Ono relocated to New York and immersed themselves in the cauldron of radical politics and avant-garde art that was bubbling in Greenwich Village. They saw Elephant’s Memory play at Max’s Kansas City, what was then one of New York’s hottest nightspots, and invited them to work with them.
Source: heraldstandard.com/Brad Hundt
