SOME JOY: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Ringo Star and Barbra Streisand
Streisand covered Lennon’s “Imagine,” combining it with Louie Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World” on her 2018 album Walls. But it is her cover of Lennon’s “Mother” on her 1971 Barbra Joan Streisand album that is deeply haunting. It is from the 1970 album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Barbra’s rendition reached #79 on the Billboard Top 100 chart.
When I interviewed her for a cover story in Vanity Fair, she told me of the source of what was then a constant drone that she insisted cluttered her hearing. "I hear noises all the time," she told me. "It's pretty horrible. I long for the silence." This is not some sort of metaphysical sensation she is afflicted with, I wrote at the time, but a real ringing in her ears. It started in childhood, around age seven, she explained to me. "It was the night my mother took me home from a Jewish camp. I was so miserable and homesick. I was a kid of the street— you know, parents hanging out of their windows and yelling at their kids. It was like a neighborhood. I was so alone in this place. I wouldn't let my mother leave without me. She had to pack me up. I always felt that kind of power—like the power over my mother. She took me home to a new apartment. I didn't know she had married a man. She never told me—or that she was pregnant."
We conducted much of the interview in her home sitting on facing sofas with a bust of Sarah Bernhardt watching over us. “I lived in the world of the imagination," she told me of her early days in New York. "I had fantasies and dreams and imagined what life should be like. But I'm still stuck with certain myths. When my mother first saw me sing at the Bon Soir nightclub in Greenwich Village I was wearing a 1900 kind of lace combing jacket that ladies wore to comb their hair, with a pink satin ribbon, and I had designed a little skirt and wore pink satin shoes from the 1920s that I still have, which are the most exquisite shoes that I own. I tried to get them copied, but I couldn't. My mother was totally embarrassed by me. She thought I was singing in my underwear. To me they were the most beautiful things. And when she first saw me act, she said, 'Your arms are too skinny.'"