John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with Elephants Memory – Come Together (live)

From studio enigma to live declaration: John Lennon reshapes a Beatles classic on stage

Come Together began as one of The Beatles’ final collaborative statements, recorded in the summer of 1969 for Abbey Road. John Lennon’s composition fused a blues pulse with cryptic imagery and wordplay, its loping bass line and half-spoken vocal shaping a sound that was both intimate and unsettling. The original recording—precise, slow, and heavy with atmosphere—stood as one of The Beatles’ most distinctive studio creations. Three years later, Lennon reclaimed the song on stage, transforming it from psychedelic enigma into something urgent and physical.

The 1972 performance, filmed at Madison Square Garden during the One to One Benefit Concerts, presents Lennon and Yoko Ono fronting the Plastic Ono Band with Elephant’s Memory. The New York musicians give the song a tougher, street-level sound—sharper guitar tones, added saxophone, and a restless rhythm section that pushes the song forward. Lennon’s delivery, louder and more confrontational than in 1969, reframes “Come Together” not as studio collage but as live confrontation. The irony and abstraction of the Beatles version are replaced by a direct, almost defiant energy that suits his early-1970s persona.

Yoko Ono contributes keyboards and backing vocals, filling the spaces between Lennon’s phrasing with short, textured responses. The interplay between Lennon’s clipped guitar and Wayne “Tex” Gabriel’s lead lines gives the arrangement a raw, improvised quality. Elephant’s Memory were drawn from the same New York circuit that fed into Lennon’s Some Time in New York City project, and their unpolished sound aligns perfectly with his post-Beatles direction—politically aware, locally rooted, and deliberately unslick.

The One to One concerts, held on August 30, 1972, were benefit performances for children with disabilities. They also served as Lennon’s only full-length solo concerts, bridging his Beatles past with his activist present. “Come Together” sat within a set that included “Instant Karma!” and “Cold Turkey,” linking earlier pop invention with the raw immediacy of his solo work. The performance was later featured on the album Live in New York City and reintroduced in a restored live video released on the official John Lennon YouTube channel on August 14, 2025, offering renewed visibility to one of Lennon’s most forceful stage moments.

Across time, this live version of Come Together serves as a reinterpretation rather than a reprise. It reveals Lennon in motion—testing his old material against a new political and musical landscape, and proving that a song born in The Beatles’ studio could survive, and even thrive, under concert lights and amplified noise.

Line-up: John Lennon — lead vocals, electric guitar; Yoko Ono — keyboards, backing vocals; Wayne “Tex” Gabriel — guitar; Gary Van Scyoc — bass; Adam Ippolito — keyboards; Stan Bronstein — saxophone; John Ward — bass; Rick Frank — drums.

Recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York City, August 30, 1972.