Eastern Fetish: Ryan Adams at Black & White on East 10th Street.   (Photo: Danny Clinch)

Ryan Adams
Village Person

A southern rocker raises the bar.

At Black & White, the East Village bar owned by his best friend and drummer, Johnny T, alt-country pioneer Ryan Adams, 28, is ripping through a pack of American Spirits and watching his girlfriend, Parker Posey, Rollerblade around the room. The high-school dropout from North Carolina founded Whiskeytown—think Raleigh’s Nirvana—when he was 19. By the time of the inevitable breakup, Adams was living in New York. His third solo album, Rock n’ Roll, is out on November 4.
BRIGHT LIGHTS: “I always knew I wanted to live here. When I was 18 or 19, I came up to play a gig at Under Acme. You always see those refinery fields with the lights on them in the distance, and I kept saying, ‘Is that New York?’ The first thing I did here was buy a tall boy and sit on the corner of Great Jones and Broadway going, ‘Fuck! Dang!’ I was just freaked out.”
DRINKING LIFE: “I hang out at Black & White and Niagara [a bar co-owned by his other best friend, singer-songwriter Jesse Malin]. They’re not bars to me—it’s like extended living rooms. It would be the same if my two best friends ran flower shops. Then I’d probably be into botany.”

Yoko Ono
Life With John
The Dakota as good memory motel.

Her hair is still black, her glasses still rectangular, except now she is 70, born the same year Adolf Hitler took over Germany. This is late in the game to have a No. 1 dance track, but Yoko Ono, who finished recording the original, unremixed version of “Walking on Thin Ice” hours before her husband, John Lennon, was shot dead in front of their Dakota-apartment home in 1980, is a singular little old lady. Daughter of a wealthy Japanese banker (the emperor’s sons were her classmates), survivor of the Tokyo firebombing, often deeply underappreciated visual and aural artist, real-estate magnate (asked if she’s bought up all the Dakota apartments, she says, “Not yet”), Yoko has lived a life.

“My situation now . . . is . . . unique,” she says in her softly accented voice as she sits, a tiny, oddly nervous woman in a forest-green sweater, on a giant snow-white couch in an art-filled, sun-swept living room that overlooks Strawberry Fields, where the vendors hawk postcards of John wearing his famous New York City T-shirt. It isn’t anything you get used to, “this strange type of fame,” says Yoko.

This is one of the reasons she is so gratified by the success of “Walking on Thin Ice,” she says. When they laid down the track, John turned to her and said, “This is going to be your first No. 1 hit.”

It’s satisfying, too, since despite the griping about Yoko’s supposed tuneless caterwauling back in the Day, the Plastic Ono Band material has aged better than much of the later Beatles catalogue, not to mention vast chunks of Paul McCartney’s oeuvre. “I never thought of it just as screaming,” Yoko says, adding that she’ll be calling The Guinness Book of World Records to make sure that she is the oldest artist ever to have a No. 1 dance hit.

Not that she plans to return to the stage. Rather, her days are often spent “working 10 o’clock until 5” on legal and commercial aspects of Lennon’s never-ending career. With the advent of the Iraq war, Yoko thought of restaging the couple’s famous anti-Vietnam War “bed-in.” “But I thought, How can I do this without John? I considered using a cardboard John. But that would not be very nice. And who wants to stay in a bed for a week by yourself?”

Yoko likes to take long walks in Central Park. Does it bother her to pass the tourists who congregate around the “Imagine” mosaic at Strawberry Fields? She sighs. “Perhaps people think it is morbid, me still living here . . . They look up to my window and think, Oh, she’s right up there. While they’re looking up, that’s when I go by, very quickly.”

Then Yoko smiles again, wryly and winningly. If John had lived, would they still be together, celebrating Yoko’s surprise No. 1? There were so many nasty stories about sleeping around, but in the end, their love affair—two immigrant artists in the city because this was the best, maybe only, place for them—remains one of the great love stories in New York music.

My audience up, standing by the door next to Yoko’s sculpture of a dozen blue Siamese cats with yellow glowing eyes, I tell her: “You know, my wife was the biggest Beatle fan. From the beginning. She really loved them.”

“Oh,” Yoko says, almost with a wince. “Does she hate me?”

It is an old saw: that Yoko used some avant art spell to steal John’s rock-and-roll heart and break up the world’s most beloved band. “No,” I say. “She said that anyone who made John Lennon happy must be a very good person.”

Yoko looks relieved. She extends her hand, touches mine. “Thank her for that, please.” —Mark Jacobson