BY LARRY NAGER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
These are heady times for artist - pop singer - entrepreneur Yoko Ono. Her exhibit of drawings and handwritten lyrics by her late husband, John Lennon, is on the road again, due to arrive Friday in Cincinnati.
Tuesday, the couple's 22-year-old son Sean released his debut solo album, Into the Sun (Grand Royal - Capitol).
It's a rite of passage, a sort of musical bar mitzvah, for the son of one of the best, most popular singer - songwriters of all time.
Ms. Ono says that's what Sean always wanted.
"He was always wanting a bar mitzvah," she says with a laugh, her voice retaining the sing-song cadences of her native Japan. "When he was a little boy, he would come and say, "Why can't I have a bar mitzvah, too?' All his friends had it."
After almost 30 years in her late husband's shadow, she now says she wouldn't mind if she becomes known as "Sean Lennon's mother." "It's fine to be known as Sean's mother," she says. "I was known first as John's girlfriend, then wife. And now Sean's mother? That's fine."
But she doesn't think people will forget his father anytime soon.
"John will go (on) for a long time, I think," she says.
Which brings us to the reason for this phone call.
"Having John's gallery show is very important for me. That's going on for the past 10 years. A lot of things, in the old days, when I was around in New York just by myself, I thought things were moving quickly and to do something for 10 years later. . . . But now I see, in hindsight, that a lot of things that are happening now are the result of what we did a long time ago. Sean is a good example," she concludes with a laugh.
She's planning a new album, possibly a live set culled from a brief tour she and Sean did together.
Veteran rocker that she is, she knows she has to keep her tours fresh, even the art tours.
"It's organized in such a way that it's very easy to put together. I get two or three new images a year, and a lot of old images are sold out and it goes on," she explains, taking the rock analogy a bit further. "The oldies are always the most popular ones."
The newest wrinkle is the addition of prints of John's handwritten lyrics, from both his Beatle days and his solo career. Some are first drafts, very different from the finished work, a visual equivalent to the outtakes from the Anthology series.
"They're beautiful," she says. "I think that handwriting tells a lot about a person, and handwriting in the Orient is a form of art."
With her son starting his musical career in earnest, Ms. Ono, like any other stage mother, is concerned.
"Yes, I'm worried about him," she says. "But I realize there's nothing I can say or nothing I can do.
"Things are so different now, or maybe not different at all. It's a gamble. Maybe what I think is not true. You don't know. So I'm just leaving it alone to whatever he wants to do."
As the torch is passed to the next generation, Ms. Ono says that's one change she notes between her generation and her parents.
"We're at least wise enough to know that we don't know everything. . . . Our parents thought they knew just what to do."
