I admit it was a dumb schoolboy error that led my to buy this album, and you can possibly guess what the error was.
It goes back to the NME list of the greatest albums ever made (I mentioned this list before, and it was also cited in The Guardian recently as an example of when lists still mattered). Nestling just inside the top 10, you'll see John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Well… yes, I wasn't to know at the time that there was another album with an almost identical title and almost identical cover.
So I got this home, put it on, and thought, "This doesn't sound like the kind of thing the NME would go for". I have since corrected my mistake, but now I'm not sure if I might prefer this album, of the two.
There are some frankly silly notes about this re-issue on the Rykodisc website, which claim, "Originally released to almost universal disdain in 1970, critics now declare this album as laying the groundwork for the punk revolution of 1976". I don't believe that. Citations, please? To me it sounds more like proto-krautrock, with Yoko playing a high-pitched version of the Damo Suzuki role in Can.
Anyway, the CD booklet shows that the disdain was not universal. There's a review from The Spectator, of all places, that concludes, "Such is the antipathy towards Yoko Ono that she can do no right. Yet why she should be the object of so much derision and plain insult I have never been able to understand. A couple of odd films and a couple of odd records hardly explain it."
I like Yoko Ono's early Fluxus work, and saw a great exhibition of hers in Belfast in 1997 or 1998. By accident I got invited to the press viewing of her Odyssey of a Cockroach installation just up the road from here in 2004. I told them I wasn't with any magazine or newspaper, but they let me in anyway, and I nearly bumped into Ms Ono.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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