“I’ve passed the time when I used to think I’m going to surprise people with this, break the sound barrier, I’m going to put in some chords that nobody has ever put in or whatever. That day is over. I just want to be myself,” says Yoko Ono.

Pioneer of the avant-garde, godmother of the new wave, conceptual art maker and peace advocator: Ono has been called all these things, and others, some of them not quite as nice, during her 40 years in the public eye and 50 years as a working artist. These days, she’s back to fronting the Plastic Ono Band, the group she and her husband John Lennon founded in 1969 as an outlet for his post-Beatles expression and the couple’s most political and experimental work. It was also the beginning of a period of intense collaboration for them, inside and outside the studio, which lasted ’til Lennon was assassinated in 1980. Beatles fans and critics were notoriously unkind about the partnership, particularly regarding Ono’s musical participation in it. “I’ve been attacked so much, I thought, ‘Oh, being attacked… this is a normal thing,’” she says.

Next year marks 30 years since Lennon was murdered and 40 years since the break-up of the band he founded in Liverpool over 50 years ago. Had he lived, he would be turning 70, while his and Ono’s son, Sean, who shares a birthday with his father, will turn 35. Though I neglected to ask the reported numerology and astrology buff Ono about the significance to all those round numbers, I don’t have to consult any oracles to know that her next birthday in February will be an auspicious 77. After all these years, it is amazing that she even bothers with fielding the inevitable Lennon questions and Beatles queries, and she does it with admirable enthusiasm and personal dignity, too. Certainly, in the face of a tragedy that could’ve defined the last 30 years of her life, she couldn’t have been blamed if she had chosen to retreat. But Yoko’s too much of a life-lover to go down that way. “Why is this life so beautiful, so interesting?” she exhales on the new Plastic Ono Band album, Between My Head and the Sky. Remaining a kind steward of her husband’s legacy—overseeing the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, their remasters, and curating a New York exhibit of Lennon artifacts currently on display—it’s no wonder she demurs when asked if she’ll ever sit down to write her own story.

“I’m too busy to do that. I think it’s something that might happen later, but I don’t think I can do it now.”

Perhaps Ono, whose first name translates to “ocean child,” is waiting for old age for that; for now, her work as an artist and musician in her own right is demanding her full attention. She has finally transcended the myth that a petite conceptual artist could come in and break up the mighty force that was the Beatles, and she has been reborn in time, with a little help from her son. Karma finally won out, if not instantly, then ultimately, as today it’s a lot hipper to dig Yoko than it is to knock her. Of course, that’s what John had been trying to tell everyone since the beginning: “What in the world you thinking of, laughing in the face of love?”

“Suddenly this record… I think it has a lot to do with my son. It’s not too wacko,” she says. “Did you know ‘Higa Noboru’ means ‘samurai,’ means ‘the sun is rising,’ and that’s the last song on the album?” asks Ono, to which I must reply I did not know that, but I am certainly intrigued by the concept as well as her stream of consciousness style of speaking, and she’s got me thinking… Now that Sean is nearly 35, the age Lennon the elder was when his beautiful boy was born, I see that, in some kind of cosmic way, the son is indeed rising. If Sean’s musical career has been marked by anything, it’s been its tentative launching, understandable for any child of a Beatle (perhaps he and his half-brother Julian have talked about that); so far, it’s most notable for an eight-year gap between solo albums following his debut. As an alternative musician whose sound doesn’t fit the mainstream alterna-sound, Sean would’ve disappointed those looking for a reprisal of the angry rock ‘n’ roll John. As a teenager, he organized IMA, a three-piece to back-up his mother’s ’90s album, Rising. Going on to forge his own relationships on the downtown avant-garde and experimental scenes, he struck up a longstanding collaboration with Yuka Honda, one half of Cibo Matto, and played bass with her group for five years. Now he collaborates with wildman savant Vincent Gallo, as well as with his girlfriend, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, though Honda remains a studio collaborator and player in the new Plastic Ono Band.

“Sean was creating this music company… he had a few artists and a few songs on a website and I checked it out and I said, ‘Look, they’re beautiful songs but they need some fire,’” says Ono. “‘I’m going to give you some fire,’ and he said, ‘Great!’ I think still the fire’s with me.” Listening to the new album and watching a live clip of the band performing “Why”, from her 1970 solo debut, it is safe to say Ono’s still got it. But the littlest Lennon also has a way with his parents’ most outside music. “Isn’t that weird?” says Ono. “I didn’t know he was checking on me but he was. ‘You mean you know the intro to this?’ Yeah, he knows the intro, he knows the chords, he knows everything—all my songs. So when I say, ‘Let’s do this,’ and name one of the old songs, he’s like, ‘Okay.’” Ono says okay, nonchalantly, in an effort to put across the ease with which Sean tackles the often difficult and at times improvisatory music that defined the Plastic Ono Band.

Following their marriage in Gibraltar near Spain in 1969, and using the paparazzi moment of their honeymoon as an opportunity to wage peace, Ono and Lennon masterminded the Bed-Ins, first in Amsterdam and later Montreal, which is where Crawdaddy! first caught up with them: Founder Paul Williams participated in the anti-war event and got caught front and center on film.  “Crawdaddy! I remember Crawdaddy!. My God, that was a long time ago… that’s nostalgia time for me,” says Ono.

Born in 1933 in Japan to a wealthy banking family, the Ono’s fortune waxed and waned during wartime and Yoko experienced extreme poverty and the horrors of war firsthand.  By the late ’50s, her father had secured work in the US and she had begun her education at Sarah Lawrence College, though even before graduation she became immersed in the New York avant-garde scene of the early ’60s. Under the tutelage of composers La Monte Young and John Cage and her friend George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus movement in art, Ono fell in with a pack of musical and visual conceptual artists. The Fluxus artists, with their ties to Dadaism, are credited for creating, among other things, “happenings,” art events that could include audience participation. Perhaps her most famous work of this period is “Cut Piece,” for which she invited the audience to cut away pieces of her dress as she sat passively on the floor (the work was a harbinger of what we now call performance art). During this period she was married twice and a daughter, Kyoko, was born.