IN BUDAPEST CONCERT : 15,000 HUNGARIAN FANS GIVE YOKO ONO A CHANCE

All Yoko is still saying is “Give peace a chance.”

It’s a theme she stressed repeatedly during her concert here Friday night--the 10th stop in the singer-songwriter’s first tour since her husband, John Lennon, was slain in 1980.

“As John said, we can make it (peace) together. . . . Together is the secret,” she told 15,000 people in the International Fairgrounds hall, a bare, stark room the size of a football field normally used for cultural or consumer exhibits.

Because so few people in this Eastern Bloc city know more than a smattering of English, those words--and other song introductions--were translated into Hungarian by an interpreter.

But one point near the end of the 80-minute concert needed no translation.

As the keyboardist in Ono’s band began Lennon’s most famous song, “Imagine,” the audience reacted with an intensity that seemed almost cathartic.

Ono’s decision to sing “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance” (another song strongly identified with her late husband) will probably fuel the resentment of pop fans who have accused Ono of trying to build her career on the lingering affection and respect for Lennon.

But the audience here appeared grateful to join in what became--in a haunting, deeply moving way--a memorial to Lennon.

During “Imagine,” tears welled in the eyes of older fans, who must have been as caught up in the music of Lennon and the Beatles as their Western counterparts, and in the eyes of teen-agers such as Gabriella Wittinger, a travel-office worker.

While waiting in the crowd for the concert to begin, she had talked about Lennon, calling him “a man of peace and love,” someone she “admired more than anyone else during my lifetime.”

Throughout the huge hall, dozens of couples embraced while hundreds held up lighted candles or pressed toward the stage as they accepted Ono’s invitation to sing along:

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one.

More than a musical event, Ono’s “Starpeace Tour” has the aura of a social and cultural experience, at least in a city like Budapest.

Friday’s concert--part of this city’s annual Spring Festival--was one of three Eastern Bloc stops on a tour that began Feb. 28 in Brussels and will include an April 17 performance at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles. The band also played Warsaw on March 4 and is scheduled to perform in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, on Tuesday.

“I felt it was very important to include these cities on the tour,” Ono said in an interview before the show. “If we want to have world peace, we really do have to understand the concept that we are all together.”

But she acknowledged her own brief uneasiness at the idea of going behind the Iron Curtain.

“I had this flash about, ‘Is it going to be safe,’ ” she said, smiling at her own reaction. “It was in that brief second before your intellect takes over and you think about all the intrigue you’ve read about or seen in movies. . . . Cities filled with spies running around in raincoats or a world composed of hundreds of Goldfingers.

“But you get to the cities and you find it’s just people. We have to get over our fears and suspicions.”

For Western visitors remembering the grim details of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution 30 years ago, however, it was unsettling to step off a plane here and see dozens of army guards standing around with submachine guns.

But there is a reassuring sign that helps you feel more at home. A billboard reads: “Welcome to Budapest. . . . Mastercharge is accepted.”

That promise notwithstanding, there is severe poverty. Tight limits exist on political freedom and such matters as travel. Still, the city seems far from the drab isolation and oppressive atmosphere of many communist cities, especially East Berlin. Downtown Budapest is filled with colorful streets and shops and warm, outgoing people who show no signs of anxiety when approached by Western visitors, even reporters.

Indeed, with its many signs advertising Coca-Cola and other Western products, the city’s mix of East and West has been dubbed “communism with a Western accent” and “goulash capitalism.”

Pop music is one increasingly important bridge in East-West relations, according to Laszlo Hegedus, a West Berlin-based concert promoter who booked Ono’s three Eastern European shows on this tour.

“While Communist governments rejected Western pop music as little as a decade ago on grounds it would corrupt young people’s values or possibly lead to social unrest, rock groups are now being courted in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary,” Hegedus said. Among the acts that have played Budapest in recent months or are due here soon: Dire Straits, Tina Turner, Talking Heads, Rod Stewart, Queen and Prince.

In the ‘70s, Eastern European countries experienced many of the same youth problems that surfaced in the West in the ‘60s (drugs, crime, restlessness), Hegedus explained. “The government (decided) that you have to give (young people) more hope, more entertainment and a nicer life. This led to rock being viewed as a positive force instead of a negative one.”

At the same time, there has been an explosion of Eastern European rock bands. When Hegedus’ company sponsored a local battle of the bands, tapes were received from 3,200 groups in Hungary alone.

The fact that Ono played a large facility here was an indication of the interest in her appearance, but that attendance was hardly typical of the crowds she’s been attracting in other cities.

While she filled 1,000- to 2,000-seat halls in some places, other tour stops--notably Brussels, The Hague and Munich--drew half a house or less.

“This is a special moment for Budapest, but it is not so special for the rest of Europe,” a pop industry executive explained Saturday in Vienna, where Ono was scheduled to perform Sunday night. “What reason is there to go see her? She doesn’t have any hit records.”

Echoed a cab driver in Vienna: “The consensus here is that she is just doing it for the money or for her own ego. . . . So why should we want to see her?”

Ono (who flew from Budapest to Stockholm on Saturday to attend the funeral of assassinated Prime Minister Olaf Palme at the invitation of Palme’s widow) isn’t a confident or experienced performer.

At the Fairgrounds Hall, she seemed uncomfortable on stage. But the audience seemed to appreciate the sense of courage surrounding her determination to carry on the Lennon/Ono crusade.

Back at the hotel, she appeared encouraged by the reception and philosophical about the problems in some other cities.

“I realized that some people would be suspicious,” she said. “They would prefer I stayed home with Sean (the couple’s 10-year-old son, who is accompanying her) and just disappear from sight.

“But there are only two ways to live. One is really living, and the other is just giving up and going through the motions.”

Ono also expected some people to criticize her use of the Lennon songs.

“I knew all that, but what am I going to do?

“I just thought it was so important to sing those songs. That was the point of the concerts, in a way. So I’m not going to exclude them.

“Whether some people accepted it or not, John and I were a team, and I’m still carrying on in that spirit.

“When I went to Japan for some concerts in 1974, John said, ‘Take “Imagine” with you.’ But I didn’t want to do it because John sang it so brilliantly. I was worried about not sounding as good.

“But that’s not important now. I just say to the audience, ‘Let’s sing it together.’ It’s not just John’s song or my song. It’s a song that means so much to people. The words are too important to just leave it home.”