John Lennon: Rock'n'Roll

JOHN LENNON: ROCK'N'ROLL (1975)

1) Be-Bop-A-Lula; 2) Stand By Me; 3) Rip It Up/Ready Teddy; 4) You Can't Catch Me; 5) Ain't That A Shame; 6) Do You Want To Dance?; 7) Sweet Little Sixteen; 8) Slippin' And Slidin'; 9) Peggy Sue; 10) Bring It On Home To Me/Send Me Some Lovin'; 11) Bony Moronie; 12) Ya Ya; 13) Just Because.

General verdict: For those who like their rockabilly greased-up, coked-up, and injected with a strain of tortured and wasted personality.

For the sakes of lady impartial objectivity, it must be confessed that Rock'n'Roll, John Lennon's last album before his retreatment into self-imposed musical exile, was never intended to be much more than an irrelevant toss-off — a record forced on the artist by a lawsuit: in order to atone for the sin of ripping off Chuck Berry's ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ with his own ʽCome Togetherʼ, John had to promise to record several oldies from the backlog of major publishing companies and hand over the royalties. Apparently he disliked the idea so much that he intentionally stalled the project, prioritizing Walls And Bridges over this kind of indentured servitude, but in the end, justice was served, and it could all be arranged under the banner of Fifties' nostalgia, triggered by the likes of American Graffiti and symbolically depicted by a stock photo of a young John in Hamburg on the album sleeve.

One could imagine that getting totally wasted in mid-1970s L.A. in a company of equally crazed-out loonies would be a good setting for a retro rock'n'roll party, even one that you had to throw on somebody else's orders. The main problem, however, was that John hadn't really done proper rock'n'roll in ages — the last time the man let loose at full speed might have been a decade earlier, when the Beatles were still touring; and even back then, the man never felt completely comfor­table when emulating the likes of Gene Vincent or Larry Williams. In addition, having Phil Spector produce your record when aiming for something like All Things Must Pass is one thing, but when covering old time rockabilly... maybe not such a good idea, no matter how much personal adoration you have for walls of sound.

With all that in mind, it is no wonder that Rock'n'Roll rarely gets sufficient accolades even from those who do not regard John's solo career in the mid-1970s as a total failure. But on a personal level, I have always liked the record anyway. It may not be true «rock and roll» in form — too bombastic, too overproduced, and even too slow for that — but it is still very rock and roll in spirit, and while it is hard to imagine John enjoying being forced to do something like this, it is just as hard admitting that he did not have fun while recording it. Because it all sounds like fourty minutes of wasted, demented, over-the-top, glammy musical orgy — letting many more inches of hair down than, for instance, McCartney's similar experience with his Back In USSR.

This bigness of the sound does have to be embraced, though. There is no question that the pure raw energy and the ferocious vocal magic of Little Richard's ʽSlippin' And Slidin'ʼ could not be matched by this coked-out band of depraved rock stars. But that does not prevent the coked-out band of depraved rock stars from hitting the zone anyway — and when they all manage to sound in tune and keep the fire well-stoked, the result is a veritable tornado of sound that nobody in his right mind could resist (at least definitely not while inebriated). Likewise, ʽBe-Bop-A-Lulaʼ here takes the echoey essentials of Gene Vincent's rockabilly style and spinal-tappishly pushes them to eleven — the entire two minutes and thirty seconds are just one big sonic wobble, with the bass, piano, and vocals trembling like a camera with Parkinson's, and only the shrill guitar solo (Jesse Ed Davis? I am never sure about individual players here because there are so many of them in the credits) emerging from the quake with untampered precision. First time around, it's a mess. Give it a couple more spins, and it coalesces into a jello ball of insane energy — overdriven to excess, but still true to the spirit of the original. Fun!

The decision to slow down so much of the material was weird, almost as if John decided to take petty revenge on Chuck Berry by turning his fast dance numbers (ʽYou Can't Catch Meʼ and ʽSweet Little Sixteenʼ) into slow shuffling drags — let alone something like ʽDo You Want To Dance?ʼ, somewhat more of a ʽDo You Want To Limp?ʼ. But even these slow shuffling drags can be fascinating, if only for the novelty of the approach: I do not think that anybody else had ever tried this «slow 'em down while slapping on the wall-of-sound» approach before, and there is a strange shamanistic magic here as John slowly, but steadily, whips himself up into a raging screaming frenzy on both of the Berry numbers; by the end of ʽSweet Little Sixteenʼ, it is as if he is madly whipping himself against the steady and unnerving brass riff, loving and hating this material in masochistic rage. In the same way, he transforms Larry Williams' flimsy joke number ʽBony Moronieʼ into a bubbling witches' brew, screaming at the top of his lungs as if trying to break out of a padded cell — where they supposedly keep him away from being able to make love to her underneath that apple tree.

Arguably the most famous track from the album, largely because it was released as the lead single, is his take on Ben E. King's ʽStand By Meʼ — deservedly so, I believe, because it is the only track here that completely annihilates the original, elevating it from a pretty, but formulaic, one-out-of-many R&B ballad to the status of bombastic personal prayer. Production helps a lot (deep bass and earth-shaking brass tones create an almost lava-like atmosphere of rumbling tectonic plates), but mainly it is just the vocal performance, one of John's very finest from that decade and visibly much more personal here than on the other tracks, though his reading of the Sam Cooke / Buddy Holly ʽBring It On Home / Send Me Some Lovin'ʼ medley comes close — all having to do with staying out of reach of his one true love, I am sure.

In the end, Rock'n'Roll is a unique experience — a unique failure, some might insist, but then again, even a unique failure from John Lennon can be so much more fascinating than a set of triumphs from much lesser artists. These days, it certainly sounds dated, but it does not cease to sound unique — and, like Bob Dylan's Self Portrait, it somehow manages to convey a familiar, but different side of a great artist's personality through the prism of somebody else's work. Also, anybody who would like to check it out in a larger context should either buy the expanded new edition (with bonus tracks) or, rather, hunt down the archival release Menlove Ave., which we will get around to eventually: be warned, however, that this larger context will be more about John's love affair with Phil Spector than with Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

John Lennon: Walls And Bridges

JOHN LENNON: WALLS AND BRIDGES (1974)

1) Going Down On Love; 2) Whatever Gets You Thru The Night; 3) Old Dirt Road; 4) What You Got; 5) Bless You; 6) Scared; 7) #9 Dream; 8) Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird Of Paradox); 9) Steel And Glass; 10) Beef Jerky; 11) Nobody Loves You (When You're Down And Out); 12) Ya Ya.

General verdict: Dreams, fears, complaints, rants, melancholy, ironic party swirl — this album has a bit of everything, even if not all the experiments are equally successful.

This album is sometimes hailed as a «comeback» for John — largely because it got him the best critical reviews since Imagine — but the word «comeback» feels a little strange now that we know that in less than a year, John would disappear off the radars of the musical world for half a decade anyway. It certainly feels strange to me personally, since I do not think that the overall quality of this material is that much stronger than it was on Mind Games. The only difference is that this time around, the sessions find John deeply entrenched in one of his personal crises, as he continues to deal with his US status issues, general depression, alcohol, and lack of Yoko by his side (who, apparently, could not be replaced by the collective presence of May Pang, Harry Nils­son, Ringo, and Keith Moon — all of them nice guys in their own right, but could any of them hammer a nail into a wooden board with that much class?).

The difference is pretty substantial: it is hardly possible that such great songs as ʽScaredʼ and ʽNobody Loves Youʼ could have been written by John prior to his drunken binges in LA clubs. But I have always insisted that a calm, peaceful, and self-assured Lennon could be just as honest and touching in his songwriting as a perturbed and hysterical Lennon — you just have to approach Plastic Ono Band and Double Fantasy with different goals in mind. Obviously, Walls And Bridges comes closer to the first one in attitude, although, due to John's life circumstances, it has to walk this thin line between personal agony and party spirit now — although it soon becomes clear that both are just two sides of the same coin anyway.

ʽScaredʼ is a particular standout here, perhaps the single most underrated song in John's catalog: not too surprising, since there was never any idea of releasing it as a single, and the sentiments expressed in it are such a far cry from the candy, the political propaganda, or the easy-access guruism of his biggest hits that popularity is not an option. Nevertheless, it is a perfect mood piece: from the opening wolf howl and down to the well-coordinated musical howl of the guitars, pianos, and brass, it is a chilling midnight confession — one that you normally reserve for your own inner self, too afraid to open it up to anybody else. Nobody who has ever lived through a midlife crisis could stay totally indifferent to this music or these words. And it is only recently that I actually noticed how the verse / chorus pair is structured like a dialog between John A and John B, or, perhaps, John and the Devil, the latter telling him about how "you don't need to worry / in heaven or hell / just dance to the music / you do it so well, well, well" (with a self-reference to ʽWell, Well, Wellʼ, I'm sure!).

Most importantly, the arrangement perfectly fits John's mood, and this is a general thing about the album — he has assembled a more dedicated team of players here than he had for Mind Games, including blues guitar king Jesse Ed Davies, Bobby Keys on sax, and Nicky Hopkins back on the piano (though the latter is not featured too often, but I think that any experienced listener will immediately recognize his style on ʽOld Dirt Roadʼ and ʽNobody Loves Youʼ). With Harry Nilsson and Elton John as additional collaborators, this is his strongest backing outfit since Imagine, and one that can equally well indulge in a party atmosphere as it can pile up the spookiness or hit upon heavy romance. Indeed, one of the strongest aspects of Walls & Bridges is all the diversity — it seems as if John was intentionally experimenting with genres here, getting funky, folksy, or glammy at will, which is actually pretty impressive considering how thoroughly wasted he himself and much of his entourage must have been at the time. (Actually, not so much: apparently, Lennon harshly restricted life's pleasures to the West Coast — once the musicians got to New York from LA to make the record, there was discipline all around).

This diversity is best illustrated with the two big hits from the record that are equally glorious, but could not be more apart from each other. ʽWhatever Gets You Thru The Nightʼ is probably the most perfect collaboration there could ever be between two Johns: Elton lends it his sense of unabashed, wild-riding rock'n'roll glamor, and Lennon corrects it with his snarky sense of humor. It is pure frantic vaudeville, a track that speeds along at such a speed that it is barely possible to even dance to it — nothing like a «Lennon goes disco», as some grumblers had it (the rhythmic patterns are jazzy rather than funky), but a spluttering, dizzy, controlled-chaotic mess of guitars, pianos, and saxes, with each band member striving to out-energize the rest, though Elton and Bobby Keys are clearly in the lead. The atmosphere is as close to glam as John ever got, but the vocal delivery is clearly sarcastic — both Johns are poking so much fun at the party attitudes that it is a wonder how the song never explodes into bursts of uncontrolled belly-laughs.

But if ʽWhatever Gets You Thru The Nightʼ is easily the whirligiggiest party anthem that John ever (co-)wrote, then ʽ#9 Dreamʼ is one of the most gorgeously psychedelic soundscapes he ever created — almost on par with ʽLucy In The Skyʼ and the like, though, perhaps, not as strictly unconventionally magical as the former. The idea was to bring forth a musical reproduction of one of John's actual dreams, and with a little studio trickery on the string arrangements, Nicky Hopkins' electric piano, and Jesse Ed Davies' wah-wah guitar intro, that goal is achieved — in fact, I would definitely call this a quintessential early precursor of the dream-pop genre; the only previous song in John's catalog that approaches this atmosphere is ʽAcross The Universeʼ, but that one had a very sharp, tangible guitar sound that still brought it down to earth, whereas on ʽ#9 Dreamʼ everything, from rhythm section to vocals, comes to you in a foggy haze. Throw in a catchy vocal melody, the sexiest whispers of "John, John" imaginable (actually, May Pang does a better job with this than Yoko), and an incomprehensible mantra for the refrain — and the whole thing sticks out as perfect proof that even in his mid-life crisis, John was capable of gorgeous abstract artistry, equally removed from his political agenda and personal problems. It also shows that, despite having openly renounced and rejected his Beatle-days psychedelic games, that particular strain within him was still alive and aching to break through — too bad that most of the time, he was actively suppressing it in favor of «realism».

Walls And Bridges does not, however, begin and end with the hits. I have already singled out ʽScaredʼ as the underdog highlight, but this should not diminish the importance of ʽSteel And Glassʼ — John at the top of his vicious emploi, tearing into an unnamed victim (reportedly it was Allen Klein, but that knowledge is unnecessary if you want to arm yourself with the song in order to vent your feelings against some son of a bitch or other) with fangs, claws, and occasionally breathtaking up-the-scale string buildups. This should not obscure the soulseeking brilliance of ʽOld Dirt Roadʼ, co-written with Nilsson (who also sings harmonies) and graced with the trade­mark piano touch of Nicky Hopkins, somewhat making it into ʽJealous Guy, Pt. 2ʼ, a little less catchy but, arguably, a little more deep. (Nicky's glissando after the "cool... clear... water" inter­mission is actually one of the most unforgettable short passages in John's solo catalog for me). And this should not conceal the deeply depressed introspection of ʽNobody Loves You (When You're Down And Out)ʼ, which takes the classic premise of Jimmy Cox's ʽNobody Knows Youʼ and updates it for a different kind of situations — unlike professional bluesmen, John Lennon would find it weird to sing about lack of money, so he makes a grim prediction instead: "Nobody loves you when you're old and grey... Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground".

There are a few relative clunkers, of course: ʽWhat You Gotʼ is a heavy funk-rocker that could have worked better without John overscreaming it; ʽBless Youʼ is a nice atmospheric ballad that is too slow and lethargic compared to the quiet, but cathartic piano turbulence of ʽOld Dirt Roadʼ; nobody remembers much about the short pop-rocker ʽSurprise, Surpriseʼ (a rather lackluster ode to May Pang) or about the quasi-R&B instrumental ʽBeef Jerkyʼ; and while it is adorable to hear Julian Lennon trying to keep the drum rhythm on the brief snippet of ʽYa Yaʼ, that closing track is more of a special family signal than a suitably de-pompifying coda to the album. (The brooding heaviness of ʽNobody Loves Youʼ might call for a ʽHer Majestyʼ-style anti-finale, but the father-son ʽYa Yaʼ isn't even particularly funny — although I am still tempted to call it the single greatest Julian Lennon performance on record ever).

But even the clunkers contribute to the album's impressive level of diversity, and even clear throwaways such as ʽBeef Jerkyʼ still possess Lennon's unorthodox style — like, what genre is that song? It's like part-time Shadows, part-time Stevie Wonder, and part-time subconsciously Paul McCartney's ʽLet Me Roll Itʼ (whose riff is partially borrowed for the bridge section). I could not say that I like it, particularly, but I respect the odd corners into which Lennon's jam spirit could lead him every now and then, as opposed to the straight and predictable roads trodden by the majority of professional blues / rock / R&B genre specialists.

In the end, Walls And Bridges is just another good and honest solo Lennon album, with the added benefit of shitty times' experience to help the songwriting and of a great company of musical friends to help with the arrangements (there is a certain naked charm to hearing the same songs in their raw versions on Menlove Ave. and other archival releases, but I am deeply impres­sed by the finished product all the same). And, for those of you to whom this is important — it is the only solo Lennon album without any input from or explicit mention of Yoko, even if his longing for her does permeate several of the songs. Ultimately, the record is more about walls than it is about bridges, and this is good, because John is always at his most convincing when he is staying behind a wall rather than crossing a bridge.

John Lennon: Mind Games

JOHN LENNON: MIND GAMES (1973)

1) Mind Games; 2) Tight A$; 3) Aisumasen (I'm Sorry); 4) One Day (At A Time); 5) Bring On The Lucie (Freeda Peeple); 6) Nutopian International Anthem; 7) Intuition; 8) Out The Blue; 9) Only People; 10) I Know (I Know); 11) You Are Here; 12) Meat City.

General verdict: A middle-of-the-road album, but I'd still rather be in the middle of the road with John Lennon than at the end of the road with... with... WITHOUT John Lennon.

Time has not been very kind to Mind Games, an album recorded by John right at the start of his next personal crisis — just after Nixon's victory at the polls had taken all the wind out of his political sails, but a little before his inner demons started getting the better of him (to be strongly unleashed in about a year's time). Thus, in between the arrogant fight-for-your-right exuberance of Some Time In New York City and the deep dark depression of Walls And Bridges lies this album, usually thought of as the one that spawned a classic title track and ten pieces of mediocre surrounding filler.

But I do not like to think of it that way. More than any other solo Beatle, I regard John's solo career now as one continuous, unbreakable whole — a decade-long musical diary of psycho­logical change, mental growth, and emotional transformation — and from that point of view, Mind Games is just another step, a somewhat relaxed and slightly less tense «breather», whose virtues are subtly touching and whose flaws are amusingly instructive. Unlike quite a few com­plainers, I sense no general weakening of the spirit here, let alone «selling out», and John's melodic gift remains, on the whole, untainted, even if a few stylistic and substantial missteps might certainly influence one's judgment.

One of the missteps in question may have been John's new playing team: remnants of the Plastic Ono Band had scattered to the winds, and in the place of heavyweights like Nicky Hopkins and George Harrison, John was hiring relatively little-known session musicians, such as light-jazz player Ken Ascher on piano and David Spinozza on guitar (the latter, amusingly, had previously already worked with McCartney on Ram, but made sure to conceal it from John throughout the sessions). This move was far from tragic, since, under John's guidance, all the session musicians still deliver the goods, and there are plenty of classy keyboard, guitar, and bass licks throughout the record (see below); but it does hurt the album's identity, and pretty much lays all the blame for its flaws on John exclusively. From now on, he would almost always be working with «third tier» players, either being jealous of the stronger ones or, more probably, just because he didn't really give a damn about extra personality touches.

Another potential misstep is actually an illusion: the album is sometimes said to have been written in one week, but that was largely because John used up a lot of material he had hung out to dry over the previous three years. ʽMind Gamesʼ itself started out as two different tunes around 1969-70, and took some time to blossom into the epic gem that we know. I love this song deeply because, unlike ʽInstant Karmaʼ or any of those other rabble-rousing anthems that John typically selected for his singles, ʽMind Gamesʼ is not a sing-along, clap-along, everybody-get-along social ritual, but more of a personal epiphany: its big, pompous arrangement calls for you to celebrate the glory of existence without sacrificing your privacy and individuality. The simple three-chord riff that keeps spiraling upwards throughout the song is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful and transcendental sequences John ever came up with — a straightahead stairway to heaven, making the "love is the answer" bridge every bit as credible as "all you need is love", and, because of the song's less pandering-to-crowd nature, even a little bit smarter. We can beat up the lyrics for being clumsy, pretentious, or naïve, but if I am climbing that stairway to heaven, what do I care about the questionable content of the billboards along the way?

Now, about that filler issue. It is true that John seems to be somewhat confused here, nowhere near as sharp about his message and general direction as he had been from 1970 to 1972. But that does not prevent him from still having scattered flashes of quite variegated emotional brilliance. Other than the title track, my two personal favorites here are ʽAisumasenʼ and ʽIntuitionʼ — two numbers that set two completely different moods and challenges, yet each succeeds brilliantly at its assigned task, and I would rate them just as high as any highlight on POB or Imagine.

On ʽAisumasenʼ, perhaps an intentionally ironic corruption of the required ʽsumimasenʼ (because it just has to be so tough for a foreigner to correctly pronounce a long Japanese word), John asks for forgiveness — double the irony in light of the fact that the song originally started life as ʽCall My Nameʼ, an anytime-at-all-all-you-gotta-do-is-call active pledge of assistance — triple the irony in light of the fact that the song was released right at the start of John's «lost weekend» separation from Yoko, rather than, as could be normally expected, at its end. Regardless of the context, it is quite a devastating confessional (not coincidentally, its chord sequence is very similar to the one used on ʽI Want Youʼ) — slow-burning, but tense, with a breathtaking plunge into even deeper waters on the bridge ("all that I know is just what you tell me..."), and culmi­nating in a screaming, all-but-suicidal guitar solo from Spinozza that, at the end, just leaves you hanging there, unresolved and unanswered. To this day, it remains one of the greatest pure expressions of guilty self-torture ever recorded.

Conversely, ʽIntuitionʼ, opening the album's second side, is brighter, sprightlier, and a superb way to get you out of bed on a brand new morning — cheerful, but intelligent; optimistic, but thought­ful; somewhat martial, but friendly and homely. Everything about it is wonderfully cute, from Jim Keltner's «slightly drunk» drum pattern to Gordon Edwards' «back-of-my-mind» bass lick that opens the song to Ascher's delightfully disciplined music-hall keyboard solo. It's also got quite an impressive set of lyrics for a song that has to remain tied to continous usage of words that end in -tion by design, although it would have been just as impressive as a pure instrumental: it is not often that we catch John in such a perky mood (actually, in the long run the song would fit in perfectly on Double Fantasy, as the perkiest album of his entire career).

The same perkiness, however, can be misplaced; arguably the biggest weakness of Mind Games is that it still contains, more due to artistic inertia rather than artistic inspiration, several attempts at rabble-rousing that do not work because it does not feel like the artist really continues to believe in this type of action. The chief culprit is ʽOnly Peopleʼ, a song that has always struck me as the definition of «phoney» — and not even because it has a bad / unmemorable melody, but because its arrangement is completely misguided. Instead of bringing in the big band touch, with thunder-drums, bombastic brass, gospel choirs and all things Phil Spectorian, John goes here for a more restrained type of «party atmosphere», providing most of the vocals himself, including all the whoopees, hey-heys, and come-on-everybody's — which backfires severely, because in the end it seems as if he is here all alone, trying to raise to action a crowd of nobodys. In the overall context of his political disillusionment after all the wasted efforts of 1972, ʽOnly Peopleʼ feels especially hollow, like something that he still felt obliged to put on this record without actually wanting to do it one bit. (As far as I know, he would later end up pretty much disowning the song in his own words, so he might have felt the same way relistening to it).

Slightly more effective is ʽBring On The Lucie (Freeda Peeple)ʼ, with its bigger arrangement and an actual musical hook (the funny little slide riff, apparently played by Sneaky Pete Kleinow him­self). Its main problem is that it wobbles in between seriously hateful protest and a merry carnivalesque atmosphere, meaning that it could never have the same psychological effect as ʽGimme Some Truthʼ or ʽWoman Is The Nigger Of The Worldʼ; but melody-wise, it is a fine effort, and, besides, some people might actually prefer their political Lennon more poppy and carnivalesque, keeping the venom restricted to the lyrics.

But if, on the whole, John Lennon, The Political Animal, is on the wane in 1973, John Lennon the bare-bones pop-rocker is doing fine. ʽOut The Blueʼ is a simple and nice love ballad, pushed up over the mediocrity threshold by its powerful bridge section (there's a really great bit out there when the solo piano and bass soar sky-high right before the "like a UFO you came to me" line). ʽI Know (I Know)ʼ and ʽYou Are Hereʼ are two consecutive ballads that might take some time to grow in your mind, but the former can eventually win you over with its sheer sincerity, and the latter is really all about Sneaky Pete and how his pedal steel can be such a perfect companion to John's vocal tenderness. Speaking of vocal tenderness, though, that other ballad, ʽOne Day (At A Time)ʼ, kind of overdoes the tender thing — it is hard for me to throttle the cringe reaction hearing John go "you are my woman, I am your man" in that falsetto. (This is one Beatle song that I actually prefer hearing in the Elton John version).

If you want to remind yourself of John the rocker, ʽTight A$ʼ might do the trick just fine — a simple, unpretentious, solid piece of Carl Perkins-ish boogie with fun guitar solos and spooky lyrical innuendos. But if you want to remind yourself of John the weird rocker, treat yourself to ʽMeat Cityʼ, a real hot mess of a track: glam-rock with an avantgarde twist, danceable, dissonant, and befuddling. I used to hate it, now I feel more amused by it — a bit of a slap-in-yer-face after all the softness and normalness of the rest of the record. "Chicken-suckin', mother-truckin', Meat City shookdown USA" — not sure if Chuck Berry would have appreciated this attitude, but I guess that after all he thought he'd done for those people, John felt himself rightfully entitled for a bit of an anti-American poke here. Still, he never had the time to make good on his "I'm going to China to see for myself" promise, though; apparently, it was much easier to go L.A. and drown himself in alcohol for a year instead.

Bottomline is — Mind Games is not a great album (by Lennon standards, that is), but it is nothing to be ashamed of. It is probably the only LP in his catalog that has no overriding general purpose, and could be said to have been made just because John's profession demanded it at the time. But no purpose is still better than, say, the purpose of Some Time In New York City; and this is frickin' John Lennon — the man that is theoretically capable to inspire you by writing a song about getting out of bed and brushing his teeth, if he so desires.

John Lennon: Some Time In New York City

JOHN LENNON: SOME TIME IN NEW YORK CITY (1972)

1) Woman Is The Nigger Of The World; 2) Sisters, O Sisters; 3) Attica State; 4) Born In A Prison; 5) New York City; 6) Sunday Bloody Sunday; 7) The Luck Of The Irish; 8) John Sinclair; 9) Angela; 10) We're All Water; 11) Cold Turkey; 12) Don't Worry Kyoko; 13) Well (Baby Please Don't Go); 14) Jamrag; 15) Scumbag; 16) Au.

General verdict: Bad news: too much politics, self-righteousness, and Yoko Ono. Good news: John Lennon is really sexy when he's angry.

It certainly took a lot of inventiveness and gall for John Lennon, the most beloved of all ex-Beatles in the hearts and minds of the «progressive» rock'n'roll press of the early Seventies, to shoot himself in the foot right in the presence of all his fans, but that is precisely what he did with the release of Some Time In New York City, almost inarguably his worst, or at least most embarrassing solo album — and yet a strangely fascinating one at that.

Released at the start of the Nixon vs. McGovern campaign, the record was clearly more of a poli­tical statement — a very, very, very straightforward political statement, next to which ʽGive Peace A Chanceʼ and even ʽPower To The Peopleʼ had all the appeal of a tender Paul McCartney love ballad — than a musical venture; so much so that even people who generally shared John and Yoko's social and political views were taken aback by its revolutionary propaganda. It seems fairly obvious that, more than any other Lennon album, this one was recorded with one particular and very concrete message in mind... except that the message backfired. Wanna know why Nixon was re-elected in one of the largest electoral landslides in US history? Half of the people who voted for him had paid for Some Time In New York City. Thanks a lot, John and Yoko!

Joking aside, though, I think that it was not so much the political gesture itself as the scope and vehemence of the gesture that spooked people back at the time. I mean, nobody blamed Neil Young for ʽOhioʼ or Mick Jagger for ʽSweet Black Angelʼ (which, if we think about it hard enough, is actually creepier than ʽAngelaʼ, because we know how much Mick Jagger had the hots for sexy black ladies, and his "free de sweet black slave" on that song is every bit a political slogan as it is a lyrical link to the fantasy of "scarred old slaver knows he's doing alright, hear him whip the whomen just around midnight"). It is only when you get all of that baggage — feminism, Irish independence, African-American activism, prison riots, Angela Davis, John Sinclair — dumped on your head in a single, frenzied, spit-dripping psycho-attack, and with Yoko Ono singing and wailing on top of it all, that the shit finally reaches the fan.

But you know what, though? In retrospect, now that most of the people who get an inkling to listen to this album weren't even born when Nixon was re-elected, Some Time In New York City is actually not that bad. It is still my least favorite Lennon album, one that I never ever get the urge to relisten to in its entirety (comprising the live LP, which we will get to in a bit), but two things I know for sure: John never made a record that truly disregarded melody, and John never made a record that was anything less than 100% sincere and faithfully reflective of his state of mind at the time. In 1972, the man was on an adrenaline roll — for whatever reason, he truly believed, even in that early post-Woodstock era, that music was still capable of introducing changes to the world rather than merely reflecting them, and he was almost literally jumping out of his skin here to make it happen. He may have made a fool of himself in the process, but it is still fascinating, and sometimes quite entertaining, to watch somebody like John Lennon make a fool of himself. (Though, perhaps, not quite as entertaining as to watch Kanye West make a fool of himself — here is one art that has actually progressed quite a bit by the 2010s).

Apart from the loyal Jim Keltner, John and Yoko are no longer backed here by whatever used to pass for the Plastic Ono Band. Instead, the sound is provided by Elephant's Memory, a local NYC bunch of semi-musicians, semi-political activists led by sax player Stan Bronstein. They are loud, brash, and overall decent, but there is certainly nothing outstanding about their sound, and on the whole, the album seems to initiate a strange period in John's musical career when he would select his team players based on any criterion except for sheer musical merit. Luckily, most of the musicians that hung around John were not arrogant enough to be totally non-professional, but still, Paul would always have John beat in that respect from now on. In this case, Bronstein himself can blow a mean sax — I think the sax parts on the album are the ones that will stick out the most in memory once the storm has passed — but his band is quite a meandering little outfit. And with no Ringo, George, or Nicky Hopkins to hang around, this only places even more emphasis on political slogans and propagandist atmosphere.

Nevertheless, far from being a fan of «militant» feminism, I will defend ʽWoman Is The Nigger Of The Worldʼ to the death. It literally towers over all the other political anthems on the record, making them seem petty and disposable in comparison — something that is clearly manifested, for instance, when you play it back to back with the Yoko-sung ʽBorn In A Prisonʼ, which has multiple melodic similarities with ʽWomanʼ (an even slower, but comparable waltzing tempo, an equally prominent role for the saxophone, multi-layered wall-of-sound arrangements, etc.). A big, fat, old hyperbole of a song, whose adoption for the official ultra-feminist movement anthem was probably only thwarted by two reasons (a: use of the N-word, b: being written and sung by a man), it manages to unleash a magnificent musical tempest that wreaks havoc on the senses re­gardless of how much you identify with the lyrics. Maybe you agree that woman is (still) the slave to the slaves and maybe you do not — to me, what has always mattered was the way those feelings were spilled out rather than the ideas behind them. Everybody works in good conjunction here: John's vocals, gradually and believably winding up from quiet patient sermon to desperate hysterics — Bronstein's sax, following and deepening the wisdom and ecstasy of the vocal melody — Keltner's powerhouse drumming — even the lead guitar playing of Wayne ʽTexʼ Gabriel on some of the solos adds to the collective pleading. No surprise at all that this is the only song of the lot that seems to have survived into the modern age (though, unfortunately, the N-word is currently creeping out all those who have been raised on too much political correctness and not enough brains).

Everything else is much harder to defend, because it is only on ʽWomanʼ that John actually takes on the risk of making himself sound like a Biblical prophet and getting away with it (in my opinion, at least). On pretty much every other song he sounds like a musically enhanced Abbie Hoffman, with Yoko bleating at his heels. And it is not just the lyrics: my initial negative reaction to ʽSunday Bloody Sundayʼ was certainly not due to the "anglo pigs and scotties", or to "it's those mothers' turn to burn", or any other expression walking the thin line between justifiedly indignant and embarrassingly offensive — it was due to the fact that the irate, burn-'em-up atmosphere was simply not congealing. On this track, John's angry verses just sound angry — not pained, not troubled, he is simply screaming out like a mindless protester with no personal stake in the business; and the idea of donating the chorus to Yoko, so that she can bleat out "Sunday, bloody Sunday" in the manner of a crazy homeless lady harassing unfortunate bypassers, while John is goading her on with forced and laughable R&B-ish "do it, do it!"s was one of the worst artistic side effects of their relationship.

Better songs still get spoiled by manipulative ideas: ʽJohn Sinclairʼ is actually pretty catchy, an overall solid attempt at writing a folk protest song in the old toe-tapping Woody Guthrie style, with very nice steel guitar playing from John himself and that other guitarist — and it is even hard to complain about the lyrics this time around, though they are not exactly the apex of protest poetry, either (but then again, neither was Woody Guthrie). But what was up with the ridiculous decision to have that "gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta... set him free" on a seemingly endless loop? Once again, as they say, at the last moment defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory, as an honest, straightforward, and musically satisfactory message is needlessly embellished with a manipulatively mantraic resolution. Heck, if each single one of those gottas gained Nixon a new fan, I wouldn't be surprised — and that, my friends, is still a much more humble hyperbole than the ones spread all around this record.

Surprisingly, Yoko-sung tunes frequently emerge as more reserved and acceptable than John's: ʽSisters, O Sistersʼ is like a friendlier, poppier, humbler retort to the preceding ʽNigger Of The Worldʼ, adorkably danceable and totally A-OK if it weren't for Yoko's constant attempts to sing so much higher than her natural range: the "freedom, oh freedom" and "wisdom, oh wisdom" bits, in particular, are blatant crimes against humanity that all but annihilate whatever contributions to the right cause the song might otherwise offer. The same goes for ʽWe're All Waterʼ, a fast, joyful, potentially infectious piece of booty-shaking delirium (Chubby Checker would be proud), but in desperate need of better organized lyrics (Bob Dylan to the rescue!) and tranquilizers for all the bleating fits — despite all of Yoko's attempts to modify the vocal clichés for rock'n'roll frenzy, some mountains are way beyond a single human being's brave attempt to move them. Of course, "there may not be much difference" between Rockefeller and her if we hear them sing... but then again, what difference there might be would probably constitute sufficient ground for termination. Still, a fun tune if you reserve all the reservations.

The crazy nature of Some Time In New York City, well summed up in the post-ʽBallad Of John And Yokoʼ narrative of the title track (which, by the way, is probably the album's second best song after ʽWomanʼ), continues on the second LP — a chronological mish-mash, but also a pre­cious historical document, consisting of two tracks from a 1969 show by the Plastic Ono Band and four more tracks from a joint 1971 performance with Frank Zappa and the Mothers. The 1969 part contains a magnificent version of ʽCold Turkeyʼ and a 15-minute jam version of ʽDon't Worry Kyokoʼ that you can take or leave; I much prefer the shorter version from Toronto, with far more precise and expressive guitar work and... well, four minutes instead of 15 mean ten minutes less of Yoko, which is always a plus. As for the 1971 show, the blues number ʽWell (Baby Please Don't Go)ʼ is surprisingly sharp and poignant — John performs it in his ʽYer Bluesʼ mode, which is always mind-blowing when he really gets into it — but the Zappa jams are passable at best, and, on the whole, Zappa and Lennon just weren't too good of a match: John understands very little about Frank's musical universe, and Frank is just way too cool to take part in John's. Essentially, this is the Mothers of Invention trying to adapt their craft to Plastic Ono Band values, and since it is not quite clear why they should try something like that in the first place, the experiment remains just that — an experiment. (It must be noted that the recent CD release of the album almost completely omitted the Zappa segment — because it is now available on its own, and in a much more honest mix that brings Frank's guitar back up front, on Zappa's posthumously released Playground Psychotics album).

But no matter how mixed this «scumbag» is, Some Time In New York City, for all its flaws and embarrassments, retains that simple quality which many «objectively better» albums of its gene­rations do not seem to have — it is interesting. It is a record that bursts at the seams with life, even if that life is sometimes stupid and misguided. In a way, it captures the throbbing cultural pulse of New York City in mid-'72 better than anything I can think of, and I'm pretty sure all those songs would have been big hits at CBGB's, had the place already been open back then. At the same time, its wildness is compatible with the glam rock excesses of the era — the sound of ʽAttica Stateʼ and ʽWe're All Waterʼ is pretty close to whatever Marc Bolan was doing, for instance. All in all, it is just one more piece of evidence how a fascinating person's failures can be, well, more fascinating than an average person's greatest achievements. The next time I listen to this record in its entirety is probably the next time I decide to review it (again!), but I know for sure that I, too, felt a little more alive while listening to it than I usually feel.

John Lennon: Imagine

JOHN LENNON: IMAGINE (1971)

1) Imagine; 2) Crippled Inside; 3) Jealous Guy; 4) It's So Hard; 5) I Don't Want To Be A Soldier Mama; 6) Give Me Some Truth; 7) Oh My Love; 8) How Do You Sleep?; 9) How?; 10) Oh Yoko!.

General verdict: The raging spirit of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, slightly sugar-coated by a superb team of qualified sugar-coaters.

Imagine there's no Beatles (it's easy if you were born after 1980, and even easier if you were born after 2000), no Paul McCartney to shake a stick at, no progressive or punk rock, imagine all the people living without access to Rolling Stone or Pitchforkmedia or any snarky media source that seems to have figured it all out about the greatest musical minds of the 20th century, and try to simply go ahead with your gut feelings. There is a good chance that in such a context, Imagine might seem like the finest pop music album ever made. Unfortunately, such a context is almost as impossible to generate as an antimatter gravitational field in your living room.

The problem with John is that he is very much an artistic gambler. Every now and then, he would raise the stakes so high that he'd be hardly able to call — and in order to enjoy his catalog through and through, you constantly have to deal with moments of hypocrisy and falling back on his own potential. Thus, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band ruptured with his past and established a whole new formula for aspiring singer-songwriters; no sooner had it come out, though, that John went back to a much less ascetic, much more smooth and conventional type of pop sound — all the while continuing to pinch and harass those who, like Paul, never backed away from that type of sound in the first place. Many people cringe at Imagine because it is too soft; many more, I think, cringe at it because it is soft stuff produced by a hard-ass guy accusing others of being soft.

Yet I have never found it to be a big problem. From 1971 and all the way to 1980, issues of creative and challenging musical arrangements did not bother Lennon as much as the issue of saying precisely what he wanted to say at any given moment. Granted, even in his Beatle days he was always more preoccupied with base melody and «idea» as opposed to sophisticated arrange­ment and «innovation» — on his own, he was thoroughly dependent on whatever technical masterminds were at hand, and never bothered much to check whether the final product came out as experimental, artsy, or commercial. Fortunately, the professionalism of the technical master­minds was rarely in doubt, and even if John did frequently sound out of time, this is no longer a problem, now that time has pretty much leveled all genre conventions.

Anyway, even if you have not heard Imagine the LP (not hearing ʽImagineʼ the song would be definitely un-imaginable), you must have guessed by now that this was a perfectly accessible, «normal», regularly produced and arranged pop album, unmarred by avantgarde influences and expanded beyond the stark minimalism of John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band. This time, John had assembled a fairly large team — and what a team it was: Harrison on guitar, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Alan White and Jim Keltner on drums, Klaus Voormann on bass, and even the mighty King Curtis himself dropped in to add saxophone parts to two of the songs (by the way, this was one of King's last, if not the last ever, recording sessions — he'd be stabbed to death one month prior to the album's release). Even Moody Blues fans should be interested, since Mike Pinder is credited for shaking the tambourine on ʽI Don't Want To Be A Soldierʼ (maybe that is why I've always been so partial to that track?..).

No amount of session talent would have saved a bad album, of course, but John was still on a roll: every single song here is at least memorable and/or fun, and quite a few are masterpieces. There is no single theme, but most of the songs are centered around the usual subjects — sarcastic put-downs of those who have it wrong (ʽCrippled Insideʼ, ʽHow Do You Sleep?ʼ), political protests (ʽI Don't Want To Be A Soldierʼ, ʽGive Me Some Truthʼ), personal crises (ʽIt's So Hardʼ, ʽHow?ʼ), relationship issues (ʽJealous Guyʼ), and Yoko (ʽOh My Loveʼ, ʽOh Yoko!ʼ). At the very least, this certainly gave John the advantage of being able to claim that all of his art is still directly related to significant personal experience, rather than, you know, singing about dogs with three legs, monkberry moon delights, and eating at home.

Prefacing all that is the title track, sincere and innocent enjoyment of which has been rendered impossible by incessant profanation — miriads of bland covers, radio overplay, commercials, and, most importantly, ripping out of context. Personally, I can still enjoy ʽImagineʼ just fine when it sits close to the acidic-venomous ʽCrippled Insideʼ, rather than finds itself in the company of church hymns, Amazing Graces, ʽTake Me Home, Country Roadsʼ, and other similar setlists created by and for very idealistic, very boring, and (typically) very obnoxious young people who prefer a very straightforward approach to the idea of spiritual enlightenment. But there is no getting away from the simplistic magnificence of the piano melody — a stately, but humble escalator to Heaven — or from the awesomeness of the "yoo hoo" falsetto hook, whose personal magic I am not able to explain in words, because it does not fall neatly under any type of emotion I am aware of. As for the «communist» lyrics of the song, which are so off-putting to all those who never fail to point out that John Lennon himself had always been quite particular about his "possessions", for some reason, they have never bothered me — maybe because the song in general is such a cloud-walking musical utopia that it never came across as «preachy» to me, even despite the "I hope someday you'll join us" line.

Anyway, ʽImagineʼ is just one out of ten songs on Imagine — and it is pretty hard for me to pick a favorite. The whole thing is evenly divided into a «tender John» and a «nasty John» part, so evenly, in fact, that sometimes I think it would have been great fun to amend the sequencing so that each of the two would inhabit a separate side of vinyl. But although the tender-nasty dicho­thomy would persist all the way up to Walls And Bridges, John was always particular about interweaving those two sides of his personality in his art, just as they were so tightly interwoven in his real life. There is nothing surprising that the biggest dick in the world can also be its most passionate and sympathetic lover, after all.

The real good news here is that John's team, assembled for the album, was able to perfectly amplify both of those sides. A large part of my own love for Imagine is due not to John's tor­mented personality, but to the little things that his friends contribute to the expression of said personality. For instance, ʽIt's So Hardʼ could be a fairly generic blues-rocker, if not for King Curtis' panicky sax solo, conveying the idea of all of life's problems much more explicitly than John's vocals — but the best bit is John's guitar duet with the strings of The Flux Fiddlers, first in call-and-response form and then as they bring it down together in a single joint wail of despe­ration. (There is also the irony of using the line "sometimes I feel like going down" in both of its possible senses, but that's just a bit of classic John hooliganry).

One song that is typically discarded even by fans of the album is ʽI Don't Want To Be A Soldierʼ: too long, too noisy, too repetitive, too simplistic, too «ugly». It is all of that, for sure, and perhaps I am too influenced here by childhood memories when I used to be transfixed and terrified by it, but even today it strikes me as something musically unique — not just in Lennon's catalog, but in general. If there is one single influence for that song, I'd go ahead and place my bets on Bitches Brew: a long, multi-layered, controlled-chaos jazz-rock jam functioning as a tribalistic ritual, except that certain complexities are sacrificed in order to make the effect spookier. With Harrison contributing some of the most aggressive slide licks he ever laid down, with Nicky Hopkins doing those agitated, paranoid piano runs in the background, with Jim Keltner causing minor earthquakes with his drum patterns, with King Curtis creating total saxophone havoc in the solo sections with multiple overdubs, how could anyone in his right mind be bored with this apocalyptic sonic panorama? Perhaps John's single repeated vocal line with minimal variations is what pisses people off, but it is so insignificant next to that voodoo they all do so well — and speaking of "well", some of John's "we-e-e-e-e-ell, I-I-I-I..." are creepy as hell here. As far as I am concerned, never again would the man rise to the same levels of sonic nightmare — and this on one of his «tenderest» albums, too.

Then there is the case of ʽHow Do You Sleep?ʼ. God knows I admire Paul McCartney and his genius as much as is permissible without getting too embarrassed about it, and clearly, the venom in John's lyrics is mean, offensive, disturbing hyperbole. But who are we to judge, particularly when that venom is being spewed from the mouth of somebody who used to know McCartney a hundred times better than all of us combined? And do not throw all the blame on John, either: a major part of ʽHow Do You Sleep?ʼ is made up by George's inventive, melodic, and equally poisonous and vicious slide guitar lines — every time I listen to that solo, I can just feel Harrison grinning from ear to ear as he is finally given the chance to take a shot of sweet revenge at the one man who once forced him to "play anything you want". Sure, it's mean and dirty, but it's just so damn classy at the same time — and although some of the lyrics are too explicit and dated, the song itself has never lost its relevance. (In fact, it was a very natural association to me after my initial impressions of Adele's 25).

Switching topics and skipping over to «tender John», we also find consistently great stuff. ʽJealous Guyʼ is ample evidence that the man who can toss out the sickest and dirtiest insults in the musical world can also issue the sweetest, most moving pleas for forgiveness — the whole song is a letter-perfect exercise in psychological therapy. (I also do believe that Nicky Hopkins should have been co-credited for the song, which is totally made by his piano — even if the song originally started life as ʽChild Of Natureʼ back in India, it never properly came to life until Nicky worked out the piano pattern). ʽOh My Loveʼ reprises the minimalistic approach from Plastic Ono Band, but is again much aided by Hopkins' piano — providing the perfect reali­sations for John's parsimonious musical genius: a classic case of how to make a tender love ballad without lapsing into the sin of sugary sentimentality. And ʽHow?ʼ, which some people have shrugged off as four minutes of soft pap, actually aches and throbs as much as ʽMotherʼ — it has simply been sugarcoated a little bit, with pleading and complaining instead of screaming, and with extra strings and vibraphones softening and dulling, but not eliminating the pain. Besides, "how can I feel something if I just don't know how to feel?" is such a good question, we should probably ask it of ourselves far more often...

With ʽCrippled Insideʼ featuring even more first-rate guitar and piano work from George and Nicky, and with ʽGive Me Some Truthʼ containing some of the finest-worded insults in Lennon history ("short-haired yellow-bellied son of tricky dicky" takes the cake), the only song on the album that is less than perfection is... well, you know. Not because of the word "Yoko", even: more because there is an oddly grating dissonance between the triumphant, ecstatic tone of the lyrics and the production of the song, which fails to properly realize that anthemic potential. The melody is suggestive of some long-winded tell-tale country ballad (think Dylan's ʽFrankie Lee And Judas Priestʼ, or something — it might not be a total coincidence that this is the only song on the album to feature a harmonica solo), while the words are a hyperbolic love prayer — the final combo just does not seem to "turn you on" precisely as promised. (ʽDear Yokoʼ on Double Fantasy would be somewhat more successful in that respect). Not to mention, of course, that the song is somewhat anti-climactic, especially compared to the stately coda of ʽGodʼ and the creepy post-coda of ʽMy Mummy's Deadʼ. It is just one of those things that added extra fuel to the fire: was it really necessary to end the album with such a blunt and straightforward pledge, when it already had the far subtler and far more touching ʽJealous Guyʼ and ʽOh My Loveʼ — songs that did not mention Yoko's name directly but expressed their feelings far less formalistically? It comes across not so much as a love anthem as a gesture of public self-humiliation.

Nevertheless, despite a slightly lackluster conclusion, Imagine as a whole is nearly perfect. Like almost any of John's records, it could have proudly born the title of Songs Of Love And Hate, had the title not already been appropriated by Leonard Cohen that same year — and, frankly, Imagine is more worthy of the title, because there are very few records in this world whose love songs are more full of love and whose hate songs are more full of hatred, and both of them feel so totally organic. Chalk it up to the crazy power of this guy that I, with a lot of love for Paul McCartney and a lot of, er, um, mixed feelings towards Yoko Ono, can so naturally get behind the emotions on both ʽHow Do You Sleep?ʼ and ʽOh My Loveʼ without a second thought. Rich melodies, classy arrangements, talented backing band, supreme depth of feeling — really, I cannot understand anybody who still has a problem with this record. Sure, it would be much nicer if more of those American Idol or The Voice contestants chose ʽI Don't Want To Be A Soldierʼ instead of ʽImagineʼ, but this is merely one more incentive to stay away from classic rock radio, TV commercials and reality shows, right? Once you do, who knows, not only ʽImagineʼ, but maybe even ʽYesterdayʼ might begin to come in their original colors once more... 

John Lennon: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

JOHN LENNON: JOHN LENNON/PLASTIC ONO BAND (1970)

1) Mother; 2) Hold On; 3) I Found Out; 4) Working Class Hero; 5) Isolation; 6) Remem­ber; 7) Love; 8) Well Well Well; 9) Look At Me; 10) God; 11) My Mummy's Dead.

General verdict: Yep, still kicking major three-chord ass after all these years in all of its beautiful naked brutality.

The legend of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, once hailed as the one post-Beatle album to put to shame all other post-Beatle albums, has become slightly dimmed in recent decades, largely due to a re-balancing of values. Back in the early Seventies, John was critically acclaimed as the Rough, Rugged, Sincere Heart of the Beatles, praised for the brave, gritty, and oh-so-substantial minimalism of his singer-songwriting spree — while Paul McCartney, at the same time, was getting critical flak for being too wussy, too fussy, too focused on petty bourgeois values, cheap sentimentality, and absurd absurdity. (On George, critical opinion was divided, some praising him for spiritual depth and others condemning him for too much preachiness).

These days (and by «these days» I'm actually saying «for about twenty or so years now»), with Ram being viewed as the grandfather of indie pop and traditional rock critic values à la Christ­gau or in the vein of Rolling Stone becoming way too stale, one-sided, and granddaddish, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band seems to have, if not exactly lost part of it appeal, then at least slight­ly receded into the background as just another good album from a solo Beatle. It still remains a milestone in the history of confessional, autobiographical songwriting, and is probably just as big an influence on every unhappy indie kid as Ram is on every happy indie kid. But John's brand of primal musical psychotherapy is now looked upon as naïve and dated, if not downright ridiculous, and his sincerity is just as often perceived as narcissistic, egotistic, and undeservingly offensive... at least, more often than it used to be.

And I believe this because even in my own case, the record no longer thrills me nearly as much as it did, say, twenty years ago — at the very least, its cracks and shortcomings are more obvious, and the occasional bouts of self-righteousness on the part of its author are more irritating. There is no subtlety here whatsoever: this is John Lennon, the atomic bomb, blasting away everyone and everything that stands in his way, not caring all that much if he blasts away you, the innocent listener, along with everything else — then again, you might not be that innocent, either, because chances are, there is something in this world that you have done, you fuckin' peasant, for which Mr. Lennon hates you together with all your fellow countrymen. The only thing in this world that Mr. Lennon does not hate is Yoko Ono, who systematically crops up on one song after another and acts as his guiding angel through a life of misery, frustration, and disillusionment.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band has no double bottom, no mystery to unravel — chances are that if you have heard it once, subsequent listens are not going to improve your reaction. The songs themselves certainly did not appear out of the blue: elements of this «primal» approach were sprinkled all over John's Beatles catalog, from ʽHelp!ʼ to ʽYer Bluesʼ, but in those past days the feelings were usually masked behind partially irrelevant or formulaic lyrics, and it was never clear just how much of himself John actually put into the songs (later on, he dropped plenty of clues himself — basically, whether or not he put himself into his songs determined which Beatle songs he'd call shitty and which ones he'd call passable). Now that he was no longer a Beatle, the album was all about John — John's parents, John's memories, John's loneliness, John's passions, John's life philosophy, John's adversaries, John's fears and hopes.

As I try to recycle the brief, but turbulent rock history pre-1970, I struggle to remember anything that would even remotely come close to the same level of «confessionalism» as captured here. People certainly wrote (usually masked) autobiographical songs, but the late Sixties' singer-song­writer was more of a Leonard Cohen or a Nick Drake — the wise, sophisticated romantic who was either too shy to bare it all, or thought this too cheap to merit his attention. John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band is, therefore, arguably the first album in rock history that sounds based on an auto-interviewing session: for all we know, John could listen to an hour-long interview with him­self on all things mundane and supernatural, and then go on to write a bunch of songs, each circling around a phrase or two taken from such an interview. "God is a concept by which we measure our pain", "a working class hero is something to be", "there ain't no Guru who can see through your eyes", "don't feel sorry the way it's gone", "when you're by yourself, you just have yourself and you tell yourself just to hold on" — doesn't that sound like a bunch of citations from some bed-in session, or a TV chat with Dick Cavett?

Whether these and other aphorisms are cleverly worded, original, intelligent, etc., is a matter of subjective opinion and lengthy discussion — there is little doubt as to their sincerity, but every­thing else is debatable. However, this is John Lennon we are talking about, the man whose way with words (which he tended to forget anyway) always took second place next to the music; what matters is not exactly what he says, but whether he chooses the right notes to go along with it. And here, too, the record delivers. Most of the melodies, in stark contrast to George Martin's Beatles, are bare-boned — usually featuring Ringo on drums, Klaus Voormann on bass, and John himself on either guitar or piano, almost never on both (except for ʽLoveʼ). The minimalism is symbolic: there should be nothing whatsoever to draw your attention away from the pain (or the love, or whatever). But it works — when you have a truly great melody going on in your mind, you might just strip it down to the root notes, and it will still work.

Something like ʽMotherʼ, I think, probably shouldn't even be catchy — its verses mostly do not rhyme, its last line is nearly out of sync with the rest, and the pauses between verse lines are so long, your mind might not keep the beginning by the time you get to the end. But catchy it is, and its catchiness comes through in the little things — like, for instance, the two completely different "goodbyes" that end each verse: the first one, with the strong accent on "BYE", is determined and categorical, the second, with more force on the falsettified "GOOD", is soft and sentimental: love and hate, hate and love, all in one. And maybe it is not even the simple C-G-C chord pattern on that piano that matters, but the sheer physical force with which John bangs out that melody: each chord falls down like a heavy hammer, to bring the message home. (An earlier version, played on acoustic guitar and released on the Anthology boxset, fails to produce the required shattering effect). With a song like that, do you really want to get into the details of how much John's character was really shaped by the traumatic experience of his youth, and how much he is merely self-pitying himself because Arthur Janov taught him to? All that matters is how convincing the performance itself happens to be — and it probably wouldn't be until The Wall and its own ʽMotherʼ that we'd get a comparably powerhouse delivery on the parental issue.

The minimalism works just as well on the more rocking material: ʽI Found Outʼ, the most vicious song on the album, charges forward like a mad bull, thanks to the kick-ass rhythm section — Ringo and Klaus really get into the spirit of things, playing a clenched-teeth dark boogie that fits in with John's pissed-off grumble and quietly dry, snappy, fuzzy electric guitar croaking. (I some­times wonder if Ringo found it comfortable for himself to play on an album like that — but then again, while we have this image of him as an eternally sunny, peace-and-love guy, the man had a pretty mean streak in him, too, especially around the Beatle breakup time, and I am pretty sure, considering how viciously he sometimes bashes his kit around here, that he took that chance to exorcise some of his own demons, too). The stakes are raised even higher on ʽWell Well Wellʼ, perhaps the most violent song ever recorded about doing nothing — there's few things more meaningless in this world than "well well well oh well", and few things more meaningful than turning that chorus into the single most intense session of throat-shredding in the history of rock music (not even Iggy Pop has anything on that — every time I hear the song, I feel like I have to go rinse my own vocal cords afterwards).

But rockers are still relatively few on the album, whose main focus is on quietly understated piano, acoustic and clean electric guitar hooks. We have our self-comforting, colorful electric guitar swirl on ʽHold Onʼ (and I swear that I still jump up occasionally when that COOKIE! thing jumps out of nowhere in the middle of the soft solo break); our dustbowl acoustic folkie thing on the eternally relevant rage-against-the-machine-ish ʽWorking Class Heroʼ; our steady rising-and-falling piano riff on ʽLoveʼ (something that would very soon also reappear in a slightly more complicated form as ʽImagineʼ); our Donovan-style ʽDear Prudenceʼ-like picking on ʽLook At Meʼ; and, perhaps most stunning of all, our rise-and-rise-and-rise-till-you-break-and-scatter-all-over-the-place piano melody of ʽIsolationʼ, one of the most terrifying songs from that era about loneliness — along with Harry Nilsson's ʽOneʼ, which surpasses ʽIsolationʼ in terms of pure drama, but not in terms of its claustrophobic aura.

That said, all these songs form part of a greater whole. By the time we reach ʽGodʼ, the singer-songwriter has crossed all sorts of territories and passed through all sorts of stages, and ʽGodʼ decidedly feels grander and more purposeful as a stately conclusion to the record than it would ever feel on its own — after all, it isn't so much a song as it is a psychological culmination. The melody here is crystal-clear R&B, or maybe even close to gospel, with Billy Preston expressly brought in to get more «feels» on the piano, but the message is pure solipsism, and it totally agrees with the rest of the album: "I just believe in me, Yoko and me" is really the overall theme here — according to John Lennon circa 1970, it makes no sense to sing about anything other than yourself because you really don't know anything except yourself. It is also a statement of rebirth, and while we have every right to chuckle to ourselves, it does sound like a statement of rebirth — and, for that matter, the entire start-from-scrap arrangement and production of the album sounds like a statement of rebirth, with John deconstructing all of his musical legacy and starting anew. It might not have worked out smoothly in the future, but it was a damn good start.

So has time really diminished the significance of the record? With the explosion of bare-bones singer-songwriting that followed in its wake, it is probably quite hard for us these days to under­stand just how goddamn different it must have sounded back in 1970 — right down to the brashly lo-fi coda of ʽMy Mummy's Deadʼ, which pretty much invented indie lo-fi back then but today might seem rather ordinary. Even so, play it back to back with just about any modern «complai­ning» indie songwriter and you will see that the chief difference is in the power aspect: aside from the minimalistic brilliance of the melodies, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is one hell of an ass-kicker, even in some of its tenderest moments ("loooooook at meeeeee!.... [bitch]"). The sheer strength, conviction, brute force, whatever, of these songs is what makes them come alive with so few expended efforts — here is a man who is not afraid of mincing his words or taking full responsibility for his actions, no matter how questionable. In the end, it is not John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band that became less attractive as time went by — it is merely that the other albums, by Paul and George, inspired enough confidence to climb out from under its shadow, and that, too, was a very good thing. This one, as far as this reviewer is concerned, remains every bit as monumental as it used to be — and a never-ending source of inspiration, though, seemingly, not for the majority of today's singer-songwriters.