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At the dawn of the digital-distribution era, iTunes released John Lennon’s entire catalog on what was then the most popular music-distribution platform. I was asked to review the catalog for Paste magazine, and I saw Lennon’s overall output as a sort of narrative of his post-Beatles life. In the years since then, streaming has replaced digital downloads as the method by which most listeners consume music, and I’m not so sure that anybody listens to music catalogs the way they once did. But I still find my take on his work interesting and worth consideration. (Plus, I included 20 of my favorite Lennon songs at the end of this piece, perfect for a streaming-service playlist.)
John Lennon’s narrative-like solo catalog is tailor-made for digital delivery
By Mark Kemp, Paste, October, 2007
ONE OF THE MORE telling songs in John Lennon’s solo catalog is the tender “Look at Me.” Not the well-scrubbed version on his first album, but the unvarnished take on 1998’s Anthology, his posthumous 94-track box set of demos, outtakes and other unreleased gems.
“Look at me,” he sings in a vulnerable rasp over the buzz and twang of acoustic guitar. “Who am I supposed to be?” At one point, he even begs, “Please look at me.” And finally, Lennon — the soul of the Beatles, the musical hero of the ‘60s peace movement, the voice of a generation — asks the most basic human question: “Who am I?” He answers resignedly, “Nobody knows but me.”
The song perfectly telescopes the Lennon dilemma, but fans can get a pretty good idea of who he was — and what contradictions he lived — from his full body of solo music, now available digitally for the first time on Apple Inc.’s iTunes. The computer company’s acquisition of the Lennon catalog suggests The Beatles’ works may be coming soon. Apple had not been able to acquire the Fab Four’s music before this year, due to a trademark battle over the name (The Beatles’ record label was called Apple Corps.). But in February, the dispute was settled, and The Beatles’ solo projects have found their way onto iTunes.
Of the four, Lennon’s music makes the most sense in digital form, not because it’s singles-oriented, but because it transcends even the album format. His songs, and his lyrics — from “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” on his first studio album, to “God bless our love,” on his last one — form one long narrative. The story of his solo career begins with a show recorded just after the Beatles completed Abbey Road. Though Lennon had cut three extremely avant-garde albums with Yoko Ono the previous year, Live Peace in Toronto, 1969 was his scruffy, rock ‘n’ roll hall pass out of the increasingly strained Beatles classroom. It’s hardly a live album of the caliber of The Who’s Live at Leeds, but Lennon’s makeshift band, including Eric Clapton cranking out the blues and Ono wailing in the background, romps through rock standards like “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and biting Lennon originals such as “Cold Turkey.”
If Toronto is the introduction to Lennon’s musical memoirs, Plastic Ono Band (1970) is the brilliant and harrowing first chapter, in which he deals head-on with everything from his childhood emotional traumas (“Mother,” “My Mummy’s Dead”) to the toll his abnormal fame as a Beatle has taken on his identity (“Look at Me”) to the social injustice of Britain’s class system (“Working Class Hero”). “Isolation” offers a glimpse of his megalomania and anger toward his fans, and in “God,” he re-examines his entire belief system. Bleak and often difficult to listen to, Lennon’s first studio release is among the all-time greatest albums of the rock era, and worth downloading in its entirety. So is its follow-up, Imagine (1971), on which Lennon runs the gamut of emotions, from rage (“How Do You Sleep?,” a vicious attack on Paul McCartney) to sweet, giddy love (“Oh Yoko!”).
The narrative loses focus on Sometime in New York City (1972), a set of protest songs that hasn’t aged well, though the album has been unfairly chastised. Feminist anthem “Woman is the N****r of the World” is one of Lennon’s finest songs, and there are several other bright spots, including some of Ono’s compositions. Despite her being consistently maligned for her Asian sense of melody (Western naysayers and obsessive Beatles fans call it “out of tune”), Ono’s “Born in a Prison” is powerful.
For Mind Games (1973), Lennon returned to the stylistic trimmings of Imagine. Featuring pretty ballads (“Out of the Blue”), hard rockers (“Meat City”) and scratchy, pedal-steel-flavored country blues (“Tight As”), Mind Games is solid Lennon from start to finish, but it doesn’t break new ground. Walls and Bridges (1974) is less successful primarily because he recorded it during his infamous drunken “Lost Weekend” in Los Angeles. The album has too many silly songs — such as the duet with Elton John (and Lennon’s first #1 solo hit) “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” — and not enough tracks like the genius “#9 Dream.” Oldies cover album Rock ‘N’ Roll is a bust, with badly arranged interpretations of the kinds of songs he and The Beatles nailed in the early ‘60s.
After five years in retirement, Lennon came back in 1980 with Double Fantasy, which, while good, doesn’t stand up as well in the clear light of day as it did when the world was mourning his assassination. “Dear Yoko” is a rewrite of “Oh Yoko!,” and other stronger tracks, such as “I’m Losing You,” seem recycled, too. In fact, many of Ono’s songs on the album are superior. With the arrival of punk and new wave, the times had caught up with her vision, and tracks like “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” are sharper and more relevant than the old-fashioned pop Lennon had fallen back on. Milk and Honey is similar, but Lennon’s material — such as the beautifully ragged (and horribly ironic) “Grow Old With Me” — sounds fresher. Several collections are also available on iTunes, but the one worth picking from is the gargantuan Anthology — its alternate takes tell the John Lennon story in ways his official albums don’t.
TRAX TO BURN
It’s a daunting task to dig through a catalog as deep as John Lennon’s, but with all of his albums finally available for digital download via iTunes, there’s now more reason than ever. Paste‘s senior contributing editor Mark Kemp has sorted through some of Lennon’s finest work, cataloging playlist-ready popular favorites and deep tracks alike.
1. “Look at Me,” from Anthology
In one of his most vulnerable songs, Lennon asks his listeners to look at who he is beyond the Beatles, beyond fame, beyond the mythology that had grown up around him during his tenure with the biggest band in the world.
2. “Mother,” from Plastic Ono Band
After the Beatles’ acrimonious break-up, Lennon turned inward, looking to his childhood for reasons for his insecurity. This song came out of his scream-therapy sessions and is one of the rawest, most primal songs in the rock canon. “Mother, you had me but I never had you,” he sings, and then in the next verse, “Father, you left me but I never left you.” The song was recently covered, brilliantly and fittingly, by Shelby Lynne, whose father murdered her mother when Lynne was a child and then turned the gun on himself.
3. “God,” from Plastic Ono Band
Throughout his youth and as a Beatle, Lennon looked to gurus, different religions and his own musical idols, like Elvis and Dylan, for answers to life’s big questions. In this song, he decides the only concept he can truly believe in is his own existence.
4. “Working Class Hero,” from Plastic Ono Band
Another dark one from his studio debut, this acoustic-guitar ballad chastises Britain’s class system for making the working-class citizen believe he can never raise himself above his place in society.
5. “Imagine,” from Imagine
On his second album, Lennon returns to the dreamer of his past, and in this beautiful piano-based ballad he dreams of a world with no boundaries, no theology, no rules, no limits.
6. “Gimme Some Truth,” from Imagine
Always one to expose hypocrisy, Lennon demands the Truth in this song. The problem is, Lennon himself – a confessed violent soul, drug addict, megalomaniac and cheater – was as hypocritical as anyone he targeted, and he knew it. That’s what makes the song resonate for the rest of us mortals.
7. “How Do You Sleep,” from Imagine
In this song (posted in the story above), Lennon proves his hypocrisy. It’s perhaps the most brutal, least compassionate song ever directed at any one person. In this one, he attacks Paul McCartney, basically calling him a no-talent poser. On his early solo album Ram, McCartney had directed a number of barbs at Lennon.
8. “Cold Turkey,” from Lennon Legend
If the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” romanticizes the drug, this song puts dope in its proper context — as a conduit to utter pain. In the horrible screams toward the end of “Cold Turkey,” you can practically hear Lennon kicking the drug.
9. “Woman is the N****r of the World,” from Sometime in New York City
One of Lennon’s most powerful political songs, this one accurately describes women as the most oppressed minority in the world: “We make her paint her face and dance / If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us. / If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man. / While putting her down, we pretend that she’s above us…” It clumsily — and, from today’s standards, embarrassingly — uses the N-word to make its point. Sadly, that flagrant display of white privilege has overshadowed the song’s important message. (This is a live version.)
10. “Mind Games,” from Mind Games
Inspired by the book of the same name by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, in which the authors suggest that humans have the potential to succeed, spiritually and otherwise, by playing mind games with themselves.
11. “You Are Here,” from Mind Games
Fueled by pedal-steel guitar and a Caribbean rhythm, Lennon sings to his lover Yoko Ono, “Wherever you are, you are here.” He wrote this gorgeous song after his infamous lost weekend away from Ono.
12. “One Day (at a Time),” from Mind Games
Another song directed to Ono, the title has become something of a cliché since 12-step groups became all the rage in the 1980s. But listening to this ballad without judgment makes the wisdom of the “one day at a time” philosophy resonate beyond the field of addiction treatment. “One day at a time is all we do,” Lennon sings over a dreamy, almost surreal melody, “One day at a time is good for us, too.”
13. “#9 Dream,” from Walls and Bridges
With Jesse Ed Davis’s ethereal, George Harrison-like slide guitar intro, its lush strings, the changes in tempo, and Lennon’s obsession with dreams and the number 9, this one sounds more like a Beatles song than anything in his solo catalog. The repeated nonsense words, “Ah, bowakawa, poussé, poussé” reportedly came to Lennon in a dream.
14. “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” from Walls and Bridges
The raw take of this cynical slow-burner on Anthology is much more effective than this overly echoed, horn-heavy version. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find that version on Youtube. Nevertheless, the song is great in whatever form it takes. In it, Lennon questions his own capacity for honesty in lines like, “And still you ask me do I love you, what it is, what it is / All I can tell you is it’s all show biz.” At the end of the alternate take, Lennon sounds deeply depressed when he mutters to the engineer, “All right, let’s go have a listen — and a break from it.”
15. “I’m Losing You,” from Double Fantasy
For the most part, the songs on his 1980 comeback represented a renewal for Lennon, but this smoking, noisy blues rocker finds him and Yoko still coming to terms with the betrayal and hurt of their rocky years. “What the hell am I supposed to do — just put a Band-aid on it, and stop the bleeding now?,” Lennon asks, and then later: “Do you still have to carry that cross? Drop it!”
16. “Help Me to Help Myself,” from Double Fantasy
This is an outtake from his comeback that suggests Lennon was still dealing with his demons long after it was being reported that he was living a life of domestic bliss. It’s raw and pure, just Lennon and his piano and lines like, “Well I tried so hard to stay alive, but the angel of destruction keeps on hounding me all around.” Then he begs to the God whose existence he’d once denied, “Lord, help me. Lord, help me now. Help me to help myself.”
17. “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him,” from Milk and Honey
This is Lennon’s version of a song Yoko had done on Double Fantasy. In this one, released posthumously, Lennon sings the exact same lyrics Yoko had written to reassure him: “Every man has a woman who loves him / In rain or shine or life and death / If he finds her in this lifetime.”
18. Sean’s “Little Help…,” from Anthology
No rip-and-burn of Lennon songs should be without the voice of his and Yoko’s son, Sean. Not the grown-up Sean who worked with the Beastie Boys, but the young Sean who partly inspired Lennon’s comeback. In this minute-long segment, Sean incorrectly sings the lyrics of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” — and father John, gently and lovingly, corrects him.
19. “Beautiful Boy,” from Anthology
The previous spoken segment segues perfectly into one of the sweetest songs Lennon ever wrote, a lovely, Asian-themed melodic ode to the son he would never see grow up. The lyrics — “Close your eyes, have no fear, the monster’s gone, he’s on the run and your daddy’s here” — ring horribly sad in light of the fact that a monster with a gun did soon appear outside the Dakota and take Lennon away from his son.
20. “Grow Old With Me,” from Milk and Honey
Another sad song, in retrospect. In this one, he wishes for Yoko and himself a long and more stable relationship into their twilight years. And again, he asks God to bless their love and employs other religious language, such as “world without end, world without end.”
© Mark Kemp, 2007