Lennon's first album of more conventional song writing after the dissolution of The Beatles continues in pursuit of confession, self-exposure and demon-hunting. And while it holds a range of musical textures and approaches it feels like a cohesive whole. Hold On breaks from its pleasing pentatonic strum to push at the edges of the sweetness.
I Found Out spits out at fakes, hangers on, the drug of the great society in a serpentine hiss of a blues workout. Working Class Hero shows the drier and darker influence of Dylan than found on Help or Rubber Soul and continues the theme of the previous one. Isolation continues the tired feel of Hero and Lennon's light touch on the vocal belies the complexity of the melody. That's all to good effect when the prolongation of the word of the title appears. A breakout section strides in double tracked force like a pulpit-thumping sermon before settling back but only long enough for one last "I-i-i-i-so-laaaaaaaaa-shun!"
A Beatlesque piano canter begins Remember and a shouting vocal tightens the stomping pace. The chorus breaks the tension with a forceful singalong. Repeat until what sounds like a surprise joke about Guy Fawkes day but is more likely to refer to life's disastrous surprises as the powder keg explodes.
The fragile Love enters slowly on piano. The vocal is as naked and plain as on the White Album's Julia. What might have come across as a series of naïve statements is transferred through vulnerability into something raw and experiential. It's in these nooks and corners of this album where Lennon really takes the power of his craft to fruition.
Well Well Well takes up the blues thread of I Found Out and tells of his new life away from the old moptop coterie where sex and food and revolution are things to do and sing. The chorus is the title repeated into a searing frenzy. Look at Me returns to the weary vocal of Love and Working Class Hero. He accompanies himself with the fingerstyle acoustic playing he favoured from the trip to India onwards (taught by Donovan Leitch, no less) There is the same spookiness he found in singing about his mother on Julia.
God begins as a soul figure on the piano and a sermonising introduction with a few lines about god being the concept we use to measure our pain before a pleading litany of disbelief as he strips himself of allegiances and creeds to arrive at his immediate locale of self and Yoko before some poignant words to Beatle fans offering them the tip to do the same thing themselves and ditch the pop idolising. The dream is, as it fully feels, over.
And then in a strange echo of Her Majesty on Abbey comes My Mummy's Dead recorded roughly and roughened further. A plain statement of pain. When first heard this sounds like a pointless defusing of the grandeur of the previous track but there is a real poignancy to its openness and simplicity. It's not simple as in elegant but sheer and unpadded. It jolts after God but it's meant to.
Like a lot of these revisit blogs I get a better understanding of records I considered myself immune to. By having to describe them and as fairly as I can I hear more of their beauty and conviction than I started with. Here's another case. I still can't distinguish Well Well Well from I Found Out until I listen to them back to back. The possible archness of the call to "follow me" in Working Class Hero only seems to reveal itself when I'm listening but in memory seems always to feel ugly and narcissistic. The flatness of melody strikes me as being anti-Beatles until I take each song in turn and hear something quite the contrary. I will probably never love this album and it's not one I would choose to listen to without an ulterior motive but it remains a strong and convicted statement of how one of the most famous and best loved public figures on the planet found himself after leaving one of the most famous and beloved units of happiness manufacture. The demons in the shadows and the chest-bursting monsters were pursued, located and dealt with and the result is seldom other than violent and bloody. For that it deserves its exultation. I just almost never choose to listen to it.
The canonical opinion on this record is that it is raw and that its rawness is enough. Lennon's biography is essential to understanding it, goes another one. Maybe. Certainly, if you do know that it followed most of a decade of being at the top of the pop music food chain which nurtured some of the most forward thinking music of the rock era then poignancy of this stripped back approach released about a year after the most lavish Beatles album will not be lost on you. What gets in the way of that is the fact of the back to basics Let It Be, regardless of when it was recorded, was released only months before this. Nevertheless, the character of rawness is the one you hear about most. In fact you hear about it more than you hear about the music.
When Andrew Nichol taped me his import copy of it in about 1977 I took it home wanting it to be all of those things and I imagined something like Lennon's shoutier tracks on the White Album and maybe a few Because-like moments and maybe even an Across the Universe or two. Mother is a strong opening but after that I was really digging around as my attention drifted to whatever crap was going on in my school day life at the time. I wasn't particularly listening to lyrics because I seldom do, even now, so what I was hearing was a lot of samey blues riff guitar. At no point did it strike me as significant or even admirable that it sounded nothing like The Beatles. As a second generation (i.e. fanatical even through the punk wars) Beatles fan it sounded like a whimper. I already had Imagine and liked most of it but even with that the string arrangements bothered me as they sounded like organ chords and veered towards the kind of muzak he damns McCartney for making in How Do You Sleep. But it did have songs you could tell apart.
These days I still find this album unengaging. When it isn't musically bland it feels self serving rather than self fulfilling. I can say that for almost all of Lennon's solo output. I really did try to like it but liked it so little that I felt guilty for thinking that way when I heard of his murder. If this record is just the clear expression of someone at a significant chapter of his life then fine. If you feel affinity with it that's fine, too.
Me, I didn't feel guilty at thinking ten years later that Double Fantasy was dull and its single Starting Over embarrassing. I also felt saddened that his hopeful message of revival was delivered in such a bland package. Sure, he was only singing about who he was and that's what he was doing with Plastic Ono Band but for me he never seemed more distant the closer he got to his self actualisation. Maybe it was the time but it wasn't mine and to me this just looked like someone who, having healed, walked away, a raw and ravaged showbiz turn smoking behind him.
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