The title track of this album has acquired a sanctity that few songs achieve. Over a thickly echoing piano, broken chords and a small ascending link to complete the cycle, Lennon's voice, distant in its own cloud of echo, asks us to imagine life without the small earthbound concerns of nationalism, greed as well others brought down form their lofty places like religion and heaven. He knows he's being a dreamer but if everyone could share the dream the world could be one and free of its old binds. You can't fault the sentiment but until you can separate the song from the singer there's a credibility slide at the top of which is a rich and adored man being whistful.
If, however, you really can tear one from the other, the song's beauty lies in the plain naivete of its presentation. Really, just listen and imagine. The piano and voice are central but there's a very plain bass, sparse drums and strings doing little more than what a basic organ track might have done. It's the low artistry that offers welcome to any who will listen. If you are inclined to attack this aspect of it then you are attacking the message itself as it is inseparable from its packing, author aside. A simple dream for a tired and complex world. It still works.
Crippled Inside might sound like a parodic country song but for all the accented cliches in the arrangement it comes across as sincere. Do what you like to dress up your pain and frustration and pretend you love this masked life but you're still broken within. I find the honky tonk piano annoying in this one. It's one of the most authentic aspects and perhaps that's why: it shows up everyone else. You can wear a stetson and some boots but one thing you can't hide is your sneer when you're snide.
Jealous Guy enters on an icefloe of tinkling piano and thick strings. The vocal mleody has a kind of eastern finish to each line as it sinks into the arrangement. The narrator of the song is apologising to a lover he has hurt. He explains that he couldn't help himself, admits he's weak against his own anger and that he's just a jealous guy. Elvis Costello, in a memorable interview I read in the late '70s, explained that for all the song's tender feel it is being told from a position of power. Cant help it, I'm just jealous. Lennon originally wrote this as a kind of spiritual travelogue in the Beatles' retreat in India. Perhaps the sentiment in Child of Nature (as it was originally known) didn't convince him after the explosive end of that episode and he shelved it until he could find a more fitting use. The melody is quite yearning and aching which is emphasised by the verse that he whistles. There is point at which stark honesty might well be confused by listener for an unapologetic taunt of a victim. Could the sense that an abusive partner is trying to smooth things over so they'll be better from then on, just like all the other times be actually triggering? I don't know. It makes the bland string arragement of this track sinister, to me, a kind of vulnerability icing. I can zone out and receive the song's beauty but that's how I have to do it.
It's So Hard is a kind of constipated blues. Life's hard and then you die by your own hand or the world's. A big bursting sax from maestro King Curtis lifts things a little but, ironically, this is less convincing than the last time he tried a blues, in his cushioned palace of Beatledom, Yer Blues, which was a piss take, anyway.
I Don't Wanna be a Soldier Mama starts with a beautifully distorted bend on the guitar before splashing into a vat of reverb with the rest of the band as John tells us of all the bad things he doesn't want to be like a soldier or a lawyer or a rich man or a poor man or a sailor or .... The crashing echo and metallic sound of the vocal give this one a kind of mystique but it's so repetitive (by intention) that you really have to just lie back in it and float.
Gimme Some Truth starts like a punch, straight in to the driving band, slide guitar, bass, rhythm electric along with Lennon's clear and alsmot reverb-free vocal which bites hard at "tight-lipped narrow minded mama's little chauvanists" among other deliciously invective word salad. The middle eight intensifies this by bashing into the fourth above as Lennon rasps his Eddie Cochrane voice: "No short haired yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky's gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me". Bugger the lot of this lysing and spinning, just give him some truth. George Harrison takes a sweet but sharp slide solo which leads back into the middle eight. The grind and the power just make you want to listen to this all afternoon; it feels like every frustration you've ever had all at once is getting beaten up by the good older guy at school. This was originally a Beatles song. I only found that out in the last few years. There's a recording of the band going through the middle eight with Paul helping enthusiastically. It made more sense to be thinking it was one of the fresher tracks as it really packs more of a wallop than anything else on the record. Still, the realisation here, an old progression dragged out of an old songbook and it gets to sound this good. Possibly my favourite solo Lennon song.
With great judgement Oh My Love's almost spooky gentleness follows this onslaught. It's a needed drop in violence but a continuation of intensity. In terms that sound very much like Yoko's poetry, John feels the wind and sees the sky and for the first time his mind is wide open. Lennon's double tracked vocal is perfectly controlled and moves through the pentatonic melody in a glide. A dreamlike but tightly packed love song of nothing but sincerity. Piano, guitar (George is playing his Les Paul clean and its thick ringing adds a swooning eeriness), bass and voice. No Woolworths strings required nor any given. This is a tiny masterpiece with a gigantic statement.
I knew enough about the Beatles' story to understand on first listen that How Do You Sleep? is a savage character assasinaiton of his old partner in tunes Paul McCartney. References to Sgt Pepper, the Paul is Dead hoax, a lot of Paul song titles from then and the time, accusations of writing muzak and so on. The song with its unvarying structure of self call and response, charge after charge without right of reply plays like those revenge fantasies you might recall form childhood where you stand up and get 'em good and they just stand there and take it. The music is a growling bluesrock, mean as mustard and relentless. This is the one track where the strings work as you don't expect them against the hard guitar rock but their sinewy lines, (for once not just playing chords) add a cinematic weight to the harrangue. But, in the end, harrangue is what it is. Lennon later attempted to ameliorate it by saying that he was just using his anger to construct a song. Really? Songs don't just appear and live in this environment, they get arranged, and recorded with many takes, mixed and pressed on to records and packed into artwork for the world at large. If you put out a record on a whim and forget about it what does that say about your integrity as an artist? He sang it and he meant it. The story went that he heard Paul's song Too Many People and took it personally (and bloody how!). When McCartney responded, if he did, it was with Let Me Roll It. That sounds like no one but John (even down to the hard driven riff and the primal scream in the fade) but it's just a love song. This meant more to me as a teenager when I thought along those lines, vengeance for a trifle, but now I just try to enjoy the music of it.
How begins with a descending melody in the vocal followed by a pair of emphatic chords on the strings and reminds me of nothing more than what the same producer did to the song Long and Winding Road which was so damned by its writer. It doesn't sound like a subtle dig though (not after the last track). John wonders how he can go on when he feels so uncertain and disorientated. It's perfectly adequate and feels bigger than it should but has a consolidating middle eight and does its job. Lennon's vocal lifts the song above this lukewarm reception of mine as, again, he sounds completely sincere.
Oh Yoko might have been almost designed to rankle anti Yoko folk (who existed in their millions) as a ditty about the best revenge being living well. But again, it just sounds sincere as John's pleasant and happy voice rides above a kind of Dylanesque country shuffle. A blend of Onoesque imagery and Lennonesque word play and a junty good natured rhythm that rise to a joyful chorus that should sound embarrassing but never does. It's just so good natured that you might forget that the last time he closed an album off it was with the listless and exhausted My Mummy's Dead. The jaunty jalopy of Oh Yoko jingles all the way to the fade and we're all happy.
Lennon was famously fickle about his own work, damning it one day and casting thunderbolts of self-praise the next. Some of the better known quotes from him about Imagine were complaints that he allowed to be too sugar coated. The worst of the string arrangements do carry it closer to supermarket muzak than they should; there is no irony to them when they flab out the sound in songs like Jealous Guy and Imagine itself. Not just George Martin but anyone who took the job of preparing string accompaniment to these tunes who wasn't already just doing what he was told would have produced something less anodyne. Compare the masterful, living strings on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left to the muzak of the orchestrations on Bryter Later. It wasn't just John Lennon who suffered but my feeling is that he was complicit, perhaps insisting on the approach being simple and simple equalling honest. I don't know that much but I always note them and have to pretend they're keyboards which is how they seem to be written.
Outside of arrangements a major affliction in this record is the energy-draining reverb that some tracks are subjected to. I am not of the anti-reverb synod and have no respect for it or any blinkered thinking about music production but Soldier and Imagine, among others, are hampered by it. The title track about the possibility of world peace andits singer sounds small and distant. The snarling attack on accepting a place in the rat race, Soldier, sounds like a jam in the next room.
Imagine is the album Lennon presented after his personal demons were dealt with in the previous one. Here he resumed his place in the world and sang to it of peace, regrets for cruelty, rejection of its social demands and finally love and it works as two sides of music as well as a suite of songs. Less compact than the previous one but more outreaching for all that. Of the two it's the one I'm more likely to listen to.
This article was informed by my own experiences with the LP as I owned it in the late '70s as well as the recent Complete Collection box set. The LP was bought at Ken Herford's import shop around the corner from my place and was a US pressing with quadraphonic capability. The stereo system my father built for the main entertainment room had four large speakers but they presented the same stereo image back and front as a kind of basic surround sound. Quadraphonic playing required special equipment which I nor anyone I ever knew had. that said the sound of this deep dish vinyl filled the room with warmth and sparkle. The blu-ray disc that comes with the box set blows that completely out of the water with an intimate immersion that makes you feel like you are lying on the floor as the music is being recorded.
I didn't wholly like the album as a mid teen. I liked the melodic numbers, found Soldier an impenetrable mess and thought It's So Hard sounded like a pisstake and How sounded like muzak. While I skipped tracks on every album I had these were songs I never bothered with more than once. The most played pair of songs were Gimme Some Truth and Oh My Love which I delight in to this day. The LP came with an outsize poster of Lennon at a white piano. It went on the wall of my room. When I moved from Townsville for good and distributed a lot of my '70s albums to people who might wanted them more than I ever would again, I kept Imagine. When the Complete Collection appeared I hesitated and decided against buying it but then saw it at a massive dicount and figured I'd get it for the blu-ray alone.
The blu-ray features a warm, immersive surround mix of the album, keeping parts of the arragements in place within the expanded field. There are no gimmick moments of saxes flying around the room or vocals taking turns in different speakers. This adds to the sense of moment and presence and the audio qulaity is never less than warm and pleasing. I was curious to try the offered quadrasonic (used to be called quadraphonic) mix that I was never able to hear the first time and can report that it's almost as involving as the 5.1. If anything it's noticeably more trebley, lacking roundness in the bass and the punchier parts of the drum kit but it is taken from the master prepared for vinyl so it wouldn't have the bass capability of hi res digital to begin with.
As to the content beyond the album itself there is a great mass of it: raw studio mixes, elements mixes which highlight different aspects of the tracks like the strings, out-takes, soundscapes that combine contemporary interviews with working versions of the songs as well as representations of the various stages of the singles from the time like Happy Xmas (War is Over). I would recommend against trying to swallow everything on offer here all at once; the repetition factor alone will exhaust you. I'd recommend for picking out sequences as the trackorder of the album is kept to whatever state the songs are in. If I have a favourite moment of the extra material it is the double tracked vocal of Oh My Love. For some reason Lennon and/or Spector chose against the exact doubling developed at Abbey Road for Beatles recordings and tried it the old way. Lennon's pitch is flawless and his nuance so closely matched it's breathtaking yet no one could do this exactly and the surrounding instruments mask much of it; hearing both in isolation, the eastern flavoured melody sung with such a studied care sends shivers up the spine.
This box set is a wonder. You pretty much get the deepest dive any member of the general voting public is ever going to get into the origins, gestation and fruition of this record. And that's before you get to the heavy bound book. Want to know about Imagine and also the processes the ex-Beatle was going through to make this statement shell out for this box. It looks beautiful and sounds like a dream.
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