#80 – John Lennon – Imagine (1971)

I hadn’t listened to this record in a while, and I always forget what an odd, not entirely satisfying affair it is.  It was deliberately intended to present a softer, more polished and pop friendly image than its more visceral predecessor, Plastic Ono Band.  And while it does partially succeed in this–sometimes to a fault–it is punctuated by several strange aberrant outbursts, whether of anger or just of sloppy, crappy music.  Rage and musical primitivism are both qualities that Lennon harnessed remarkably well on Plastic Ono Band, but which feel out of keeping with what seems to be the intended spirit and sound of this record.

Perhaps from a musical point of view, the album would have felt less disjointed if it had been cleaved neatly into a pretty side and, for lack of a better term, an “inappropriate side”.  They actually wind up occupying an identical number of tracks and roughly the same amount of time.  And yet perhaps that would have put too fine a point on the ways in which the album as a whole fails to live up to the spirit of peace and unity promulgated in its title track.  As it is, one hears an expression of Lennon’s struggle to reconcile his own anger and personal demons with his positive vision for the world as a whole.  So while it makes for a choppier listening experience, perhaps the track listing as it is gives us a truer picture of where Lennon was at, not just as an artist, but as a person.

And yet for purposes of analysis, just for kicks, I believe I’ll proceed as though the album’s two overriding aspects were more neatly cleaved.  The pretty side would start, of course, as does the existing album, with the title track, which is rightly celebrated as one of Lennon’s finest accomplishments, and one of the most universally loved anthems of peace and love and whatnot.  To be fair, its prescription for world peace rests on a radically communistic vision–one that neither Lennon nor the vast majority of people who love the song would actually be willing to submit to, and attempts at real world implementation of which had long since been shown to produce something quite far from the utopian state Lennon envisions.  But whatever.  As a melody, a general sentiment, and an aspirational statement, it is a pretty unassailably great piece of work.

Also great is “Jealous Guy,” although here too a deeper reflection on the lyrics reveals something that may initially be obscured by the song’s gorgeous, soulful melody and gauzy production style.  It’s a confessional, apologetic song, of course, but as the extent of Lennon’s shortcomings as a husband have become clearer over time, it starts to seem almost unsettling that he would address those failings–which included outright physical abuse–in such a pretty, commercially accessible song.  (It’s a theme he would revisit in the similarly gorgeous but less well known “Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)” on the Mind Games album.)  But there’s something kind of manipulative and a little weird about using such a public form of art to atone for such personal sins.  Still, the song on balance remains a powerful and pleasurable one on its own merits.

The least of the pretty tracks to me are “Oh My Love” and “How?”  Both have a dull, saccharin quality that is not quite redeemed by their unmemorable melodies, which seem to shoehorn the lyrics into faintly unnatural positions.  Neither are those lyrics anything to write home about–the former is an unexceptional valentine, the latter a clumsy attempt at therapeutic self-assessment in song of the sort that worked better in the context of Plastic Ono Band.  I don’t hate either song, but they strike me as completely inessential.  Later on the album, he accuses his former bandmate of writing “musak,” a description that is not too far out of place for his own work here.

Things bounce back, though, at the end of the real album, and the end of our imaginary “pretty side,” with “Oh Yoko.”  It’s a song I used to cringe at as a kid, since it celebrates in vivid terms an individual that I, like many Beatles fans, didn’t hold in the highest regard.  As I imagine was the case for many people, it was the song’s canny placement in the film Rushmore that brought me around to it.  At first I was puzzled why a song about such a specific and polarizing figure should be used in a context so irrelevant to that person, but then I got it: it’s a jubilant, great feeling ode to ecstatic love.  That it is very specifically about John’s love for Yoko is what brings it to life, but its sentiment is big enough to have taken on a life beyond that specific circumstance.  I still don’t personally much care for Yoko (even if her role in the dissolution of The Beatles has likely been exaggerated.)  You’ll never catch me forwarding the increasingly popular thesis that she is actually an important and misunderstood musical artist.  Nor am I buying her coproducer credit on this album.  But I have really come around to loving that song, and the palpable buzz of good feeling it leaves me with.  It was indeed a canny choice for the album’s closer.

The “inappropriate side” of the record  is not without its great songs too–just fewer of them, and the bad ones are more stubbornly intolerable.  The two real throwaways–“It’s So Hard” and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die”–turn out to have been recorded before the rest of the album, which puts them into a slightly more sensible context–they have a raw, tossed off quality to them that feels out of step with some of the more carefully arranged, beautiful songs that surround them.  The former is an insignificant, two minute long blues of the sort that more or less anyone could have written without much effort.  It feels embarrassingly beneath the guy who wrote “In My Life,” or the non-cheeky parts of “A Day in the Life.”  Or “Imagine,” for that matter.  The latter smacks of a forgettable jam session fragment that had no business being turned into a proper album song, particularly not a six minute long one.  It has a heavy, menacing groove that it is briefly sort of interesting, over which Lennon drones his various discontents with reality.  Had it been as short as “It’s So Hard” I’d have thought it the better the song.  Instead, it’s the album’s greatest waste of space and thus its largest distraction.

Of slightly more musical interest, but a solid contender for the most deeply inappropriate song over all is “Crippled Inside.”  I grew up with it, so I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but, man, what a weird song that is.  The music is like jingle jangly, honky tonk piano driven quasi-country music, with Lennon not so much singing as mugging in an almost vaudevillian style about his…emotional pain.  It’s a catchy enough little song (emphasis on little), but boy does it give off a strawberry feeling.  It brings to mind a comedian desperately pushing an unfunny joke way too far, as the crowd looks on in discomfited silence.

“Gimme Some Truth” is perhaps the strongest entry of the angrier songs on the album.  It almost verges on being not inappropriate at all, except that its explicit rage against the system quality seems at odds with the gentler bed-in/beard peace/“Imagine” approach to pacifism for which its author is better remembered.  I don’t generally love angry political songs, but I do almost love this one–perhaps because I grew up with it.  It’s not among his very finest work, but it’s a good, honest rant– enticingly bitter without devolving into unmusicality or unfocused rage, although it does get a little primal screamy near the end.

Finally, there’s the other contender for least appropriate song on the album, which is the incredibly hostile, acrimonious, and frankly juvenile lashing out at Paul McCartney, “How Do You Sleep?”  It’s actually a pretty good song, but it’s kind of unbelievable that Lennon would be both so cruel and so unprofessionally candid in his rancor, especially on an album best remembered for its message of peace and brotherhood.   As a kid, I was seduced by its scintillating bitterness, and perhaps allowed it to color my perceptions of the relationship between Lennon and McCartney–that Lennon was the cool one and the superior artist, and that Paul was the lame, fuddy duddy asshole of the group.  In adulthood, I’ve had the opportunity to revisit these youthful prejudices, and recognize that they are probably not so cut and dried as they once seemed.

If I think back on the Beatles songs that most move me, it’s true that I tend to favor John’s songs, and that his solo albums, uneven as they are, have always meant more to me than McCartney’s post-Beatles output.  And yet it seems a near certainty that McCartney’s influence–as a once-friendly competitor, and as the chief engine of the move toward greater harmonic and structural complexity than was found in pre-Beatles rock ‘n roll–helped push John to become the songwriter that he was.  John unquestionably put more of himself on the line in his music–more personality and emotional intensity–but without Paul’s encouragement to perfect the formal structure of his songs, he might well not have grown into anywhere near as an important a songwriter.  In this song, Lennon intones “you should have learned something in all those years,” and perhaps he meant that McCartney should have been inspired to strive for greater meaning, whether personal or political, in his music.  But the line–and the whole premise of the song–seems to gloss over the enormous influence of McCartney’s compositional style on his own art.

Whatever the cluster of conditions that drove The Beatles apart, it does seem as though McCartney, in any event, was striving to be an adult about things.  His art is more boring for the most part, which perhaps has to do with being a less damaged person than Lennon.  But for all of Lennon’s willingness to be a prophet of peace, it does seem, for what its worth, that McCartney was the better man–the vegetarian, the non-wife beater, the one who didn’t respond in kind when his old best friend and partner eviscerated him in this very public way.  The charismatic nastiness of the song still seduces, but it seems to me now that the subtext of the song–that Lennon would be so infantile as to record and and release it–gives a clearer picture of the story than does does the amusing string of cheap shots contained in the song itself.

John Lennon later expressed regret that this record was too polished, polite and overproduced.  Perhaps his thinking was that Plastic Ono Band  was a better record, and that a similar formula of rawness and emotional honesty would have produced a similarly great record.  But while I agree that that is the superior record, I also think it was a singular kind of statement of the sort that would not benefit from being repeated.  I think that the move toward a gentler, sweeter sounding record was in fact a good impulse, and that some of the songs that reflect that spirit are spectacularly successful.  I would also note that, for a Phil Spector production of its era, it is remarkably tasteful and restrained.  The album’s flaw, as I see it, is that Lennon was not yet enough at peace with himself and the world to see such a project all the way through, such that we are left with a somewhat scattershot, uneven and tonally schizophrenic album.  Certainly its among the best of Beatles’ solo efforts, and its highs are very high indeed.  But it is not as great or as unified a piece of work as it could and should have been.

Source: LP – the MFSL pressing.  It sounded good, but didn’t significantly open up or alter my perception of the music.