Now let us consider a Beatle
Spoiler - This may not go how you are expecting....
An album review? Well, it had to happen eventually I suppose….. so I thought I’d do something slightly different.
I’ll explain. If you have an interest in such things you may have seen that the John Lennon estate have just issued a huge box set retrospective of his fourth post-Beatles album ‘Mind Games’. Now in the way of such things these days, it was the topic of a lengthy article in the Sunday Times, which broke new ground. But not in a good way.
It didn’t have anything much to say about the album itself, but delivered such a fawning hagiography even the most ardent fans must have felt slightly bilious reading it. My take on John Lennon is that the man was one half of the greatest song writing partnership ever. But they did need each other and after the team split neither member achieved such heights separately. There were some moments of genius from both of them, but they were intermingled with work of, let’s say, variable quality.
Anyway, as I read Sean Lennon’s (hopefully) jokey and history-aware comment that at least his father had lived longer than Jesus, I thought back to the Mind Games album itself and realised I hadn’t listened to it for decades. I did recall though, that I had a copy at the time and wasn’t overly enamoured.
So as Loki, the juvenile Labrador needed a walk, I loaded the album up, cranked up the earbuds and set off across the fields. Those who know the album know the tracks and those who don’t won’t be enlightened by a track-by-track review, so I’ll cut to the chase.
This album is a huge, strutting, gobbling, turkey.
As I crossed the fields listening to the mantra-like title track (which I’ve always thought was a bit of a piss-take, consisting of the same 4 notes covered in Spector-style strings, even if he didn’t produce it), I waited patiently for the moment where I could bring my now more mature appreciation to these long unlistened-to grooves from the Master. But it just didn’t happen. Words like ‘anodyne’ and ‘schlock’ came to mind. It’s an album of peaks and troughs, only without the peaks.
Right at the last there was a glimpse of the great man. I had forgotten about ‘Meat City’. It is really good, but that’s the only decent thing on the entire record unless you like the winsome, Yoko-love-in, version of John Lennon and there’s loads of him on here. This was his third album of the stuff. He got away with it on Imagine because of the simply stellar tunes, but once they aren’t around underpinning things, it’s pure corn.
One idiot described the album as “Imagine with Balls” I’d correct that to “Imagine without Tunes”
As I reached the halfway point of our walk Mind Games drew to a merciful close. So I thought I’d try something else of his that I’d not listened to for years, to see if I was, in fact, on the verge of some kind of midlife reappraisal/nervous breakdown around all things Mop-Top. I went back to the very beginning of solo Lennon, The Plastic Ono Band album.
And he was back. That cynical, funny, aggressive, artistic risk-taker that we knew from the previous decade. He was in his Primal Scream therapy phase when this was recorded and we get plenty of that here right from the beginning, but it’s OK because we also get the sure-footed, experienced tune-smith and the fabulous song structures. Despite Spector’s presence in the studio, it’s pleasingly raw, with a notable absence of that murdering psychopath’s mad, slathered strings. And especially welcome is the fact that we get to hear rock’s greatest vocalist giving it the beans on several tracks.
Standout tracks on this listen through were ‘Mother’, which still retains a shock value in that he was willing to put such intensely private stuff out on a record. I know ‘Working Class Hero’ gets ‘ivory tower’-based criticism, but it’s still a snarling beast of a protest song, plus ‘God’ with its stunning lyric ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’ and the moving ‘the dream is over, I was The Walrus, but now I’m John’.
So where does this leave me in my love affair with the Fabs? It gets ever harder to distinguish the reality from the myths and legends and it’s certainly not helped by the willingness of the news media to indulge in the sort of ridiculous nonsense seen in the Times last weekend. What pisses me off hugely about the fluff piece is that a person not versed in the Beatles music (and shockingly, there appear to be more and more of them) might think, reading this dross, that ‘Mind Games’ might be a back door into Beatles world. They’d then listen to it and understandably resolve to move onto something infinitely less worthy, like Coldplay or (God help us) Ed Sheeran .
No, the Beatles stood alone as Pop music’s greatest band, but no band is perfect and they wrote some garbage, both when they were together and solo. But that’s the flip side and it goes with the territory. For every ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ you get a ‘Bip-Bop’ for every ‘God’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ you get a ‘Bring on the Lucie’. It’s just silly to pretend that they were infallible. They don’t need the assumption that everything they did was perfect and that they couldn’t make mistakes. They had quite enough era-defining triumphs to take the odd slating.
It’s often instructive to go back and see what the reaction was when the albums were first released. As a rule, the ones that got slagged off were probably fairly treated.
Mind Games was panned.