Listening to Lennon #4: Mind Games

Mind Games is usually seen as Lennon backing away from the direct, seemingly (but in actual fact almost never truly) spontaneous engagement with radical and counter-cultural politics and street life that characterized Some Time in New York City, and there's clearly a lot of truth to that take. If nothing else, it fits with Lennon's trajectory in early 1973. He was fighting efforts to deport him from the United States, and thus found it necessary to make himself less of an anti-American lightning rod, and Richard Nixon's re-election to the presidency in 1972--Lennon had strongly affirmed his support for George McGovern--had left him thoroughly depressed and falling back into sexual and chemical addiction and dissolution (not that he'd ever really escaped such, anyway). By the summer of 1973, Lennon and Ono had formally (if not officially) separated, and Lennon was spending most of his time in Los Angeles--the beginning of his infamous "Lost Weekend." But before he left New York, however temporarily, he poured out thoughts and ideas into a new album, writing all the songs in a week's time (though some of the basic tunes he's worked on here and there for years), getting the recording and mixing done--he produced the album himself--in a little less than two months. After more than a year of benefit concerts and political appearances and no new music, this was in some sense a return to form for Lennon, though his "form" was far from at its best. 

Mind Games, while it has its defenders, is also often seen as an aimless, unfocused album, and there's truth to that as well. I actually think it's helpful to think of the album in terms of its original vinyl: the album's A side is actually pretty strong, while the B side is mostly perfunctory at best. I really love the sumptuous, Phil Spector-inspired arrangement for the album's lead single, "Mind Games"; its lyrical substance is slight and hippy-dippy (Lennon was busy pursuing another guru, this time the psychologists Robert Masters and Jean Houston, two key players in the quasi-mystical "human potential movement"), but the resulting recording is wonderfully dreamy, and Lennon's vocal is terrific. "Tight A$," by contrast, is a solid, fun rockabilly song. And the album's stand-out, I think, is "Bring on the Lucie (Freda People)," a rambunctious yet melodic tune whose sharp lyrics and clever political allusions really ought to put it on the same level of Lennon's much more famous "Power to the People" or "Give Peace a Chance." ("Lucie," by the way, is apparently "Lucifer," if you're wondering.) Put those along with "Intuition"--the first song on the B side, a surprisingly McCartney-style pop tune, with its infectious rhythm, its upbeat lyrics, and its jaunty, half-baked vibe--and you have an impressive musical collection, especially coming from someone struggling through depression and an admittedly justified paranoia. Why none of them were released as radio singles besides "Mind Games" I don't understand.

I'm not sure anything else on the album is worth more than an occasional listen, though. "Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)" is a sincere, self-confessional ballad, but whatever the value of continually repenting for one's faults may be, as a musician Lennon is repeating his processing of emotions here in a way that he'd already done much better on Imagine. "One Day (At A Time)" has its fans, and I admit Lennon's high-register vocal is kind of distinctive, but the same could be said for the mellow, steel guitar sound of "You Are Here," the hand-claps of "Only People," or the fine guitar work on "I Know (I Know)"--all are solid but not particularly captivating introspective tunes about love. I'll give credit to "Out the Blue," though--the lyrics there are occasionally bonkers, but maybe that's reflective of Lennon really trying to be original in expressing his conflicted yet enduring feelings for Yoko, similarly running through multiple styles in putting together this genuinely moving and fun ballad. And the aggressive boogie of "Meat City," the album's concluding track, can really get your head bopping, even if it veers into the same "just-jamming" problem that afflicted so much of Some Time in New York City.

So even with Lennon messed up and aimless, his artistry shone through, sufficient to put together on short notice a pretty decent rock and roll album. I give it a B-. Nowhere near his best work, but the greatness is still there, sometimes. 

Listening to Lennon #3: Some Time in New York City

In August of 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono moved to New York City, according to them to help Yoko obtain custody of her daughter Kyoko (which was a failure; Kyoko's father Anthony Cox, who had been awarded custody of Kyoko in his divorce from Yoko, kept Kyoko hidden from Yoko for more than 20 years), and also to escape the tabloid attention they attracted everywhere they went (though considering how effectively they cultivated and made use of that attention, that explanation seems questionable). In any case, they never left, with Lennon himself existing in legal limbo, fighting attempts to deport him for five years before finally achieving his green card and permanent residency in 1976. Lennon had been to America before, but only with the Beatles; now, he was living in what he considered to be the finest, freest, most fun city in the world, and artistically he was all on his own. And with the release of "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" in December of that year, he was the toast of the city's radical chic establishment. What was he going to do?

Unfortunately, what he decided to--with an excitement that is audible on every track of the album--is knock out a bunch of loose, rough recordings with Yoko, titled Some Time in New York City. It's probably the worst reviewed single album that John and Yoko ever worked on together. Most of the songs on it were written and recorded hurriedly (the whole album was finished by March 1972), with the divided aim to appeal to the hippie counter-culture audience that, ever since "Give Peace a Chance" in 1969, John had ingratiated himself to, as well as to present Yoko's artistic perspective, something that sometimes seems identical to that counter-culture, but other times presents itself as somehow above and condescending to it. For a backing band, Lennon chose a short-lived, hard-partying bar band, Elephant's Memory, which had been playing around Greenwich Village for a while (they provided two tracks to 1969's Midnight Cowboy), but did last very long beyond their collaboration with John and Yoko.

One thing you can say for Elephant's Memory, though: they could jam, and for several singles on this album, aimless jamming is all Lennon had in mind."Attica State" and "John Sinclair" both have the lyrical seeds of decent protest folk or rock songs, but the music goes nowhere (despite some really great blues licks and slide guitar on the latter tune). The solo Ono compositions--"Sisters, O Sisters," "Born in a Prison," and "We're all Water"--all have a slightly better musical structure; there's a fun, girl-group energy to the first of those, and an off-kilter rollicking quality to the last. If their lyrics--and Ono's wailing vocals--hadn't alternated between being pretentious and ridiculous, I could imagine either becoming a slumber-party anthem or bus-trip favorite. No such luck though. (As for "Born in a Prison,"the less said about that the better.)

The Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, Ireland, on January 30, 1972, inspired two songs: "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "The Luck of the Irish." The first is rambunctious and angry, and works well enough, except for Ono's dirge-like singing of the chorus. The second is smarter, reflecting both Lennon's dark, sarcastic sensibility as well as his winking smirk; the lyrics include both the vicious "Why the hell are the English there anyway? / As they kill with God on their side!" and the giggling "Let's walk over rainbows like leprechauns / The world would be one big Blarney Stone." And Ono's vocals are actually pretty well controlled on that track. They both lack any kind of overall unity, though; they definitely aren't the equal, at least as far as their musical production is concerned, to McCartney's own response to Bloody Sunday, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" from Wild Life, and that's admittedly kind of a low bar.

What's left? "Angela," a quiet duet and tribute to Angela Davis that has a nice enough tune, but whose lyrics and vocal are just cloying. "New York City," by contrast, is an open-ended and overflowing celebration of Lennon's new home. The only song on the album attributed solely to himself, it weaves together terrific electric guitar work and a pulsing saxophone sound. It's the album's one unqualified success; when Lennon shouts "The Statue of Liberty said 'Come!'," you can feel it. "Woman is the Nigger of the World" is actually even better musically; it has a great melody and polished, forceful rock beat. But the subject matter and lyrics are just utterly mis-matched to the music. Lennon was apparently off hard drugs at this time, so you just have to solely credit his immense arrogance and obliviousness when sings, as part of a thundering, raving, enthusiastic, heartfelt chorus "Woman is the slave to the slaves!" I mean, full points for your feminist strivings, John (Ono actually came up with the title of the song), but honestly, what were you thinking?

Some Time in New York City gets a D+; "New York City," and the overall energy of the backing band, prevents me from giving it a D. Hope John will do better--and keep Yoko away from the mic--next time out the gate. 

Listening to Lennon #2: Imagine

By the spring of 1971, Lennon's confused mess of anger, resentment, and frustration had a focus: his oldest and truest friend, Paul McCartney. Macca's own frustrations had led him to sue the Beatles as an organization in order to force a break-up of the legal entanglements that were, in his view, preventing any of them from moving forward either artistically or financially. This had, obviously, infuriated the other Beatles, with his formal announcement that The Beatles were no more--something that Lennon had made clear nearly a year and half earlier but which the band had agreed to keep quiet--compounding the (not inaccurate) controlling image they'd developed of Paul. And then there was the release of McCartney's second solo album, Ram which (deservedly) enjoyed much more commercial success than did his first, and which (undeservedly) generated immense ire on the part of John, mostly due to "Too Many People," a song with a couple of Lennon-aimed snarks that was, as I wrote before about this slight but enjoyable album, "probably about as close as McCartney can ever get to building up righteous indignation." So as Lennon went into the studio, similarly determined to make his second solo album less artistic and more accessible, he did so with at least one additional goal--give it to Paul McCartney but good. But he didn't get around to that until most of the way through the album.

Imagine is most famous, of course, for its masterful title track, which opens the album. Some people will go to their deathbeds insisting that they hate "Imagine" or at least find it vapid or saccharine or somehow quasi-totalitarian, but I think these people are being driven political hang-ups, whether they acknowledge them or not. Yes, lyrically the song is ponderous and self-important--and this is where the Yoko Ono haters note her influence on the song--but its melody is sweet, its piano gorgeous, and its overall vibe, weighted by over a half-century of invocations, is exactly what album producer Phil Spector aimed for it to be: anthemic. Steve Martin has gotten 15 years worth of laughs out of his gag number "Atheists Don't Have No Songs," but of course Lennon proved him wrong decades before. "Imagine" is a damn hymn, a reverent paean to a worldview that has moved tens of millions, and must be respected as such.

It's not, I think, the best or most beautiful song on the album though. For that, I would nominate "Jealous Guy," which is just an astonishing gem, one I'd never really listened to over all the decades (the decision not to release it as a single was a crime). I can see the argument that the song's lush, haunting arrangement is overproduced, but to my ear the strings and percussion are properly placed in the background of Lennon's vocal, which is, in my opinion, equal to any of his best Beatles ballads, like "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" or "Dear Prudence." And lyrically it's fascinating: obviously autobiographical, yet also open-ended. Ian Leslie, writing in John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, is convinced (mostly by the whistling break in the song; he sees that as a give-away) that while Lennon was, thanks to the intensive therapy he'd subjected himself to, plainly thinking about Yoko, he was probably also thinking about Paul. McCartney himself agrees, or at least did at one time; Leslie quotes him in his book: "In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say 'Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.' He wrote 'I'm Just a Jealous Guy,' and he said that the song was about me." I don't know if I believe that, but I want to.

So two absolutely great, and eminently listenable songs on this album; what else? "Crippled Inside," another obvious product of Lennon's therapy, is to my mind a spiritual cousin to McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," a song with lyrics spelling out interior ugliness while being accompanied by a delightfully jaunty--in this case rockabilly rather than musical hall--tune. "It's So Hard" is a short, solid blues song, perhaps a little too prettified by the album's production, but worth listening to a time or three. The propulsive beat of  "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don't Want to Die" hides the fact that the song is as underdeveloped as any of Macca's lazier tunes; Lennon's just vamping here. The same can be said for "Gimme Some Truth." "How" is a perfectly fine love ballad, though after listening to it over and over, I'm convinced McCartney stole from it for "So Bad" on Pipes of Peace. By contrast "Oh My Love," which Lennon co-wrote with Yoko (he actually acknowledged her contribution on this song, unlike on others), is a genuinely searching and loving song, with George Harrison's gentle guitar accenting Lennon's voice wonderfully. And the final track, "Oh Yoko!," is a head-popping, hand-clapping charmer, a bright and hopeful tune with a harmonica finale that finishes off the album excellently.

What did I skip? "How Do You Sleep?," of course. What do say about this musically compelling, lyrically embarrassing song? It's a huge, burning, sweeping number, funky and intense in its groove; with a better subject matter it might have been one of Lennon's greatest recordings. But as it is, this awesome musical set-up just perversely provides listeners with a bunch of cheap shots. Some of the lines are admittedly quite sharp ("The sound you make is Muzak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years"), but mostly what Lennon spilled out about his former songwriting partner was childish and mean. (It's not to George Harrison's credit that he got into the recording with such gusto; one the other hand, it is to Ringo Starr's credit that, when he stopped by the studio, he was nonplussed by it all, and told John it was time to stop.) John later dismissed the song, and apparently Paul was able to get past it as well. Again, Leslie situates the song in John and Paul's long, complicated relationship, quoting Lennon as simply stating that "How Do You Sleep?" actually "isn't about Paul. It's about me."

How to rank Imagine? It's better than Plastic Ono Band, though not by leaps and bounds. The best stuff on it is some truly world-class pop music; the worst stuff on it drags it down. I give it an A-; a genuinely great album, but not quite as great as it could have been.

Listening to Lennon #1: Plastic Ono Band

So, as promised, my review of Lennon's solo albums begins.

By January of 1970, the last time the Beatles ever worked together as "The Beatles" was more than four months in the past. Lennon had been divorced from his first wife Cynthia for over a year, and he'd been married to Yoko for nearly one; he'd also recorded and released two big solo hit records, "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey," and was working on a third, "Instant Karma," which would do even better on the charts than either of the previous two. He'd cut his hair short, he and Yoko had (for the moment) quit heroin, and he'd long since privately told his fellow Beatles that the band was over, though they'd all agreed not to make any public announcement. Through all this, it's not clear what the end of the Beatles meant for John; in interviews while he and Yoko were traveling Europe and then again when "Instant Karma" came out, he'd talk about how what was ending wasn't so much a band as an "image," and that the current confusion as to the direction of the band might easily be a "rebirth." Lennon seemed happy--which was always a difficult thing to determine with him, but the signs were there.

But then the spring of 1970 brought Paul's release of his first solo album, McCartney (honestly, I don't think it's very good), triggering John's defensive, jealous spirit; Paul's incredibly ill-conceived (however frustratingly justified) promotional interview which was taken as a public declaration that the Beatles were finished, which John saw as a presumptuous betrayal; the release of both Let It Be the album and Let It Be the documentary film, with its (incorrectly!) depressing take on the "Get Back" sessions that produced both of the above, and the latter of which reduced John to tears when he saw it; and, finally, John's discovery, in March, of the psychotherapist and wanna-be guru Arthur Janov, whose book The Primal Scream convinced Lennon--a man who, as Rob Sheffield put in in Dreaming the Beatles, had always been "deeply attracted to conversion experiences and renunciation scenes"--that he desperately needed to scream his way out of his problems, his frustrations, his abiding and confusing hates and regrets. He and Ono spent four months, in London and Los Angeles, going through Janov's therapy. In the meantime, Yoko miscarried, Lennon turned 30, and had a terrible row with the father who had abandoned him as a child, whom he never saw again after his birthday. I'm hardly the first to say that you can't make sense of Lennon's first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (his name for the floating line-up of musicians that played with him and Yoko) without considering all of this.

So the entire album is a work of therapy? Not quite; there are a couple of songs on it that could have been developed in any context. "Love" is a sweet, stripped-down tune, with Lennon's voice stretching to sing lyrics as sappy as anything Macca ever wrote (I mean, "Love is asking / To be loved"?), while "Look at Me" is a polished if rather plain ditty that had its roots in something Lennon was working on way back in India in 1968. But besides those, every song on Plastic Ono Band, to one degree or another, is an explicit expression or a reflection of John's resentments, his immaturities, his angers, his fears. "Working Class Hero" is a masterful political statement, a perfectly tight bit of quiet, controlled folky fury, which Lennon apparently obsessed over more than any other song on the album. "Hold On" is more an idea than a fleshed out song, but his use of tremolo, complemented by Ringo's superb drumming, makes it seem like genuine moment of hope in the midst of comprehensive despair. "I Found Out" and "Well Well Well" are both darkly bitter, pulsing, insistent songs of righteous indignation and John's shouting, all about making do and living life despite the betrayal of others. "Remember" and "Isolation" are both full of dissonances and rhythmic shifts; they're worth pairing together, though the sadness of the first is staccato and accusatory, and on the second its bluesy and reflective. I think they're all pretty solid tunes, however inseparable they are from the album's overall vibe.

That just leaves Plastic Ono Band's bookends, "Mother" and "God" (leaving aside the creepy, brief, monotone "My Mummy's Dead" ditty at the album's conclusion). "Mother" is the fullest artistic work on Plastic Ono Band, I think, and really is kind of a masterpiece of raw, musically expressed pain; his repeated, increasing hoarse cries at the end--"Mama don't go; Daddy come home!"--deepen and propel the song towards its conclusion. "God," though, is odd. It's an artfully arranged but sing-songy incantation, a kind of anti-mantra; if it wasn't for the tremendous combination of Billy Preston's gorgeous piano and Ringo's furiously controlled drumming, the whole thing would sound kind of petulant. Or at least I think that--but then, I've never been famous, and there's basically no chance I or anyone else who reads this will ever be remotely as famous as Lennon was. So maybe I've no place to say that his plaintive concluding lines--"I don't believe in Beatles....I was the walrus / but now I'm John. / And so, dear friends, / you'll just have to carry on. / The dream is over."--don't deserve the ponderousness he delivered them with. Like I said before, the end of the Beatles was huge--and to the extent that John was considered by many the Beatles' wounded artistic muse--thanks in no small part to John spending the first years after the break-up constantly telling himself and everyone else that--his pronouncements in "God" perhaps deserve all the respect they received. (As far as I'm concerned, though, the best thing about "God" is that it inspired Bono to write "God Part II," a mostly forgotten track from Rattle and Hum which is, I think, the best rock tune U2 ever recorded.)

I give Plastic Ono Band a solid B, maybe even a B+; it's better as a personal artistic document than as an album of popular music, but it's not entirely lacking in the latter. It'll be interesting to see if I decide that Lennon ever did better than this dark but mostly compelling first solo album of his.

Regarding John (and Paul, and the Beatles too, but Mostly John)

Paul McCartney has been my favorite Beatle for years, as the long journey I took in 2019 through Macca's then-nearly-50-years' worth of solo, non-Beatles recordings should prove. The man is simply incredible, as a musician, performer, arranger, and instrumentalist. He's got an uncanny ear for melody, and his elastic appreciation of different sounds and styles, along with his incredible (however inconsistent) work ethic, has meant that he's built songs for decades that demonstrate a mastery, or at least a partial mastery, of the capaciousness of pop music. I can't think of any English-speaking artist besides Bob Dylan whose influence on popular music in the 20th century (and more!) can compare with Sir Paul, and it frustrates me to no end that while I was able to finally catch the former in concert, I've probably missed my chance to ever see the latter. 

But all that said, after recently reading Ian Leslie's tremendous John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, I found myself thinking: have I, perhaps in kind of a perverse refusal of the worship of John Lennon which I saw all around me in pop culture as a young person in the 1980s, purposefully underplayed the role John played in making Paul the musician he became? As a pop radio kid, I was vaguely learning who the Beatles were at a very young age--and yet out of any of them, it was the groovy hits that McCartney put out that I learned first, and that perhaps overshadowed whatever else I was picking up. Despite being a news addict from elementary school on, I actually have no memory of the announcement of Lennon's murder in December 1980 (just before I turned 12). Instead what I remember was the endless reminiscences of him, on every station and in every publication, for months if not years afterward (a sad scene about how devastating many found his murder even showed up in one of my Moon Knight comic books). Perhaps all that--no doubt combined with the anti-hippie vibes that weren't too hard to find in the conservative Mormon milieu I was raised in--made me inclined to just not take John seriously.

If I did, that's a huge mistake, not just because Lennon is an artist worth reckoning with, but because it undermines my own understanding of  McCartney. As all the very biographies of Paul I read confirmed (indeed, how I even noted here when talking about Peter Jackson's Get Back), John's relationship with, his competition with, and his collaboration with Paul is probably incalculable in terms of how they all contributed to Paul's musical genius. I'm not saying the world wouldn't have known Paul McCartney if the 17-year-old John Lennon hadn't have captivated him and then, upon sizing up the 15-year-old Paul's audition for him, invited him to join his group The Quarry Men when they first met in the summer of 1957; I think Paul is just too protean an artistic force to have been kept down by any circumstance or lack thereof. But without his older friend's wit, his anger, his arrogance and his neediness, his mix of idealism and cynicism, and most of all his friendship? Black 47's Larry Kirwan once wrote a play--"Liverpool Fantasy"--that imagined an alternative history where the Beatles hadn't made it (in Kirwan's imagination they broke up, tellingly, because John quit the group when they seemed ready to acquiesce--as did actually happen--to studio demands for them to play something other the rock and roll John was devoted to at their very first recording session in 1962). While Kirwan presented John, George, and Ringo as all still living in Liverpool, Paul wasn't; by the play's imagined 1986, he'd become a massive American pop superstar, singing in Las Vegas and cranking out heavily orchestrated, disposable hits under the name "Paul Montana." I think that's a little cruel, a fiction that leans too hard into the mostly (but only mostly) false image of Paul as a crowd-pleasing, superficial hit-making machine. But still: any honest reckoning with Paul's history and accomplishment simply cannot due without considering what John's drives and hang-ups and delights and hatreds helped make him into.

So that's what I'm going to do for the rest of 2025: listen to John Lennon's solo music--all of it--closely, and see what I think, and how I can put it together with my understanding of the life he led, and what that understanding of Lennon's aspirations and accomplishments says to me. This will be an easier task than what I did with Paul; for one thing, with his life tragically ended 45 years ago, John had far less time than Paul has had to build up a musical library to explore. Thanks to the same friend who encouraged and enabled me to do my deep dive into McCartney's music back in 2019, I have available to me remastered recordings of all eight of Lennon's post-Beatles albums (yes, that means I'm skipping over the three avant-garde albums of experimental music that he and Yoko Ono produced in 1968 and 1969), plus a collection of Lennon's officially released non-album singles and various studio outtakes and home recordings. I'll review and reflect upon one of those albums each month, May through December. For today though, some random thoughts about and reviews of that catch-all collection first.

The singles portion of John Lennon: Singles and Home Tapes consists of six songs, all of which are terrific. This isn't surprising; they all were, after all, studio recordings that the engineers and record company people and John himself all thought worthy of an independent release, and whatever may or may not be said about any of those others, Lennon himself, whatever his limitations as an instrumentalist or solo songwriter, had a deep, intuitive grasp of both the zeitgeist and of American rock and roll as it enraptured him as a teenager in the 1950s--he knew what worked (usually, anyway). Three of the singles are first-rate expressions of that rock and roll sensibility; of the others, one is among the greatest popular Christmas songs written and recorded in the past century, and two more are inseparable from the equally idealistic and simplistic (and "commercializable," if that's a word) peacenik movement of the late 1960s; to criticize them on the level of songmanship, as opposed to the sing-along tunes of protest they were purposefully designed to be, is to misunderstand completely what Lennon, as guided and shaped by his new love and wife Yoko, had determined himself to become. Which is not to say they should be criticized. On the contrary, whether or not they're world-class musical art, the truth is that even John's hippie singles provide more than adequate proof that, at its best, John's talent--mixed up as it was with his anger with himself and the status quo, his deep insecurity about his own accomplishments and relationships, his double-minded contempt for (but also longing for) intellectual and artistic pretension, and his often messianic idealism--could nonetheless still create great music, even without his greatest friend, rival, and partner at his side (or looking over his shoulder).

"Give Peace a Chance," the last of the six on the "Singles" disc, was the first one recorded, in a Montreal hotel room during John and Yoko's "Bed-In" in the summer of 1969, with dozens of hippie hanger-ons and luminaries (Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Dick Gregory, Tommy Smothers, etc.) clapping and singing along; the second to last on the disc, "Move Over Ms. L," was the latest one recorded, from John's drug-addled "Lost Weekend" period in Los Angeles in 1974, a short and quick, delightfully innocent, mostly nonsense rocker, that shows that all hallucinogenics in the world couldn't stop Lennon from approximating Chuck Berry or Carl Perkins when he had a mind to do so. It's my favorite song out of the whole collection, to be honest; comparable to some of the very best of McCartney's straightforward solo pop, I think. I can't listen to it and not think of the rocking gem from the Beatles' rooftop concert, "One After 909," where John and Paul's love for each other and the rock and roll music which made them who they were is just overflowing.

As for the rest, "Cold Turkey," a bluesy hard rock tune, also from 1969, features Eric Clapton on guitar, and would have been a perfect fit with The White Album's "Revolution" (the single version, not the album one), or when Lennon performed "Yer Blues" with Clapton and Keith Richards as The Dirty Mac in 1968. "Power to the People," from 1971, is a strong, quasi-R&B song that no doubt often fired up crowds during anti-war protests back in the day, with Bobby Keys, the Texas saxophone wonder who went on to power so many classic Rolling Stones tunes--and whom I was lucky enough to see perform live back in 2009--giving this song much of its oomph. "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)," from 1970, is a pulsing, insistent number, with the sound just rushing at the listener from almost the first beat; it's not surprising that Phil Spector was in the recording studio for that one. And who can criticize 1971's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)"? Sure, self-conscious 19th-century traditionalists can, and so can Christians who insist that not centering the Biblical story in every holiday song is some kind of crime. But other than those sticks-in-the-mud, it's hard to imagine finding any sincere fault with the tune. Lennon managed in this song to channel the spirit of the season in a musically simple, politically pointed, historically grounded, yet entirely inviting and open-ended way. Most other songwriters never come close to that level of accomplishment, and John, in 1971, was still just getting started.

The "Home Tapes" disc of the collection is a mixed bag. It's interesting to hear early and alternate takes of such songs as "Mother," "God," and "Beautiful Boy," but they can't compare to the official album tracks--though perhaps, as I work my way through the albums themselves, I'll change my mind. For now, I think the only track that truly makes it worth owning is the solo piano version it contains of the unreleased "Serve Yourself" (a track that exists in many bootlegged versions, some of them exceptionally profane). I don't consider it a particularly good song--but then, I'm biased, as I consider Dylan's Christian albums mostly strong and powerful music, and the specific song that Lennon found infuriating and was inspired to respond to--"Gotta Serve Somebody"--a masterpiece for both gospel and rock and roll. Lennon didn't agree, unsurprisingly. Which is okay; John followed his own path, one that was tragically cut short far too early. For the rest of the year, I'm going to follow it the best I can.

Thoughts on Dylan

1) I saw Bob Dylan on Saturday here in Wichita, which was only the second show of his 2025 extension of his never ending tour (nominally supporting his most recent album, the excellent Rough and Rowdy Ways, but really just Bob being the traveling poet and song and dance man he's always been). It was a great show, with Bob sitting at the piano the entire time, playing pretty consistently, adding bluesy chords, rockabilly swing, and some romantic melody as the song required. And his four-piece band was tight, never showing off, but providing a solid foundation for a supremely musical evening. I wish I could have snapped some pics, as I have a very good seat, but it was a strict no-device show (including old cameras like mine!), and security was tight. But other than that, I had a wonderful time.

2) His set list? Almost exactly the same as his set list from Tulsa last Tuesday, where he kicked off this round of touring; the only change for us in Wichita was the addition of "Across the Rubicon," which was awesome, since I think that's maybe the best song on Rough and Rowdy Ways. ("Murder Most Foul" would outrank it, except I have a hard time considering it an actual song; more like some ancient bard orally capturing the whole gestalt of a particular society at a particular moment in time.) I was moderately disappointed with his significantly shorted version of "Desolation Row," and would have preferred almost any cut from Nashville Skyline aside from "To Be Alone with You," but I loved his harmonica work on "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and, especially, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," which he and his band made whimsical, upbeat, and almost sweet; on the basis of the couples I saw leaning into each other and swaying to the song, I'd bet that I'm not the only one who considered it the highlight of the night.

3) Speaking of Tulsa, Melissa and I took a day-trip there only two weeks back; we've lived in Kansas for going on 19 years, yet in all that time, Melissa had never seen this city only a little over two hours southeast of us, and I'd only been there once for a conference which didn't give me any time to explore. We had a grand time there--and for both of us (which is surprising for my wife, since she's not a Dylan fan), the highlight was the Bob Dylan Center. I had kept my expectations low, since I feared that it would just be a glorified add-on to the Woody Guthrie Center next door, which I've long heard raves about. But a bookseller at Magic City Books strongly encouraged us to check out the Dylan museum, and I'm glad we did. It really does a brilliant job at organizing its immense collection of photos, letters, films, notes, and more; the introductory videos do a great job situating Dylan as an artist and a cultural figure, and the main exhibit is filled with wonderful discoveries (the loopy, gushing letters Johnny Cash wrote to Dylan were charming). My favorite feature was a jukebox programmed with Dylan songs, Dylan covers, and "Dylanesque" tunes selected by Elvis Costello, but that just scratches the surface. It's not a huge museum, but after two hours there we still hadn't seen it all.

4) Becoming the sort of person who could spend most of an afternoon hanging around a Bob Dylan museum has been a long process. As I've detailed here on my blog many times over the years, my pop music sensibilities have always been, first and last, about the radio--and by the time I really started listening to pop radio around 1978, Dylan's time as someone who got much radio airplay were done and gone. So I was generally aware of him as a singer and song-writer, and occasionally recognized when other artists were covering his songs, but it wasn't until sometime in late 1993, when I picked up a double VHS tape copy of the 30th anniversary concert held for Bob at Madison Square Garden, that I really woke up to this astonishing and unpredictable artist. Besides all the wonderful music, just the range of the man's writings, both in substance and style, blew me away. I mean, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"? "My Back Pages"? "When the Ship Comes In"? I mean, it's folk, but also rock; it's political, but also personal; it's judgmental and dismissive, but also sneakily open-hearted. It's hardly an original realization, that Dylan contains multitudes, but it's what began my 30-plus years of recurring curiosity in the man. Being the political nerd I am, I dived into analyses of his lyrics, examinations of his interviews, reflections on his historical role--but more than that, I listened to his songs.

5) As for the songs, what can I say? I was delighted to finally be able to check seeing Bob in concert off my bucket list, but that doesn't change my most basic judgment about his music (one shared by my wife as well): the man just isn't ever the best interpreter and performer on his own material. I won't go as far as her (and, to be honest, many tens of thousands of others) in declaring that Dylan's voice grates. Like Mick Jagger, I think there's something distinctive and musical to his vocal instrument, even when it's not at it's best (and at the Wichita concert, as indecipherable as many of the words which came out of his mouth were, its sometimes wry, sometimes wistful, always gentle tone was quite engaging). But still, the point stands: he can write incredible songs, but there will always be someone (often many someones) who will be able to do those songs better than he. Examples? Oh man, don't get me started; I could list a couple of dozen. "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"? Joan Baez. "All Along the Watchtower"? Jimi Hendrix. "Boots of Spanish Leather"? Nanci Griffith. "Chimes of Freedom"? Bruce Springsteen. "Desolation Row"? Robyn Hitchcock. "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"? Dolly Parton. "Forever Young"? The Pretenders. "Girl from the North Country"? Rosanne Cash. "Gotta Serve Somebody"? Shirley Caesar. "I Shall Be Released"? Joe Cocker. "If Not for You"? George Harrison. "It Ain't Me Babe"? Johnny Cash and June Carter. "Just Like a Woman"? Nina Simone. "Like a Rolling Stone"? Michael Hedges. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"? Warren Zevon. "Masters of War"? The Staple Singers. "Mr. Tambourine Man"? The Byrds. "Positively 4th Street"? Bryan Ferry. "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)"? Manfred Mann. "What Was it You Wanted"? Willie Nelson. "With God on Our Side"? The Neville Brothers. Just accept that, save for the towering exception of the Lennon-McCartney due (who only had about 12 years of collaborative production, whereas Dylan has been producing consistently for over 60), there simply isn't another English-speaking artist in the recording era that has written as many great songs as Bob Dylan has. You don't have to grant that he was the definitive interpreter of all these songs too!

6) Oh, and as for politics? Well, by all available evidence, the man's favorite president was Jimmy Carter. As another great story-teller once commented, 'nuff said.

Leslie's Love Story in Songs, and Ours Too.

Ian Leslie's John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs is a terrific book. I say that as a major Beatles fan, though not, as I've confessed before, a fanatic. I may have collected and listened to everything Paul McCartney has ever officially released, but I haven't done the same with John Lennon (much less George Harrison or Ringo Starr), and that's a failure on my part. Particularly when it comes to John, I need to correct that someday. 

Why? Because as I think Leslie demonstrates very well in this book, constructing any history of the Lennon & McCartney musical partnership--both before and after the Beatles--which doesn't put their complicated, deeply loving, often deeply resentful, and always deeply confusing relationship at the center almost certainly misses something crucial. That's not to say Leslie does something here that has never been done before; any remotely attentive take on the lives of these two individuals--or at least their lives between 1957 and 1980, and the art they made during those years, both together and apart and with others--can't help but notice how much John and Paul, no matter what else is going on or who else is there, are looking at and to one another, seeking approval from the other, trying to one-up one another, listening to and trusting in each other. I took that away as perhaps the defining revelation of Peter Jackson's wonderful reconstruction of the Let It Be sessions, The Beatles: Get Back, and I know I'm not alone in thinking that way.

But Leslie provides the supporting evidence of the abiding artistic importance of all of John and Paul's looking, listening, seeking, competing, and trusting. Some of the songs he builds chapters around are, admittedly, a bit of stretch; he tells the story of these two artists chronologically, and finding the right song from the particular stretch of their lives he is chronicling (sometimes just a few weeks, sometimes several months) to match what he wants to say about respective artistic and personal as well as their relationship's evolution(s) doesn't always work. But there were so many times when the product of the Lennon & McCartney songwriting partnership reflected exactly what appears to have been going on in their hearts and heads that, more often than not, the songs Leslie chooses for each chapter work very well, sometimes perfectly. (I'll never think about "If I Fell" or "In My Life" or Lennon's "God" the same way again--and it's not a coincidence that these were all John songs: while Leslie's admiration for Paul is endless, he makes a strong case that the brilliant and damaged John was always the force that did more to captivate or infuriate or drive forward Paul as an artist, and the Beatles as a band, than was the case for any other single member.)

Anyway, this is a first-rate work of both popular biography and musical criticism; I have to set it alongside Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles as the best book I've ever read about that band, despite its limitations (he puts an official apology at the end of the book, expressing regret that, because of his thesis--as defensible and correct as I think it is--George Harrison and Ringo Starr get pushed aside). Check it out, if you're any kind of fan of the 1960s at all; you're learn something from it, and maybe be inspired by it too.

A Voice, a Chime, a Chant Sublime

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

One hundred and sixty-one years ago, on Christmas Day 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem “Christmas Bells.” This poem, of course, became the basis for the well-known--but not, in my observation, particularly popular--hymn, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." It wasn't included in our Christmas program in our Mormon congregation this morning, and I wish it had been. 2024, and specifically those of us who have lived through it and must face its consequences, need it.

The poem that Longfellow wrote is inextricable from the Civil War, and the desperation and despair so many felt during those years. By late 1863, the war had dragged on for over 2 1/2 years, his oldest son had run away to join the Union army without his permission and had been gravely wounded in battle, and the horrors of Gettysburg—Lincoln had delivered his famous Address only a month prior—weighed down the country as a whole. Perhaps it is unsurprising that his reflections that Christmas morning were dark ones, with his final stanza perhaps suggesting more faithful determination than any actual hope:

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
    And wild and sweet
    The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
    Had rolled along
    The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
    A voice, a chime,
    A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
    And with the sound
    The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
    And made forlorn
    The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
    "For hate is strong,
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
    The Wrong shall fail,
    The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

It is not Wadsworth greatest poem, but it is a good one. And in any case, within ten years the poem, in various versions, was being put to music. In the 20^th century, Bing Crosby recorded the song; so did The Carpenters. Both of them, like many other artists, dropped stanzas 3, 4, and 5; they removed the songs explicit invocations of the Civil War, and instead turned the poem into an abiding message of peace and good will—one that is doubted, briefly, in the next-to-last stanza, but is re-emphasized, both “more loud and deep” in the concluding one: “The Wrong shall fail!”

I am grateful that the version which made it into Mormon hymnbooks took a different approach—not an unknown one, but not, I think, the dominant one either. It is not, on the basis of decades of observation, an oft-sung Christmas song in American Mormon congregations, but it deserves better, if only because of the wisdom of the arranger in ordering the stanzas 1, 2, 6, 7, and then, and only then, 3. Far better for all of us—for everyone who lives, as we all must, as Longfellow himself did, through catastrophes large and small, through daily mistakes and passing triumphs, through rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike—to reflect upon the message which the miracle of the Incarnation, of God the Son being born as a human being, communicates…and then experience evil and suffer our doubts that’s God’s good message may ever be realized…and then be reminded that’s God’s love abides and calls to us despite all opposition…and then, finally, gird up our loins and begin again, day after day after day.

The Mormon hymnbook is currently being revamped--and if "I Heard the Bells" survives into the new version, I would wish for only two changes: turn “Till” to “Then,” and “revolved” to “revolves.” Embrace the idea that this hymn no longer, if it ever entirely was, one man’s Christmas determination to keep hoping though his nation’s greatest peril, but is now rather a benediction on the message of Christmas, a summation as well as an invitation. Yes, the wrong shall fail, but the defeat of the wrong is something God does with us, through us, day after day, year after year, lifetime after lifetime. As the man said, the bells still ring—still sing, still chime, still chant on their call, their eternal, abiding reminder of God's grace and peace--for those who believe.

Then, ringing, singing, on its way,
The world revolves from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

 Merry Christmas!