1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 203. John Lennon -John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)

 

After the first track on this album, my pattern-seeking brain came up with a thought, which seems to have been borne out by the rest of the album. Of the three post-Beatles solo albums given in the list (Ringo is overlooked), the style of each reflects where each former Beatle ended up. McCartney, on a farm in an isolated part of Scotland and on the brink of depression, turns out a very lo-fi acoustic album of songs that barely sound finished. Harrison, meanwhile, in a mansion with its own recording studio and surrounded by music industry friends, produces a highly-polished triple album full of radio-friendly rock and soul. Lennon, meanwhile, lives in New York with an avant-garde artist, and so his offering is a much more art-house kind of deal.

It feels like a lot of therapy is going on here, as well. The first track, Mother, descends into primal scream about the death of his mother (killed in a car accident when Lennon was 17) and abandonment by his father – the lyrics “Mama don’t go, daddy come home” gradually becoming more and more of a ragged scream as the song goes on. There’s more primal scream in the track Well Well Well but this is lyrically less confessional and so it feels more like a musical affectation here than the raw emotion of Mother. This is followed by a short, but soothing, song, almost by way of an antidote. Like James Taylor, Lennon addresses himself to Hold On (followed by Yoko, and then the world).

The two stand-out tracks for me have a similar cathartic element. Working Class Hero is a little like Dylan’s Masters of War, an acoustic protest song with bitter and biting lyrics about how the system is rigged against the working class, who are offered tidbits while getting crushed down

“They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules”

The track God, on the other hand, deals mainly with Lennon’s feelings about the break-up of the Beatles. Like most of the tracks on the album it’s sparsely arranged with a simple repeated musical refrain, here Lennon on the piano in a nihilistic counterpart and precursor to Imagine. The song turns into a repetition of “I don’t believe in …” with a range of things from religion (Jesus, Gita, Yoga, which one suspects may be a poke at George Harrison), politics (Kings, Hitler, Kennedy), to music (Elvis, Zimmerman) before climaxing with “Don’t believe in Beatles”.
And here, almost as if Lennon has surprised himself with this admission, that the truth has finally hit him, the music drops down into an absolutely heat-wrenching softness. “Just believe in me, Yoko and me.”

Having brought these feelings out, exposed them, and accepted them, the song becomes softer, with Lennon recognizing that “I was the walrus, But now I'm John”. The dream is over.
And that, I think, is a fitting full stop to the year of post-Beatles solo albums.

It’s a very difficult listen in some ways, because it feels so absolutely personal and raw. I think Harrison’s album may have had more tracks that you’d want to hear on the radio, but there are some tracks on here, especially God, that are either masterfully constructed or relentlessly honest, or sometimes both.