John Lennon POX

If you must know why I ask, I'm not quite as knowledgeable on his album tracks/b-sides/whatever from the post-Imagine/pre-Sean years, and I'm looking for a few recommendations.

"Whatever Gets You Through the Night" is classic. "What You Got" is very good. And I like "Scared" a lot, from that album. Some of the others are okay, but I don't know that I'd POX them.

Oddly enough, I was just going to do that!

I still like "Power to the People." (Was "Cold Turkey" on the flip side of that 45? I know my brother had the "Power to the People" single when I was a kid, something my father has probably since sold at a flea market for $.25.)

And "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" is (improbably) one of the few holiday songs I don't hate; in fact, I don't even get sick of it. Weird.

I think Walls & Bridges is really underrated, but only because of those three songs (all of which were available on really good versions on Menlove Ave., which is where I first heard them. i don't know if that ever made it to CD unfortunately).

Fuck "Imagine."

bring on the lucie
imagine
one day (at a time)
jealous guy
mother god
(just like) starting over
love
mind games
i found out
hold on

mother / god

fuck

I am not a Beatles fanatic so I don't know how much of the material has already been easily available but I just enjoyed listening to the Song Exploder podcast episode on "God." New interview with Klaus Voormann interspersed with archival interview snippets from John, Ringo and Billy Preston, alongside original tracks broken out and bits of demo and studio chatter (I think they said previously unreleased).

There is one v funny moment when Voormann says that John asked him, "do you think I should say 'Yoko and me' instead of 'I just believe in me'?" and Voormann tells him, "I think only you can answer that question for yourself."

His Yahrzeit today.

(Another) great article from Wayne Robins on his Substack.

lol even in death john's desperate cries for help still are being prettified by paul to the point that no one can hear them. whether he actually wanted that is an open question

the song is fine I've decided but you want more from the "last song" from the biggest band ever. it definitely loses something without the original bridge- it seems to have been taken as another sad-nostalgic beatles tribute (marketing & video really didn't help matters). but the song might be too sad or raise too many questions if they hadn't changed it. people (paul, yoko, fans, writers) much prefer the "happy househusband" story to the "writing jealously about paul every day in his diary" story when it comes to lennon in the late 70s. what happened to this song is the musical equivalent of the kind of narrative spinning and smoothing out that the beatles empire has done with the more controversial parts of lennon's biography (broadly the late 60s/early 70s, mid 70s, and late 70s) and it bums me out a lot (both the reality and the fact that it's apparently still necessary to deny it in order to protect a a dead man's ego or something)

it’s sort of interesting to me how this “final” lost Beatles song ends up so dour, goth, dirge-y, funereal, half dead sounding, it seems so far away from the methd out early 60s Beatlemania feminized noise thing that has way more relevance to their place in history imo, idk

my interpretation is that lennon at some point(s) tried to purge that part of himself (my new music isn't for girls and gays etc) and it worked too well in terms of burning bridges and even fucking with his own memories but not at all well in terms of actually getting over it. so he had the worst of both worlds in that he destroyed most of his relationships in an attempt to get over them but it didn't work and he took it so far that he couldn't go back. I see the lennon of these posthumous songs as a ghostly and haunted figure (some reports claim he was actually expecting to be killed at any minute around this time, as karma for his violent past)

as for the songs, I could just about come up with 10 I think are good but it wouldn't even make up an album. I almost want to accuse the rock press of perpetuating a conspiracy that paul was no good without john in order to cover up the obvious reality (and let john save face yet again)