John Lennon Solo Albums Poll

First two Plastic Ono Band records totally rule. "Fly" owns most of John's catalog.

Although spotty in a few places, 'Imagine' narrowly over POB for me.

I heard DF for the first time on Dec 7 '80. So sad.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

easy one.

Lennon is generally overrated as a solo artist, but "Double Fantasy" was great. Would have been even better without the Yoko tracks though.

Oh, and I am not saying "Imagine" is a bad album. Just a pity the rest of the album doesn't hold up with "Imagine", "Jealous Guy", "Oh My Love" and "How?"

I'd have thought "Mind Games" and "Walls/Bridges" would be up yr alley, geir.

Nah, "Tight A$" and "Meat City" too . . . well, you know.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow.

o_O

The order is what I was expecting, but the landslide? Only two points' difference between Imagine and Double Fantasy? I didn't even think PBO was that well known let alone popular.

I didn't expect Mind Games or Walls & Bridges to both get shut out. Neither are particular faves of mine, but I could have sworn that I have heard love for both on ILM in the past.

Lennon is generally overrated as a solo artist, but "Double Fantasy" was great. Would have been even better without the Yoko tracks though

Oh, and I am not saying "Imagine" is a bad album. Just a pity the rest of the album doesn't hold up with "Imagine", "Jealous Guy", "Oh My Love" and "How?"

Geir lives in Bizarro world - down is up, black is white, etx

i find it quite reassuring myself.

http://www.google.co.uk/logos/2010/lennon10-res.gif

I think I disagree with pretty much every single conclusion Wolk draws in today's Pfork review, with the exception of his dismissal of Sometime in NY

Mind Games deserves alot more love than it gets.

I mean

Mind Games, on the other hand, isn't particularly off-putting-- it's just creatively exhausted and timid. The title track has a nice tune; the session dudes who play on the album are entirely competent; "Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)" is a sweet sentiment. But there is not a single risky or urgent moment on the entire thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx0ZqyqO8Wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l1ILO2DZwA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJSMvVyRVZ0

Yeah, perhaps if you take away those above songs and the title track.

Yoko's songs on Doubel Fantasy are better than John's. FACT

About to listen to "Life With the Lions" for the first time.

John can really play some feedback!

I imagine there are some 1967 jams where John is doing this while George plays sitar and Paul and Ringo play maracas & congas.

never heard Life with the Lions. neighbor had a vinyl copy of it that he wanted to sell for $150 though. lol

Rawer than Metal Machine Music, tbh.

I like the insouciance of Wolk's review! It's like he wrote his own Walls and Bridges.

insouciant? seems like a lot of received wisdom to me - Imagine is overplayed hippie drivel, POB is good except when you think about it in terms of whiny rich guy, etc

i think it's really hard to write a review of john lennon, or any of the beatles (and *especially* the beatles themselves). some parts of this review (particularly the mind games overview) seemed dismissive to me, but then again, short of writing another book, pretty much anything you say is going to dismiss some aspect of the guy. The notion of yet another compilation of his music does make me tired just thinking about it--- despite the fact that it did make me listen to a bunch of solo lennon today, and like pretty much everything I played. interesting guy!

Wow, now it's total freejazz territory. Sounds almost like Coltrane w Yoko screaming over it.

The notion of yet another compilation of his music does make me tired just thinking about it

yeah I can understand this, being bombarded with his cultural omnipresence every 10 years will do that

I laughed out loud at:

A couple of John's songs here are fantastic, especially the inspired throwaway "Nobody Told Me", allegedly written for Ringo to sing. Yoko's aren't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7v0O8M5vKc

^^^underappreciated gem imho

that is funny (insofar as you can misread it as implying that Yoko didn't write any songs for Ringo to sing) - but I sorta bristled at the implication that Yoko couldn't function in John's idiom. Witness this piece of absolute brilliance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8k4lN3Kd28

No, I disagree (I love M&H's "You're The One") – I just love the terseness of his dismissal, especially after that long sentence.

yeah I can understand this, being bombarded with his cultural omnipresence every 10 years will do that

and yet I always hope that I'm going to stumble upon Lennon's stuff in a way that will somehow cause all of it make more sense than it does. why? he's dead! I've already heard everything!

have you heard Pussycats?

not that it will make anything "make more sense" - really it's just another piece in the incomprehensible puzzle - but what a fun, great-sounding, bleakly funny piece it is

yeah I can understand this, being bombarded with his cultural omnipresence every 10 years will do that

The problem is, it's always the same dozen or so songs, when he did extremely minimalist and challenging stuff that is being ignored by the music industry. His first two solo albums aren't even being reissued! Thom Yorke just recently ripped off "Two Minutes Silence".

They should let Thom handle Lennon's music LOL

pussy cats

yes, and yeah it's just more haze. I came at it from the Nilsson point of view, in which case it's both inspired and tragic. thru a lennon lens, less tragic, more benevolent albeit w/less invested in the end result of HN's general well being...?

Wow, "Radio Play" is a straight up Animal Collective instrumental.

wait Dom are you blaming HN's drinking on Lennon...?

Yeah that's wrong

I mean I know the story that Nilsson busted a vocal chord on that album and went on recording anyway (ostensibly because he didn't want to admit it to Lennon?) but I dunno if that's the kind of thing you can really lay at John's feet.

Liveblogging "Life with the Lions" first play. Just listened to John Lennon pushing the 'off' and 'on' buttons & volume knobds on a radio for 12 minutes! amazing!!!! "Radio Play" is incredible.

'On a windy day let's go on flying
There may be no trees to rest on
there may be no clouds to ride'

"Song for John" is AMAZING.

"Mulberry", this is some nice stuff. Noise acoustic guitar with a slide, Yoko singing sadly but softly. Brilliant.

Love the fast playing at 3.33

no, not blaming his drinking, but more like, lennon kind of riding the train w/him, and in the end lennon had a fortitude that nilsson didn't, and hence didn't have to pay the same kind of consequences

I wonder if John experimenting with alternate tunings in the 60s or if he just was too fucked up to notice the guitars were tuned oddly.

John was totally familiar with multiple tuning styles and he uses a bunch of different ones throughout the Beatles catalog

Dear Prudence uses both open D and drop D iirc

"No Bed For Beatle John" consists of John and Yoko singing the text of press clippings about themselves, in a cappella chant style.

lol

It’s like the worst track ever, I agree. Sonic vomit

i like it. sorta repetitive but w/e. production is fine. surprised so many here dislike it, hate it even. #9 dream is the keeper from W&B tho

'#9 Dream' is one of my favourite things Lennon ever did, including with The Beatles, so I can't disagree. Sublime production, string arrangement, lyrics, melody, chord progression... everything just came together beautifully on that song.

Yes.

Wah filter ftw

#9 Dream is ear candy but not much more. Which, given what we were getting from Lennon around that time, isn’t nothing.

I haven’t read any of the Lennon biographies but here’s what I believe we do know:

*Lennon recorded about two albums’ worth of material when he came out of retirement in 1979-80.

*In the intervening 37 years, not much new music from Lennon has emerged from 1975-1980. The “Dakota” disc on Lennon Anthology didn’t add that much to the canon.

*Lennon hadn’t exactly been at the top of his game for the previous 3 or 4 years either. Quality-wise, the songs he recorded when he returned were probably better than what he was writing before he retired but rarely a patch on his work pre-Mind Games (I rate three really good songs apiece on DF and M&H but YMMV).

*Team Yoko has very carefully presented what we know about those years.

*John Lennon didn’t write a ton of music around the time of Sgt. Pepper either – Ian MacDonald notes that he was in bed a lot and his productivity immediately prior to meeting Yoko was low.

What we don’t know:

*Whether he has “writer’s block” from 1975 on (is that even a real thing BTW? I mean, do psychologists actually diagnose this? or is it just a catch-all phrase for “I can’t write stuff”)

*Whether Lennon had a drug problem in those years.

*How “happy” Lennon actually was during that time (one thing we do know about artists is that many tend to be productive when they are in turmoil).

*Whether he actually baked bread.

So is it possible Yoko Ono is hoarding some treasure trove of material John wrote during those years? I suppose. But unless there’s a good reason she hasn’t come out with them, it seems pretty unlikely. Does that mean he was blocked? Maybe? Or maybe he was just uninterested in music – which frankly seems a lot more in keeping with what we actually know about his life then as well as him from before.

Also, Turrican, aren’t you also having some fight over on the George Harrison thread about the number of Beatles references in their solo work? What gives?

I don't know - already having said my thoughts on the matter might have something to do with it!

Turrican is kind of weird. Doesn’t like Presence. Sad

I would also just add: I don’t think there is any way any of us can really understand what it was like to be a Beatle and the impact an experience like that would have. Yes, it was only a decade, and, yes, there is no lack of stars that have blown up unimaginably in the years since, facing all the same paparazzi mania.

But it’s not actually that surprising that Lennon pretty much tanked for most of the decade after they broke up. When you consider that no band since has even come close to having the same cultural significance—and then, how many issues he had to work out from his childhood through his marriage to Cynthia and abandonment of Julian, etc.—it kind of makes sense that he might have simply dried up creatively once he separated from all that and started a new family. Many others have found themselves creatively spent dealing with less.

And FWIW, this isn’t exactly unique to Lennon within the Beatles. Outside of what came out in the immediate aftermath (POB, ATMP, “Maybe I’m Amazed,” etc.), the more time passes, the more you realize how little of the music the Beatles made music outside of the band compares even remotely favorably to what they did together. And, that’s okay.

Nah, I disagree... McCartney continued to write classics for a long time after the Beatles split.

cf. "One of These Days"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPizFm-2jo8

“I don’t think there is any way any of us can really understand what it was like to be a Beatle”
No shit?

The more time passes, the more I realise that McCartney was essentially the driving force during the later Beatles years - not just in terms of coming up with concepts and pulling the band together to work, but... Ram sounds more like Abbey Road than Imagine or All Things Must Pass do.

McCartney kept delivering hit after hit for decades, and wrote a great number of classics from 1970 onwards, and to be honest, I'd rather hear him talk more about that stuff than The Beatles again.

Give me 'Once Upon a Long Ago' over 'Tell Me What You See' any day of the week.

I agree with all that. In the case of McCartney, his craftsmanship alone carried him along after inspiration left him (even some of those songs are classics – craftsmanship counts a lot in pop). But do *any* of those songs (again, those not released in the rush of the breakup) really rank w their Beatles work?

That’s not a knock on the later songs. It’s a credit to the earlier ones, what each brought to them and what the Beatles enterprise brought to them.

“I don’t think there is any way any of us can really understand what it was like to be a Beatle”
No shit?

Yes, I think songs like 'Jet', 'Bluebird', 'My Love', 'Live and Let Die', 'The Note You Never Wrote', 'With a Little Luck', 'Coming Up', 'Take It Away', 'My Brave Face', 'This One', 'Calico Skies' etc. (I could go on - I won't) are as good as any song he wrote 1962-1969.

In fact, if we view Paul's Beatle songs for what they are, rather than just assuming they have some sort of automatic superiority (which they don't) then I would rank plenty of Paul's post-Beatles stuff higher than 'P.S. I Love You', 'Hold Me Tight', 'Tell Me What You See', 'Every Little Thing', 'I'll Follow The Sun', 'All Together Now', 'Your Mother Should Know', 'Yellow Submarine', 'Lovely Rita', 'Rocky Raccoon', 'She Came in Through the Bathroom Window' etc.

This is before we get to 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' and 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' ... I'll take 'Listen to What the Man Said' and 'Silly Love Songs' over either.

Junk, One of These Days, Coming Up are absolutely among his best.

and McCartney II is a stone cold curveball classic, no other Beatle ever made something as progressive & idiosyncratic & intuitive & of its time after 1970.

When I first dug into solo McCartney in the late 90s, I actually tried to make the case to a fellow musician friend of mine that Paul’s post-Beatles work was as good as his Beatles stuff and in some cases better (this isn’t something you can really try to do with Lennon). I played him songs like “Arrow Through Me,” “Back Seat of My Car,” “However Absurd,” “I’m Carrying,” and “Letting Go.” He looked at me like I had three heads. Which wasn’t a knock on the songs – he liked them fine. But the idea that this was world-changing stuff was silly to him.

The point is, I’m not reducing this to Beatles = Better. And you will find few ILMers more enamored with McCartney than me. I prefer his stuff to a lot of Beatles material in part because there is still something for me to discover. That medley at the end of Red Rose Speedway with the nonsense lyrics tells me more about the artist who made it than another listen to side two of Abbey Road.

Are their best solo moments better than or “When I’m Sixty-Four” or “Good Morning, Good Morning”? Sure. But there are no solo tracks these guys did as deathless as “Yesterday” or “Norwegian Wood,” as deeply weird as “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “Helter Skelter,” or as perfect as “Martha My Dear” or “I’m a Loser.”

And again, that’s fine. I like living in a world with all these things.

"I prefer his stuff to a lot of Beatles material in part because there is still something for me to discover."
this is a great point

Johnny will be spinning in his grave.

yeah like i could never make the case that "beware my love" or "loup" is better than "for no one" or "hey jude" or whatever but finding yourself in the zone for speed of sound or red rose speedway is a pleasant experience and the journey should be savored imo. precisely because it's quirky and odd and not always "finished" or polished (in songcraft, performance, and/or production). sorta like how i feel about the white album tbh. or 70s dylan. there are lots of artist where it's fun to just spend time rummaging in their back catalogs and back pages.

"Cookin' (in the Kitchen of Love)" on Ringo's Rotogravure is from early in the John Lennon retirement period.

en I first dug into solo McCartney in the late 90s, I actually tried to make the case to a fellow musician friend of mine that Paul’s post-Beatles work was as good as his Beatles stuff and in some cases better (this isn’t something you can really try to do with Lennon). I played him songs like “Arrow Through Me,” “Back Seat of My Car,” “However Absurd,” “I’m Carrying,” and “Letting Go.” He looked at me like I had three heads.

To be fair, I also probably would have looked at you like you had three heads if you tried to prove this with 'Arrow Through Me' and particularly 'However Absurd' - bad choices.

But there are no solo tracks these guys did as deathless as “Yesterday”...

'Live and Let Die'

as deeply weird as “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “Helter Skelter,”

'Secret Friend'

or as perfect as “Martha My Dear”

'No More Lonely Nights' ('Martha My Dear' is a really bad example)

My rankings.

excellent post alfred, though i would (predictably perhaps) put #2 as #1

My rankings🕸.