Dear John

Lennon with a difference

by Richard C. Walls

It seems appropriate that The John Lennon Anthology (Capitol) isn't the usual boxed-set career overview, that it's made up entirely of alternate and fluffed takes, home demos and studio chatter, live performances and curio snippets -- that, like the man's post-Beatle oeuvre, it's a little messy. On the other hand, the collection divides Lennon's decade-long ('70-'80) solo career into four parts, neatly and without strain, each sequence getting its own disc. Discs one and four have most of the good stuff; discs two and three are, to all but the most indiscriminate fan, more or less so-so.

No surprise that disc one (titled Ascot, which is where Lennon was living at the time) has the best stuff. He had just extracted himself from what was not only the most famous but until that point the most baroque rock band ever, an avant-garde gestalt that had nudged rock as far from its teen-hormone roots as it was possible to do without inventing an entirely new form of music. Emerging out of this milieu, Lennon's initial solo albums, 1970's Plastic Ono Band and 1971's Imagine, were harshly reactionary presages of punk venom and stripped-down instrumentation that sounded, at a time when extravagance was still considered a cutting-edge quality, simply amazing.

Listening to the early versions of the cuts that would end up on the Plastic album, you can grasp just how worked-out -- calculated, even -- the "rawness" of that album was. "I Found Out," with just Lennon accompanying himself on electric guitar, and "God," with the full Ono band, boasted even more energetic urgency than the final versions. The released set shows more consistency and, we can hear now, a little more polish than was immediately evident. Lennon might have been conducting an exorcism, but he was still a pro, and there were some things back then that just weren't considered ready for prime time.

Of the Imagine material, the most notable thing is how much better "How Do You Sleep" sounds without those damn strings. "Imagine" itself -- done twice here, once in the studio and once live -- has to be one of the most unlikely anthems of all time, a synthesis of love-generation utopianism and Lennon's newly unleashed nihilism. I guess the lilting melody puts it across for most people, though Lennon schmaltz, unlike McCartney schmaltz, tends to drag a little -- the difference, one suspects, between a songwriter who's essentially depressed and one who's essentially happy.

Lennon was never really able to devise a good follow-up to the emotional bridge burning of these initial efforts, and so discs two (New York City) and three (The Lost Weekend), which cover '72-'74, find him wandering in the wilderness. Various guises are assumed -- protest folkie, pick-up-band troubadour, rockabilly curator; and though he often sounds committed, he only now and then sounds compelling.

The sessions for '73's Mind Games have some good songs full of the sort of dark-hearted optimism that characterized Lennon's work at this time, but the band are dull. From '74's Walls and Bridges we get two simple keepers, "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and "Scared"; '74's Rock'N'Roll turns out to be the flip side of Mind Games -- the songs are the usual golden oldies you feel you're suppose to like, but the band are tight and Lennon sounds jazzed. One major exception is Phil Spector's insane arrangement of "Be My Baby," the sort of goopy pomp that can swallow a vocalist whole, and to which Lennon responds bizarrely -- this may be the only time on record that he sounds not merely mocking but downright camp. There are also three cuts of "Phil and John" in the studio; these begin as joky banter but devolve into dueling snits -- mainly because of Spector's inability to know when to shut up.

Most of disc four (Dakota) is from '80, the final year -- and that's doubly sad because it's obvious that Lennon's getting a second wind. Those who found Double Fantasy's songs a little diffuse, or even sappy, should give a listen to the altogether crunchier energy of these unofficial versions. Although Lennon still had his soft side, it seemed less mawkish at this point, as if the awkwardness that attended his need to express love had evaporated with his need to excoriate his demons. He's starting to sound almost wholesome here, almost happy.

Dakota also offers the set's most obvious bits of humor, including an indirect swipe at George Harrison called "The Rishi Kesh Song" that owes more than a little to The Goon Show (Monty Python precursors from Lennon's youth), plus three, count 'em, three different imitations of Bob Dylan, not badly done. But my personal favorite moment of good, bitter cheer comes on a home recording of "Dear John," one of those getting-older-and-better-slow-down songs, when he accidentally slips into the melody of Kurt Weill's classic geezer lament "September Song" -- then laughs, as though realizing he's still a little young to be feeling so old. It's a wonderful moment.