Feel Your Own Pain: Fresh Ears on "Plastic Ono Band"
Some albums have been in my life, and my record collection, for a good long while without ever quite being favorites, let alone formative. These are mostly records I know I'm supposed to revere, or that friends have repeatedly raved about, or that I feel I haven't ever given a fair shake to. Occasionally I've discovered new love for one of these white elephants, and it's like finding an old friend I didn't know I had. Some years ago this happened with All Things Must Pass, and more recently with the oeuvre of one Fiona Apple. For a time in 2018, I was, to my own surprise as much as anyone's, obsessive replaying both Dylan's Street Legal and Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans. And just a year before that I finally, belatedly, clicked with Joni Mitchell and thereby uncovered a deep vein of gold and other precious metals.
Hope springs eternal, is what I'm trying to say. And I've got some other likely candidates for this treatment, plus the itch to create a new series, to alternate with Formative-Album Replays and the Private Canon. I'm calling it Fresh Ears, and the first work in my sights (or earshot) is John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. It's a record I've spun plenty of times over the years without ever quite warming to it. But if I'm going to claim Harrison's All Things as the best record by an ex-Beatle, I should probably return to another purported candidate for that title before I count it out.
I have to report after a close listen that while it's still not a favorite, I have both a clearer sense of why I don't like it as much as I'm supposed to, and a better appreciation of its unique, idiosyncratic merits. It is boldly and self-consciously an End of the Sixties record, its first sentiment being a full-throated "goodbye" and its last lines (or almost its last) being an abrupt, "The dream is over." It is a document of almost total disillusionment, in other words, and I would argue that its real thesis statement is not the tuneless, tiresomely adolescent litany of things "I don't believe in" that forms the record's climax in "God" (the dramatic pause on the supposedly heart-stopping Beatles, after he's thrown over a dozen shibboleths sacred and profane, strikes me as hilariously self-important), but instead the crackling, sputtering "I Found Out," in which he straps his anger to a blues rocket and really goes places, fueled by one of Ringo's tightest drum parts and Klaus Voorman's meathead bass. It's also one of the few instances in the album's Disaffection Suite in which he evinces real fellow feeling with the song's targets: He may be hectoring us with the truth he's discovered, but he's clearly on the same downward train with us, he's pissed about it, and he wants us to feel it. "Ow!" he screams at the end, and I do feel it.
Alas I can't say the same for the hateful "Working Class Hero," which sounds uncannily like a ripoff of Dylan's "Masters of War" and which, I guess you could say in its favor, at least has the courage of its own assholery, as it punches down bravely at "fucking peasants" entrapped by "religion and sex and TV." And I guess I can coolly appreciate the vicious irony of the chorus's "something to be," which suggests an inescapable hamster wheel of impossible aspiration, and the song's chilling final turn, in which he advises us that if we want to be heroes, "well, just follow me." That might read as self-implication if the rest of the song didn't droop with bottomless contempt. And again, I can't take seriously the smug kiss-off of "God," not because I object to its atheism but for its spectacle of presumption: Lennon here accepts the title of a pop-guru thought leader, only to nobly sacrifice it and inform us we're all on our own, actually, and don't let the beaded curtain hit us in the ass.
Elsewhere, to the extent that I find odd pleasures and pockets of enjoyment on Plastic Ono Band, these benefit more from a pervading disorganization than any grimly unified purpose. A vertiginous stream-of-consciousness feeling unsettles songs like "Remember" and "Isolation," with their descending and ascending piano chords, respectively, and though the form of "Well Well Well" is a dirty-blues cousin of "I Found Out," its lyrics read like a weirdo's diary. "Look at Me" sounds like rejected spare parts of "Julia," and "Hold On" is a genuinely sweet diversion, though lyrically both only tighten the grip of the album's clammy solipsism.
I haven't mentioned the album's most affecting songs, the tripartite masterpiece "Mother," as pure a distillation of emotional truth as anyone has ever put on record—you really can feel the full liberation of not being a Beatle anymore, all the costume drama and showbiz falling away, and the song's lid-off power is almost glorious enough to pull me through the whole record—and "Love," a simple, questing secular prayer with one of those jarringly beautiful Lennon chord progressions, scratch-and-scrape vocals, and guileless nursery-rhyme lyrics that stick because they deserve to.
My verdict? It all feels a bit less plastic to me, and I will definitely no longer say "oh, no" when it turns up in shuffle. But best Beatle album? Until I revisit Band on the Run, that crown can rest easy on Harrison's concurrent uncorking.
Hope springs eternal, is what I'm trying to say. And I've got some other likely candidates for this treatment, plus the itch to create a new series, to alternate with Formative-Album Replays and the Private Canon. I'm calling it Fresh Ears, and the first work in my sights (or earshot) is John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band. It's a record I've spun plenty of times over the years without ever quite warming to it. But if I'm going to claim Harrison's All Things as the best record by an ex-Beatle, I should probably return to another purported candidate for that title before I count it out.
I have to report after a close listen that while it's still not a favorite, I have both a clearer sense of why I don't like it as much as I'm supposed to, and a better appreciation of its unique, idiosyncratic merits. It is boldly and self-consciously an End of the Sixties record, its first sentiment being a full-throated "goodbye" and its last lines (or almost its last) being an abrupt, "The dream is over." It is a document of almost total disillusionment, in other words, and I would argue that its real thesis statement is not the tuneless, tiresomely adolescent litany of things "I don't believe in" that forms the record's climax in "God" (the dramatic pause on the supposedly heart-stopping Beatles, after he's thrown over a dozen shibboleths sacred and profane, strikes me as hilariously self-important), but instead the crackling, sputtering "I Found Out," in which he straps his anger to a blues rocket and really goes places, fueled by one of Ringo's tightest drum parts and Klaus Voorman's meathead bass. It's also one of the few instances in the album's Disaffection Suite in which he evinces real fellow feeling with the song's targets: He may be hectoring us with the truth he's discovered, but he's clearly on the same downward train with us, he's pissed about it, and he wants us to feel it. "Ow!" he screams at the end, and I do feel it.
Alas I can't say the same for the hateful "Working Class Hero," which sounds uncannily like a ripoff of Dylan's "Masters of War" and which, I guess you could say in its favor, at least has the courage of its own assholery, as it punches down bravely at "fucking peasants" entrapped by "religion and sex and TV." And I guess I can coolly appreciate the vicious irony of the chorus's "something to be," which suggests an inescapable hamster wheel of impossible aspiration, and the song's chilling final turn, in which he advises us that if we want to be heroes, "well, just follow me." That might read as self-implication if the rest of the song didn't droop with bottomless contempt. And again, I can't take seriously the smug kiss-off of "God," not because I object to its atheism but for its spectacle of presumption: Lennon here accepts the title of a pop-guru thought leader, only to nobly sacrifice it and inform us we're all on our own, actually, and don't let the beaded curtain hit us in the ass.
Elsewhere, to the extent that I find odd pleasures and pockets of enjoyment on Plastic Ono Band, these benefit more from a pervading disorganization than any grimly unified purpose. A vertiginous stream-of-consciousness feeling unsettles songs like "Remember" and "Isolation," with their descending and ascending piano chords, respectively, and though the form of "Well Well Well" is a dirty-blues cousin of "I Found Out," its lyrics read like a weirdo's diary. "Look at Me" sounds like rejected spare parts of "Julia," and "Hold On" is a genuinely sweet diversion, though lyrically both only tighten the grip of the album's clammy solipsism.
I haven't mentioned the album's most affecting songs, the tripartite masterpiece "Mother," as pure a distillation of emotional truth as anyone has ever put on record—you really can feel the full liberation of not being a Beatle anymore, all the costume drama and showbiz falling away, and the song's lid-off power is almost glorious enough to pull me through the whole record—and "Love," a simple, questing secular prayer with one of those jarringly beautiful Lennon chord progressions, scratch-and-scrape vocals, and guileless nursery-rhyme lyrics that stick because they deserve to.
My verdict? It all feels a bit less plastic to me, and I will definitely no longer say "oh, no" when it turns up in shuffle. But best Beatle album? Until I revisit Band on the Run, that crown can rest easy on Harrison's concurrent uncorking.
That "Apple Jam" disc badly mars the otherwise wonderful "All Things Must Pass." I still don't understand what Lennon is trying to say in "Working Class Hero" - that you're only good if you're rich and above it all? And I understand your reaction to "I don't believe in Beatles," but I think its intended effect probably worked on listeners of the time who had only just recently lost their favorite band and probably held out hope that there would be a reunion.
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