ALBUM REVIEW: John Lennon - John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band

    John Lennon told The Beatles that he wanted "a divorce" in September of 1969, just after the recording of Abbey Road, and he immediately began exploring his newfound freedom from the group. In the months following, the "Cold Turkey" single was released, as were recordings from his performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival on the Live Peace album; the biggest of these releases came in February, though, when Lennon recorded and released the "Instant Karma!" single in less than two weeks, and the result was the first million-selling Beatles solo single, truly signaling a new post-Beatle era. Outside of music, John also found himself undertaking a practice known as "primal therapy" with psychotherapist Arthur Janov - to briefly explain what primal therapy is, it's a psychotherapy technique in which repressed childhood trauma is brought to conscious awareness and the pain is fully re-experienced and expressed in an attempt to fully resolve the pain through more complete processing and integration. Through this practice, John was able to confront and come to terms with his horrible childhood, and channeled his energy and emotions into an album's worth of new, emotionally bare material. The resulting Plastic Ono Band album isn't as grand as Harrison's All Things Must Pass, nor is it as cozy as McCartney, but it's one of the most revelatory albums in the history of pop music; it's a self-deconstructing and myth-making album that shows Lennon at his most vulnerable.

    By this point in his solo work, Lennon had established a working relationship with Phil Spector, who you may remember from The Beatles' Let It Be project as well as Harrison's All Things Must Pass - before all that, though, Spector had produced "Instant Karma!", and the results pleased Lennon enough to hand him over the Get Back tapes to make Let It Be happen. Here, however, we don't get the cinematic scope of Let It Be or the reverb rock walls of All Things - this is Spector out of his element, as a lot of this album is frankly minimal. The "band" as it is here is really only three people - John on guitar or piano, Hamburg friend Klaus Voorman on bass,  and fellow ex-Beatle Ringo Starr on drums. The resulting recordings are, frankly, much more primitive than any of the more sophisticated studio happenings that The Beatles were doing just a year or two prior, but it's suited for the record. Songs like the grime of "Well Well Well" wouldn't sound right with too much polish, and Spector's restraint is admirable throughout the entire record. Only a handful of songs, such as the bouncing piano rhythm of "Remember", have a decent amount of polish, with that song in particular probably being the album's closest shot to a real pop hit - the bridge is fantastic. All of it works together to create a somewhat bare-bones release, especially on songs like the acoustic only "Working Class Hero", but a great sounding one all the same.

    Despite what you may think, I wouldn't exactly call Plastic Ono Band an accessible record, at least not fully. This is the part where I touch on the incredibly personal lyrics that John writes throughout the album; I think he's hardly written songs with such emotion, wit, sadness, and anger as he has on the tracks here. What do you even say about a song that's filled with such great pain as "Mother", where John is shouting "Mama don't go!" and "Daddy come home!" at the end? Other songs are angry, like the pure disillusionment with the world in "I Found Out", a criticism of religion, authority, and even some clever swipes at his past Beatle life ("I've seen religion from Jesus to Paul" may be my favorite line John has ever written). This carries over into the proletariat anthem "Working Class Hero", a bleak reflection on how those in power will always hold you down - at the end, it essentially becomes an encouragement to rise up against those in power. Other songs are painted in fear and sadness; "Isolation" is not only one of the album's greatest moments, but it's a reflection of his vulnerability and loneliness in the world. It's stewed in self-dissection and disillusion throughout, the latter best seen in the penultimate track "God" with its swirling piano chords and crashing drums during the chorus as he rattles off "I don't believes" from religion to superstition to idols - magic, tarot, Hitler, yoga, Elvis, and Zimmerman. The final line, "I don't believe in Beatles" is the song's climax, and a complete tossing aside of what was. In his words, the dream is over and you'll just have to carry on. All of these songs showcase a massive release of emotion from Lennon, and it's this contents that continues to get stronger and more impactful with every subsequent listen.

    Perhaps no other Beatles solo album is as bare as Plastic Ono Band, and perhaps no other Beatles solo album needs to be. John Lennon's proper solo debut is a clean tear away from his past, all while still having that brilliant musicianship and lyricism on its own. A revelatory work, and one that feels awfully rare in the grand scheme of things - few albums are filled with such naked truth and pain as this one (only a few albums like Skeleton Tree or A Crow Looked at Me come to mind). Brilliantly produced, performed, and written from start to finish, Plastic Ono Band is the Beatles' obituary if ever there was one, and remains one of the strongest solo releases from the group even now.

RATING: ✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯✯

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