A solo Beatles triple play: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band from 1970 which featured drummer Ringo Starr on seven of the 11 original release tracks followed by George Harrison’s 33 & 1/3 from 1976 and Paul McCartney & Wings’ 1973 blockbuster Band On The Run. My thoughts on each album follow the track listings.
John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band
1. Mother
2. Hold On
3. I Found Out
4. Working Class Hero
5. Isolation
6. Remember
7. Love
8. Well Well Well
9. Look At Me
10. God
11. My Mummy’s Dead
1. Woman Don’t You Cry For Me
2. Dear One
3. Beautiful Girl
4. This Song
5. See Yourself
6. It’s What You Value
7. True Love
8. Pure Smokey
9. Crackerbox Palace
10. Learning How To Love You
Paul McCartney & Wings – Band On The Run
1. Band On The Run
2. Jet
3. Bluebird
4. Mrs Vandebilt
5. Let Me Roll It
6. Mamunia
7. No Words
8. Picasso’s Last Words (Drink To Me)
9. Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five
Leading off with the track-for-track cathartic album for Lennon as has been analyzed at length over time. I like the whole album but for me, it has always come down to two songs which were influential on my impressionable young mind, especially as I grew into teen years after the 1970 album release.
Working Class Hero and God. But before I delve more deeply I’ll preface my thoughts by saying I’ll likely go on longer about Lennon’s album but that doesn’t mean I necessarily rate it higher than Harrison’s or McCartney’s. For one thing, I’ll be honest; these three albums – all of which I enjoy – perfectly fit my two-hour slot. That said, each of the albums are different, all have their merits, good to great songs and particularly in McCartney’s case with a largely worldwide No. 1, high chart placings although all three albums did well. Lennon’s was top 10 in most countries with Harrison’s in the top 20. I love and grew up with The Beatles and enjoy much if not all of their material both band and solo, and for all three albums I’m playing it really comes down to just a few songs on each, if forced to choose. But the Lennon album is different in that it’s primal, personal, unvarnished, brutally honest and most shaped my thinking, particularly via Working Class Hero and God.
Working Class Hero: I remember being stunned – albeit in a ‘right on’ kind of way – on first listen that Lennon used the F word, twice. Few would bat an eye at what’s become relatively common usage on recorded works now, but in 1970, it was startling. And the line that got me thinking: ‘Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV’ which sends me off on a perhaps self-indulgent tangent. Years later, at 26, I had a similar reaction after reading what became something of a bible to me: Neil Postman‘s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business.
It’s a short book, just 163 pages, within which Postman posits that it was more Aldous Huxley in his 1932 book Brave New World than George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four who pinpointed humanity’s potential problems. He wasn’t critical of or questioning Orwell by any stretch but an excerpt from the short forward to Postman’s book boils things down to his point.
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held . . . But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally opposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. . . . This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
At the time of writing, Postman, who died at age 72 in 2003, put forth the premise that TV, including the news as presented on TV, was the drug Soma from Brave New World. Forty years later, one could say the same about social media and the internet. Postman – and Huxley – was prescient.
Back to Lennon, and God, the other influential song on me with its opening line ‘God is a concept by which we measure our pain’ and on into the list of all the things Lennon, in the wake of The Beatles’ breakup, didn’t believe in, culminating in the dramatic ‘I don’t believe in Beatles’ and ‘the dream is over . . . and so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.’
And all The Beatles did, albeit individually although Lennon, Harrison and Ringo did work on some of each other’s albums with McCartney joinng the fray for Starr’s 1973 album Ringo.
Three years later, 33 & 1/3, released in November 1976, if nothing else afforded Harrison the opportunity to write and release This Song, making sport of the long and drawn out My Sweet Lord copyright infringement case which ruled in September of 1976 that he had plagiarized The Chiffons’ 1963 hit He’s So Fine. The first verse:
This song has nothing tricky about it
This song ain’t black or white and as far as I know
Don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright
This Song made the top 30 while the infectious Crackerbox Palace slipped inside the top 20. But the funky It’s What You Value is arguably my favorite. It opens with the line ‘Someone’s driving a 450’, a reference to Harrison paying session drummer to the stars Jim Keltner with a Mercedes 450 SL, apparently at Keltner’s request, for playing on Harrison’s 1974 Dark Horse Tour.
And back to 1973 we go for the wall-to-wall classic Band On The Run where, after a few good if inconsistent albums to start his post-Beatles career, McCartney put it all together. The opening one-two punch of the title track and Jet, Let Me Roll It, Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five, etc. People know it, most at least like it, I could go on but . . . the music speaks for itself.