It's 70 years after John Lennon's birth, and 30 after his death, and his solo career is still a knotty, vexing mess. The current round of reissues and repackages includes the third and fourth posthumous boxed sets of his work, and the fifth-or-so stab at a greatest-hits compilation; they're still not nearly as satisfying as you'd expect from one of the most important figures in the history of rock. That's partly because Lennon spent his solo years painfully aware of how important he was, alternately trying to see how he could use his fame to act in the world and how he could rebel against his fame's trappings.
Lennon had gotten a head start on his solo career: In the final couple of years of the Beatles, he'd started batting out records as reports from the front, whether or not his bandmates were available or interested. In 1968 and 1969, he made three albums with Yoko Ono, in her idiom (conceptual art) but his medium (LPs), none of them in the current batch of reissues. The two of them also started releasing singles credited to the Plastic Ono Band-- a John song on the A-side, a Yoko song on the B-side. The first Plastic Ono Band single, "Give Peace a Chance", was the soundtrack to a clever bit of political branding; "Cold Turkey" was written and recorded very shortly after he kicked heroin, in late summer 1969; "Instant Karma!" was in record stores 10 days after it was written.
The odd thing about John and Yoko's simultaneously released, identically designed solo albums entitled Plastic Ono Band is that hers is more suited to repeated listening, but his is better as conceptual art. (It's still pretty good as music: He's backed up by Ringo Starr, Billy Preston, and longtime Beatles associate Klaus Voormann.) The concept was the biggest rock star in the world breaking his wand and burning his books; directly expressing his unseemly emotions; doing things he would never, ever have gotten away with in the Beatles. He starts the album by working himself up into a total howling breakdown about his parental abandonment issues-- in 1970, you did not do that in public, ever-- and spends the rest of it essentially stripping himself naked. (He'd already done that, literally, on the cover of his and Yoko's first collaboration, Two Virgins.) "God" takes the concept to its destination: it's Lennon declaring, bluntly, that every myth that has ever given his audience comfort, up to and including the Beatles, is no longer of use-- "the dream is over."
The Achilles' heel of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is that it's functionally very similar to the world's most privileged man having a tantrum; it's hard to hear it now without thinking of National Lampoon's "Magical Misery Tour", a dead-on pastiche of the album whose lyrics are entirely drawn from Lennon's legendarily withering 1970 Rolling Stone interview, ending with a repeated howl of "genius is PAAAAAIN!" But, yeah, it's a hell of an album, anyway.
Imagine is one last visit to the edgy but likable variety show of White Album-era Beatles ("Jealous Guy" is actually rewritten from the White Album demo "Child of Nature"). Lennon still had an axe or five to grind-- "How Do You Sleep?" is an open attack on Paul McCartney (and features George Harrison on snarly slide guitar)-- and he was getting into an unfortunate habit of repeating himself: "Oh Yoko!" half-recycles a line from "A Day in the Life" as its refrain. But there are flashes of brilliance all over the record, from the unstoppable invective of "Gimme Some Truth" ("no short-haired yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky's gonna Mother Hubbard soft-soap me with just a pocketful of hope") to the reverse-double-entendre bruiser "It's So Hard". If the title track sounds like hippie bullshit now, that's just because it's been played to death.
And then Lennon moved to New York and started hanging out with much bigger potheads than himself, and everything kind of went to hell for a while. Some Time in New York City is a reeking lump of an album, the low point of his catalogue. The first disc is Lennon and Ono trading off songs of sanctimonious, unconvincing agitprop, most of which were guaranteed to alienate the people they were ostensibly meant to convince. (A rock star starting his follow-up to a #1 album with a militant feminist anthem might have been a bracing idea in 1972, except that it's a witless 50s rock'n'roll pastiche called "Woman Is the Nigger of the World". Yeah, that'll help.) There's also the matter of Ono's songs: She's a superb artist and a very interesting musician and songwriter, and you should go listen to Fly if you don't believe me, but when she tried to write and sing in Lennon's idiom, she was simply not in the same league. The previous reissue of Some Time excised most of the second disc's shitty live jams; this one reinstates them.
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.
After he separated from Ono in 1973, Lennon moved to L.A. and made a pair of slick but emotionally turbulent albums. The linchpin of Walls and Bridges, "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night", featuring Elton John on piano, was Lennon's first solo #1 single, and a slightly jarring nod to disco. Its laissez-faire hedonism was pretty far from the persona Lennon had established, but he was obviously trying to get away from himself in general. A lot of the album, in fact, addresses the idea that he might have screwed up his life irreparably. "Bless You" is a love song to Yoko and a word of kindness to her potential new man; "What You Got" is straight-up L.A. funk; "Scared" and "Steel and Glass" are among the most self-lacerating songs Lennon ever wrote.
Required to record three songs owned by publisher Morris Levy as the result of a bizarre lawsuit over "Come Together", Lennon pieced together the all-covers album Rock 'n' Roll between 1973 and 1975. As drunken, phoned-in contractual-obligation records go, it's pretty entertaining-- he clearly adores the 50s-era rockers he revives here, and his signature high-note rasp makes "Stand By Me" and "Just Because" sound genuinely desperate. Pity about that reggae version of "Do You Wanna Dance", though. (The bonus tracks from the previous reissue are gone again.)
In early 1975, Lennon reunited with Ono, and essentially dropped out of public life for five years. The two of them resurfaced with 1980's Double Fantasy, on which they started a project of seeing if they could make pop music whose central subject wasn't romantic love, exactly, but mature domestic partnership and its particular joys and tensions. Lennon and Ono alternate songs, usually as conceptual pairs-- his specific "Dear Yoko" followed by her universalized "Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him", his harrowed "I'm Losing You" seguing directly into her weary response "I'm Moving On". Some of Ono's songs are still pretty ear-gouging on their own, but the point of the album, as with the Plastic Ono Band singles of a decade earlier, is how the couple play off one another. The new reissue pairs the original album with Double Fantasy Stripped Down, a entirely unnecessary new mix of the whole thing.
Lennon was murdered a few weeks after the release of Double Fantasy; his half of the identically constructed Milk and Honey is mostly casual performances of Double Fantasy-era songs he figured he might finish later, which means it's got a sense of looseness and fun that had been missing from his post-Beatles work. (The countoff for "I Don't Wanna Face It": "Un! Deux! Eins zwei hickle pickle!") 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.
On top of the eight album reissues, there are three new reconfigurations of Lennon's solo material. Signature Box includes all of the above, minus Double Fantasy Stripped Down, plus two extra discs: "Singles" (the Lennon sides of five non-album Plastic Ono Band 45s, and the negligible 1975 B-side "Move Over Ms. L."), and Home Tapes, a bunch of outtakes and demos that somehow didn't appear on 1998's John Lennon Anthology box (highlight: an off-the-cuff home demo of "Nobody Told Me"). Not included: the early John-and-Yoko experimental albums, Live Peace in Toronto 1969, and another six or seven discs' worth of posthumous releases.
A small handful of those missing recordings do show up, however, on Gimme Some Truth, an otherwise superfluous four-disc set that hits "shuffle" on the catalogue and sorts it into discs called "Working Class Hero" (social-consciousness songs), "Woman" (love songs), "Borrowed Time" (kind of songs about self-doubt except for the ones that aren't) and "Roots" (the entire Rock 'n' Roll album, plus a few other songs, but not the ones that were on the 1975 semi-bootleg called Roots).
Finally, there's Power to the People: The Hits, a single-disc (or CD + DVD) introduction whose title isn't quite accurate-- Top 5 single "Nobody Told Me" is absent, non-hits "Gimme Some Truth" and "Jealous Guy" are present. ("Happy Xmas [War Is Over]" is, conveniently, right near the end of the sequence; there's nothing from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Some Time in New York City or Milk and Honey.) Song-for-song, it's pretty terrific, but it's incoherent as an album. The Lennon it presents is a team player who lost his team and tried to replace it with a partnership, a great singer who trusted his voice so little that he tried to drown it in reverb, a persona prone to alternating fits of indignant rage and abject, dreamy apology. Of course he deserves better, but there's no way to give it to him: He asked for ideals, but he demanded the truth.
