Album Review: John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band

John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band

May 7, 2019

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 1

 

I recently read a book that reminded me somewhat of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. Tara Westover’s memoir Educated has become the darling of book clubs across the United States, and frankly I can’t for the life of me figure out why. Was she raised by a weird family? You bet, they were a pack of real weirdos – but there are plenty of weird families out there. Was she homeschooled? Well, yeah – but that isn’t all that unique, I know plenty of families who homeschool their kids. Was her brother abusive? Horrendously so, and I do not in any way mean to minimize the impact that abuse had on her life – but regrettably, that is a story that isn’t too uncommon either. Was her family really all that socially isolated? No, of course not, – she makes them out to be freakin’ hermits, but they had indoor plumbing, electricity, TV, and even the internet. They bought groceries at the local grocery store, went to church with their neighbors every Sunday, and she even performed at the Worm Creek Opera House in Preston, Idaho, where every local celebrity in northern Cache Valley has put their talent on display for the world to see at one time or another. So she got a Master’s and a Ph.D. from Cambridge – impressive, true, but plenty of people from disadvantaged backgrounds get advanced degrees – it is only academic snobbery that might cause you to feel that the Cambridge angle makes the story a little more impressive. Not to make this a hardship pissing contest, but I’d say Becoming Ms. Burton, written by a former drug addict and prostitute who went on to establish halfway houses for formerly incarcerated women, is a far better story of overcoming a considerably more abusive background, and her book ends with Ms. Burton going on to help literally hundreds of other former inmates return to society after making a huge difference in their lives, while Tara Westover went on to…write a book and make a ton of money being the Book Club Flavor of the Month. I’m no fan of Educated – Westover’s hardships aren’t all that unique, and unlike Susan Burton, she doesn’t use overcoming them as a springboard for helping anyone else. Educated is all about Tara Westover, and seems to me to be self-absorbed in a way that a book like Becoming Ms. Burton isn’t.

And when I thought about it, I was surprised to realize that my reaction to Educated mirrors my reaction to Plastic Ono Band fairly closely. Like Tara Westover, John Lennon experienced hardship in his young life, and again, I am not minimizing that hardship, but my point is it is hardly rare, unprecedented, or unique. Yes Lennon’s father abandoned him as a young child – like, unfortunately, literally millions of fathers have abandoned their children across the miserable, sordid history of the human race. Yes, his mother was killed when he was a teen – but again, there are plenty of people out there who lost a mother in their formative years, it happens. I’d tentatively argue that the young Lennon had some advantages that many children who lose their parents don’t have – his Aunt Mimi took him in and gave him a solid, upper middle-class British upbringing. In my mind’s eye whenever I think of John’s Aunt Mary Elizabeth “Mimi” Smith I can’t help but picture Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “bouquet”) from the BBC’s Keeping Up Appearances, and she even kind of looked like Hyacinth:

 

However uptight and annoying she might have been, though, she gave John a good home, familial stability and structure, and love. Lots of kids who lose their parents don’t get that, and while the pain of being abandoned by a father and losing a mother as a teen is very real, and has a definite impact on a young person, in Lennon’s case that loss was tempered somewhat by his aunt’s support. Things could have been far worse for young Master Lennon. He went on to become rich, famous, and universally beloved – which of course has its pressures most people can never understand, but I generally have little sympathy for someone who works to become a celebrity then whines about the price that must be paid for it. Nobody forced John Lennon to become a superstar, and if he didn’t count the cost before he made that decision, well, that’s kind of his fault.

What does any of that have to do with Plastic Ono Band? All of it has everything to do with Plastic Ono Band, and why I don’t care for it. For almost fifty years critics have been falling all over themselves praising the album as a masterpiece of self-revelation from an artist in pain. I want to be very clear, I do not doubt the burning reality of the pain of parental loss, but there are some things that trouble me about how it is dealt with on the album – for one, it is a pain that was hardly unique to Lennon, particularly in those post-war years (you need look no farther than Roger Waters to see that). And it is dealt with in a particularly self-absorbed manner with seldom so much as a flicker of recognition that the artist is not unique in this pain. There is only one person in pain on Planet Lennon. Maybe two, every so often he thinks to mention Yoko.  Lennon sings as if he is the only person who has ever felt what he is feeling – and while it is true for some aspects of his life experiences, it is not true of his formative years.

But it isn’t the job of a wannabe music critic to determine the presence or intensity of the pain an artist has experienced; it is the job of a critic to evaluate the artistic merits of the expression of said pain in song, and I would emphasize this: the fact that true pain is being expressed is completely irrelevant to the artistic merit of the work under consideration.  Just because an artist expresses her or his inner turmoil and anguish, it does not follow that it automatically makes for great art. Even if Lennon’s pain was in fact exceptional, he sang about it in largely unexceptional ways.  Besides, too much has been made of Plastic Ono Band being an expression of pure psychological pain – only a few songs actually deal with that, a number of songs on the album are largely unrelated to John wearing his pain on his sleeve. The album has an unearned reputation for being the ultimate aural expression of a soul in agony.

Which would be forgivable if Plastic Ono Band had likable songs, but for the most part it doesn’t. It starts strong – I find “Mother” genuinely moving, it is the one song on the album that in my opinion communicates pure, unbridled pain in a way that other people can relate to, and “Mother you had me, but I never had you” is a line both brilliant and haunting. There is true anguish in the “primal screams” that punctuate the fade out, and I connect with that. Sure, it’s a downer, but it’s also a great song, and to my ears one of only two on the album. I kind of feel like critics let the first song represent the whole album when reviewing it, when in fact I find it fairly unrepresentative of almost everything that follows. I’d give Plastic Ono Band a great review if everything that followed was on the level of “Mother” – but hardly anything else is.

I mean, here’s the thing, Plastic Ono Band is supposed to be this cathartic exorcism of all of Lennon’s demons, an explosion of all of his sorrow and pain and fear caused by the rejection from his parents growing up, but much of the album is pretty boring really.  It’s not the gripping, emotionally draining experience I was led to believe it would be.   Even “God”, Lennon’s much ballyhooed proclamation of independence from everything he ever believed in, is fairly unremarkable and tedious – and pretty disingenuous in terms of its final message (I’ll get to that in a minute). “God is a concept by which we measure our pain” – what does that even mean? He thinks it’s so profound he “says it again”, but what is he really saying? Is he saying that the concept of God is how we know how much we hurt inside? Can’t be, plenty of lifelong atheists feel plenty of pain in their lives, the concept of God is unnecessary for the perception of pain, and is not required for an assessment of its magnitude. Is he saying the concept of God exists solely as a salve to the pain we experience in life, a psychological crutch some religious people lean on in times of hardship? Again, can’t be, plenty of people who aren’t in pain remain firm believers in a God of some kind. So what exactly is the phrase attempting to convey? Personally, I think it is nothing more than pretentious pseudo-profundity – it sounds deep, but dig just a little ways into the statement and it is hard to tease out much meaning. The quote is all form and no substance. But it sounds sacrilegious, and that’s all some people need to like it.

After that rather weak attempt at a quotable moment on the album, Lennon launches into a litany of things he doesn’t believe in with a dramatic piano pounding away behind him, listing Kennedy and the Bible and the Gita and kings and Zimmerman and so forth. Ho hum. Who cares what he did or didn’t believe in? Personally, I don’t believe in boring attempts at listing all the stuff you don’t believe in anymore. Besides, he forgot to mention Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. “I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny…I don’t believe in Kris Kringle…”. I can actually hear him singing that in my mind. And “I don’t believe in tarot”?  What kind of idiot ever did in the first place?  Then we conclude with “I don’t believe in Beatles/(long pause)/I just believe in me”. Well good for you, John, you want a medal or a Milkbone or something? I’ll get you a smiley face sticker or a star. Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back there. Thing is, at the time you also believed in Dr. Arthur Janov and Allen Klein, and would go on to believe in George McGovern and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin…Johnny boy, don’t give me that crap about how you stopped believing in anything except yourself and Yoko. If anything, you had become even more gullible and easily manipulated than you had been before. “I just believe in me/Yoko and me/And that’s reality”. “The dream is over”. Whatever. I’m sorry, but I cannot take “God” seriously as a manifesto of self-determination and freedom from the heroes that had failed Lennon, when he merely went on to worship more heroes who ultimately failed him, and when he subsequently embraced other philosophies that he eventually rejected. For that reason “God” fails as a personal artistic statement, and without the pretension that has been built up around it over the years, it really isn’t that interesting to listen to. It isn’t all that engaging musically or melodically, and lyrically it’s totally overhyped, so what does it have to offer really?

“Mother” and “God” anchor the two ends of the album, the piffle that is “My Mummy’s Dead” at the end of the album notwithstanding. The other song that is generally considered a standout is “Working Class Hero”, and I also consider this one a true classic, easily one of the best songs of Lennon’s solo career. For about the only time on the album Lennon peels back his blinders and sees others sharing the same pain he feels, a rare acknowledgement that much of what impinged on young Lennon also impinged on his fellows. Unlike most songs on the album, “Working Class Hero” isn’t constricted by John’s experiences, it is about the systems and structures in society that misshape young souls into the cold, uncaring monsters many of them become. Parental neglect, schoolyard bullying (although young Lennon himself was reputed to have done more bullying than being bullied), a cruel and misguided educational system, the dog eat dog nature of the working world, all of these things twist and bend maturing youth into “peasants” who are “drugged on religion and sex and TV”. If more songs on the album had the expanded vision and shared humanity of “Working Class Hero”, the album would have worked better for me, but for the most part the album is just John, John, John, me, me, me.

“Hold on John, John hold on, it’s gonna be all right”. “Hold On” is an incredibly slight song considering its inclusion on an album so widely considered to be a harrowing listening experience. The lyrics are as vapid in their way as anything McCartney was putting out around the same time. The same is true of “Remember”, with its pounding piano and shallow “Don’t you worry” chorus, and “Remember the fifth of November” ending that probably left most Americans scratching their heads (if you don’t get it, google Guy Fawkes). The same with “Isolation” – it just isn’t all that interesting as a song, the lyrics aren’t that much to write home about, it’s got this ponderous piano part with a tiny hint of a jazz lick in a limp attempt to spice it up a bit, it really doesn’t have much going for it. Then there’s the bland “Look at Me”: “Look at Me/What am I s’posed to be?”…yeah I don’t know what you are supposed to be, but what you’re being is boring as hell. There are an awful lot of mediocre moments on this would-be confessional masterpiece where there just isn’t much interesting going on. Take all of these songs and throw in “My Mummy’s Dead”, and you’ve got an album with an awful lot of dead weight. It’s surprising that an album that garners so much breathless and enthusiastic praise has so much filler on it.

“Well Well Well” is quite the overrated rocker in my book. It’s got a mildly interesting guitar riff, but not interesting enough to support its seemingly endless repetition in the song, and the beat just kind of plods along. It is a song that aspires to heaviness, but it takes more than a beat that stomps around in musical jackboots to make a song heavy. Yeah, sure, the guitar has a real nasty, dirty tone, that matches the mood of the song perfectly, but that doesn’t make the riff interesting. And the lyrics – so he took his loved one to a big field to watch the English sky and just sat nervous feeling guilty without knowing why – so what? What’s the point of this song? If John shouting “well” over and over again gets you going, good for you, but I find his shouting repetitive, annoying, ridiculous and tiresome. Nor do I much care for “I Found Out” – the guitar has a similar dirty, abrasive tone, and it moves better than “Well Well Well”, but I really can’t warm up to it. And like “God”, it is hard to take Lennon seriously as he lists all the things he “found out” about when you know he would just fall for more of the same types of things in the years to come. Evidently he didn’t “find out” nearly to the extent he thought he did. Even if you remove the song from its context, it just isn’t a song I really ever feel the need to listen to – the nastiness in Lennon’s voice, the sneering contempt for those who haven’t “found out” what he has, it all grates on my nerves really. You’re not as smart as you think you are, Mr. “I found out the Maharishi was a shyster but oh look there’s Arthur Janov and his amazing primal scream therapy”. He’s got a lot of damn gall being so dismissive of other people when he was so easily taken in by charlatans himself time and time again in his life.

Then there’s “Love”. Pretty? I suppose, but not remarkably so. Lyrically it isn’t much to get excited about: “Love is real/Real is love…Love is touch/Touch is love…Love is needing/To be loved”. The reversal of the words in the first two lines of each verse (Love is real/Real is love) isn’t especially clever or meaningful. Lyrically this one could have been a lot more inspired, a lot more focused. I mean, I get that it is supposed to be simple, but I expect more from someone who built much of his reputation on his lyrical incisiveness. That said, he sings with an uncharacteristic vulnerability and tenderness on this song. While I don’t think most of the songs on the album are all that great, I do have to give Lennon some credit, it is probably his most diverse album vocally, with both his most violent and most gentle vocals ever put to tape. With the songwriting brilliance of Lennon/McCartney grabbing so much attention, it is easy to forget that part of their appeal is that both of them were so good at communicating emotion in their singing. Among many other things, the Beatles were the most emotive band of the Sixties, which is part of what allowed them to connect with an entire generation (and all the generations that have followed so far). When he isn’t boring you to death, Lennon is as vocally emotive as ever on Plastic Ono Band. But if he was going to make a grand emotional statement, he really needed a stronger set of songs to do it with. Other than “Mother” and “Working Class Hero”, there really aren’t too many songs that are all that memorable on the album.

On the whole, the fans seem to share that assessment, no matter what the critics say. Sure, the album was in the Top 10 in both the US and the UK on release, but the first solo John Lennon album after the Beatles broke up was going to go top 10 no matter what. That it didn’t hit #1, and that it never reached platinum, tells you a lot about how fans felt about it. By comparison the decidedly (and perhaps intentionally) mediocre McCartney spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard chart and went double platinum, and All Things Must Pass spent seven weeks at #1 and went six times platinum. To the extent that sales reflect fans’ assessment of the first releases by the ex-Beatles, Plastic Ono Band made a very poor showing indeed in comparison to the others. Not that the fans always get it right – but I think this is one time they did. The comparison to George’s first major solo album is instructive – while Lennon comes across as insular, self-absorbed, and socially stunted on his solo album, George’s vision is expansive, relatable, and engaging (Paul was mostly just stumbling around trying to figure out how to deal with not being a Beatle anymore on his solo debut). For all of the unearned praise Plastic Ono Band gets, All Things Must Pass is the truer and more enduring artistic statement. John mostly bores us with simple little songs, some of which have to do with his troubled background but some not, and many are hardly worth the trouble to listen to, while George went epic and came up with two solid LPs of winners (I usually just try and pretend that third “Apple Jam” LP doesn’t exist). George comes across as a thoughtful, visionary artist – John kind of comes across as a self-obsessed whiner. Again, I don’t doubt for a moment that Lennon’s pain is real, but then relatively few of the songs on the album address that pain, and when they do, there is nothing particularly revelatory about how that pain is addressed, with the two notable exceptions mentioned earlier.  For the most part, he talks about his pain in a very ordinary and unremarkable way.  Lennon was capable of far better than that.

When did Lennon become such a boring lyricist? He even notes on the album he’d earned a reputation as the “Dreamweaver”, but little of that lyrical prowess is evident on the album. There’s no clever wordplay, unless you want to count “Hold on John, John, hold on, it’s gonna be all right” (I don’t). Where is the startling imagery, the novel descriptions, the poetic brilliance that characterized his best work with The Beatles? It’s nowhere to be found on this album. But, you say, this was intended to be a confessional album where Lennon put his tortured soul on display for the world. So what? He’d done that before in ways that were lyrically impressive, clever and engaging, on “Help!” and “I’m a Loser” and “Nowhere Man” and “I’m so Tired”. Lennon’s lyrics on this album are fairly cliched, spare, and uninspired, with the exception of “Mother and “Working Class Hero”.

The production is similarly stripped down, at most piano, guitar, bass, drums, and often considerably less than that. I’ve seen reviewers claim that with Plastic Ono Band John proved that the true power in rock is stripping it down to to barest elements, but personally I find the arrangements quite flaccid and the playing unremarkable. Take away the vocals and there is nothing interesting about the musical backing of “Hold On”or “Look at Me” or “Remember”. This is probably the lightest touch production Phil Spector’s name was ever associated with, but apparently he wasn’t around for most of the recording, so we get John’s “let’s do this with as little effort as possible” production approach. There’s little impressive musicianship of any kind, I find the playing rough and lacking in spark or ingenuity. While some reviewers find that the nakedness of the arrangements supports the alleged starkness of the songs, I find the playing as uninteresting as most of the lyrics on the album, and in that sense the production is a good fit for the songs.

I bought this album in my early teens after reading what a burning bonfire of artistic pain it was, and even teenage me recognized it didn’t live up to its reputation. Thirty years of going back to it periodically hasn’t changed that assessment. Too many weak songs, too little inspired lyricism, too many unengaging melodies. It isn’t nearly the manifesto of a tortured artistic soul it has been advertised to be. Lennon’s reputation from the Beatles props the reputation of the album up – who doesn’t want to like the smart Beatle’s confessional album? But if I am honest with myself, it doesn’t live up to even half the hype. If you like Plastic Ono Band, good for you, I’m probably not going to change your mind with this review. Despite the album being so Lennon-centric, there are likely even a few of you who found it helped you through a rough patch in your life.  But I ask, what about the album exactly earns the praise it’s been given all these years? In my estimation, not the lyrics, not the songs themselves, not the production or musicianship, and above all not the concept – Lennon turns his gaze inward and emerges with little that connects with the rest of us. It is a limited, constricted, claustrophobic little album that suffers from severe tunnel vision. I hope at least he got a little catharsis out of making it, because neither I nor the legions of other Beatles fans who don’t really care for it get much out of listening to it. A lot of you are probably saying to yourselves I just don’t get the album, but there are plenty of Beatles fans in my camp, and we might not all be wrong.

However, if you think Plastic Ono Band is the bee’s knees, try reading Educated.  You’ll probably love it.

P.S. If for some reason you insist on listening to this album, I’d recommend the 2000 remix.  As is the case with all of Lennon’s solo albums, those remixes from the early 2000s are a substantial improvement in sound quality and sound definiton over the original mixes.

 

“The level of his pain was enormous … He was almost completely nonfunctional. He couldn’t leave the house, he could hardly leave his room. … This was someone the whole world adored, and it didn’t change a thing. At the center of all that fame and wealth and adulation was just a lonely little kid.”
– Arthur Janov, on Lennon’s psychological state

 

“I’m not nearly calloused enough to say anything snide about that, I truly am sorry for the pain he felt. But that doesn’t obligate me to think Plastic Ono Band is a great album”. – Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews