Authors: Ken Bielen Ben Urich
collected and released, and certainly nothing that could be turned into pop
music hits on the contemporary charts. Clearly, the well of material from
Lennon’s dormant years was dry, and only the most zealous fan would be
interested in yet another demo variation of some fragmentary, incomplete
song that was barely more than a couplet set to a guitar riff or piano run.
It was expected that the industry of Lennon releases would be relegated to
reissues and the repackaging of previously issued materials, with a collection
of the best of
The Lost Lennon Tapes
being the last release of “new” Lennon
material. Such, however, was not to be the case.
Lennon
The fourth overview of Lennon’s post-Beatles output is the most exten-
sive, encompassing four CDs and entitled, simply,
Lennon.
Of special inter-
est is the inclusion of several live tracks, including a sampling of cuts from
Live Peace in Toronto,
the Fillmore show with Frank Zappa, the One to One
concert, and the appearance with Elton John. The only album present in its
entirety is
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,
and, while personal taste may mark
some disagreements with the remaining selections, it succeeds in its goal as a
fairly comprehensive summary. Some quibbles include that “Move over Ms.
L” is absent, while “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him” is present;
106 The Words and Music of John Lennon
and, as with all of the other collections, none of his experimental work with
Ono and none of his studio work in collaboration with others is included.
PLayground Psychotics
In the early 1990s and near the end of his life, Frank Zappa embarked on
a project of remastering and remixing his entire recorded output for digital
issue, in addition to continuing to compose and record new material. He also
reached back into his archived recordings to digitize and put his stamp on a
strong collection of live recordings from throughout his career.
Included in this effort was Zappa’s 1971 Fillmore East appearance with
Lennon and Ono, released by them in 1972 as part of the bonus disc making
up their
Sometime in New York City
album. Zappa released a two-CD album
consisting of a variety of live music recordings and audio-vérité conversational
snippets called
Playground Psychotics
that included his mixes of the material
Lennon and Ono had released 20 years earlier. Because the performance was
apparently a free-flowing jam, after Lennon’s excellent performance of the song
“Well,” Zappa broke the numbers up differently than the earlier release and
gave some of the numbers different titles, sardonically naming one “A Small
Eternity with Yoko Ono.” Zappa’s versions are cleaner and more balanced
than Lennon’s, and the breaks make more sense musically. As such, they are
the preferred versions. Ono’s CD reissue of the
Some Time in New York City
album omits the jam entirely, apparently acquiescing to Zappa’s judgments.
onobox
In 1992, a six-CD set retrospective of Ono’s recorded work, with and
without Lennon, was released under the title
Onobox.
This set includes seve-
ral previously unreleased recordings, including an entire abandoned album
from 1974 called
A Story.
Some of the previously unissued material has
contributions from Lennon.
The
Onobox
set has two more uses of Lennon’s voice beyond what has
previously been discussed. The work opens with “No Bed for Beatle John,”
with the brief added beginning of Lennon saying “Yoko’s box.” Later in
the collection, a similar voice introduction from Lennon has been added
to “Walking on Thin Ice.” Lennon states, “[I] think you just got your first
number one, Yoko.”
Ono also used Lennon’s voice on her contribution, “Georgia Stone,” to a
1994 album honoring John Cage titled
A Chance Operation.
Lennon Legend
A fifth Lennon retrospective collection,
Lennon Legend,
was the first
single CD collection to include material from
Milk and Honey,
and the
Gone from This Place 107
first designed solely for CD. Perhaps partially cashing in on the renewed
Beatlemania as a result of The Beatles’
Anthology,
this compendium pres-
ents 20 cuts, and, once again, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” and
“Cold Turkey” are excluded. “Love,” “Stand by Me,” and “Jealous Guy”
are back, with four instead of six of Lennon’s
Double Fantasy
numbers,
as were on the previous collection. The slots are replaced with two tracks
from
Milk and Honey.
“Move over Ms. L” is not in the collection either,
but there is the intriguing addition of “Working Class Hero,” significant
in that it was growing as a common phrase and attribute in the expanding
Lennon mythos.
LiverPooL sound coLLage
Paul McCartney presented an art exhibit and prepared a set of sound col-
lages and looped tapes to accompany the event. The recordings were subse-
quently released as
Liverpool Sound Collage,
and Lennon can be recognizably
heard on two of the pieces, “Plastic Beetle” and “Made Up.” Both tracks use
short snippets of conversational dialogue or interviews recorded during the
Beatles era.
covered #1
Q
magazine released two different CDs of then-contemporary groups
doing versions of Lennon’s songs late in 2005. The occasion was an issue
commemorating the 25th anniversary of Lennon’s killing, or, alternatively,
celebrating what would have been his 65th birthday. On
Covered #1,
the
group Elbow performs “Working Class Hero” and ingeniously incorporates
an excerpt from one of Lennon’s last interviews wherein he proclaims that
the social role of an artist is to express “what we all feel, not to tell people
how to feel ... not as a preacher, not as a leader,” as the lyrics ironically intone
“just follow me.”
The BeaTles anThology
As
The Lost Lennon Tapes
radio series ended in 1992, fans expected a CD
release of the most significant recordings unearthed for the project. But
instead, rumors began that a long-delayed documentary and archive project
titled
The Long and Winding Road
was at last underway. This would be The
Beatles telling their own story, and eventually became the
Anthology
project.
As the 1980s came to a close, two projects commenced that would have
far-reaching repercussions for the continuing legacy of Lennon’s work. One
was the projected release of an album of never legally released Beatle tracks
called
Sessions;
the other was the radio series
The Lost Lennon Tapes,
discussed
in the previous chapter.
108 The Words and Music of John Lennon
The recordings on
Sessions
were neither jams nor unfinished fragments, nor
a rehash of the U.S. version of
Rarities,
but were completed numbers that,
for a variety of reasons, never were issued. The album was pulled from legal
release at the last minute and, of course, became a best-selling bootleg, pre-
sumably influencing the Beatles’
Anthology
project. A roaring performance
of Lennon leading the band at full throttle through a stellar cover version of
Little Willie John’s “Leave My Kitten Alone” was even selected for release as
a single. Other obscure Lennon tracks, known only to those who collected
bootlegged recordings, were to have been included. Fortunately, everything
that would have been on
Sessions
did end up eventually in the
Anthology
collections.
Although this book does not cover Lennon’s work as a Beatle, the
Anthology
project and its resulting publicity sparked a Beatles revival in the mid-1990s,
renewed interest in the solo recordings of all four, and had a major impact
on the reissuing of Lennon’s posthumous materials in particular, and on his
posthumous career in general. It is in this light that the
Anthology
project will
be examined.
The first salvo was the 1994 release of The Beatles’
Live at the BBC.
This
CD collection features 56 live but in the studio tracks recorded for broadcast
by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The tracks were recorded
from late 1962 through 1965, and over half the songs did not have a coun-
terpart in the Beatles’ officially released body of work. Most are covers, and
Lennon lives up to his reputation as a rave-up rocker on several excellent cuts.
Brief exchanges of dialogue were included where Lennon’s humor shines.
More newsworthy was the fact that The Threetles—as fans took to calling
McCartney, Harrison, and Starr—would be making new music together for
the documentary. It was then disclosed that Ono had given some of Lennon’s
uncompleted recordings to The Threetles to see if they could finish them,
thereby creating new Beatles recordings, of a sort.1 Titles varied, but most
sources said they had four songs to complete. They met and worked infre-
quently over a 15-month period in 1994 and 1995, completing two tracks,
making progress on a third, and deciding to forgo work on a fourth.2 Because
of their clearly unique nature in The Beatles’ output and their origins as post-
Beatle Lennon compositions, they are discussed here.
By the mid-1990s, the project had become the
Anthology
series, and the
surviving Beatles released three two-disc sets of unreleased finished tracks,
outtakes and performances that spanned the time from their early days to
the band’s breakup. The first two volumes of the series opened with tracks
whose foundations were two of Lennon’s 1970s home demo recordings.
Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr added vocals and instru-
ments to Lennon’s demos of “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” which appear
on
Anthology 1
and
Anthology 2,
respectively. Assisting in the production of
both songs was Jeff Lynne, a founding member of Electric Light Orchestra,
and a member, with George Harrison, of The Traveling Wilburys. Lynne
Gone from This Place 109
had also previously helped produce Harrison’s
Cloud Nine
album with its
Beatles-themed parody number “When We Was Fab.” It seems not to have
dawned on anyone that the sound Lynne and Harrison had created for par-
ody was now somehow perceived as the way the reconstituted Beatles were
supposed to sound.
Lennon’s demo of “Free as a Bird” consists of a vocal with his piano
accompaniment. The melody was completely developed, but the lyrics were
not. McCartney, Harrison, and Starr added vocals, guitars, piano, bass, and
drums in 1994 and altered the arrangement. The world will never know
the final form Lennon may have released the song in, if any, had he lived,
and in that light it is difficult to evaluate the recording with the contribu-
tions of his band mates. The issued production has a slow, almost plodding
rhythm, attempting to capture a dreamlike quality. The track purposely and
methodically gives each of the remaining Beatles a chance in the spotlight.
McCartney sings the first bridge. Harrison sings the second, abbreviated
bridge and follows it with a slide guitar solo. Both McCartney and Harrison
seem to restrain their vocals to match better with the quality of the recording
of Lennon’s vocal that sounds thin and compressed to the point of distrac-
tion. After the false ending, Starr’s drums come to the fore before the song
closes with a George Formby–like banjolele and a snippet of Lennon speak-
ing Formby’s tag line, “turned out nice again,” played backward (though the
single version seems to just be Lennon saying, “uh, John Lennon,” and not
backward at all).
The subject of the song is a freedom that has evaporated. It could be a
freedom that was felt because of the narrator’s involvement in a romantic
relationship, or it could be a freedom that resulted from his being in a more
expansive surrounding (social or physical) in harmony. Harrison’s slide guitar
and some of the backing vocal harmonies are the most distinctive and suc-
cessful parts of the recording.
The song was one of the compositions Lennon had decided to use in the
proposed musical play
The Ballad of John and Yoko
and dated from 1977–
1978.3 Lennon had not written much in the way of lyrics. For the bridge,
his demo recording has no lyrics after “the life that we once knew”; he fills
in the melody with vocal sounds but no words. The lyrics McCartney sings,
“where did we lose the touch that seemed to mean so much?” could relate
to his relationship with Lennon, might be commentary on the dissolution of
The Beatles, or could be addressed to an imaginary lover. With all the public-
ity around the group’s
Anthology,
a clever promotional video, and 25 years