John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band
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"The dream is over." John Lennon Plastic Ono Band
John Lennon: vocals, guitar, piano, principle songwriter
Klaus Voorman: bass
Ringo Starr: drums
Guests: Billy Preston, piano on “God;” Yoko Ono, “wind”
“Produced” by Phil Spector, produced by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
art by Dan Richter
1970 must’ve been a crazy year to be a Beatles fan. Paul McCartney was in his Reputation era. George Harrison was having the time of his life, “My Sweet Lord” was inescapable. Ringo was just being Ringo, the best was yet to come for him.
In order to understand why John Lennon felt the way he did and what the hell he was doing in 1970, we have to pull back.
“...from ’65 on I was sort of vaguely looking for somewhere to go, but I didn’t have the nerve to really step in the boat by myself and push the boat off.”
quoted from: David Sheff with G. Barry Golson, editor. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (1981.)
John was slowly emotionally checking out. He wants something more than the Beatles, but wasn’t sure what that looked like yet. Paul took over as de facto frontman. John didn’t take kindly to this, even though he wants to explore a life beyond the Beatles. (Classic John hypocrisy right there!) He microdosed in the form of writing a book and starring in How I Won The War, then threw himself into the Transcendental Meditation that George and Pattie brought into the fray. After Brian Epstein passed away, the Maharishi became the Beatles’ new “father figure,” and at the top of 1968, they visited his ashram in Rishikesh. “Look At Me” was one of many revealing songs John wrote at the ashram. He was struggling with insomnia, he wanted to die, and he’d fallen in love with Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono.
“...when I met (Yoko) and then fell in love, it was ‘My God! This is different from anything before. This is something other...It’s more than gold, it’s more than everything. It’s more than. This is something indescribable.”
quoted from: David Sheff with G. Barry Golson, editor. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (1981.)
Outside the noise of Beatlemania, John suddenly saw what his life could be, and just couldn’t go back to what it was before. Thus, John left his wife Cynthia (a very public divorce ensued) and further checked out from the Beatles.
“That old gang of mine. That’s all over. When I met Yoko is when you meet your first woman and you leave the guys at the bar...Maybe some guys like to do it every Friday night or something and continue that relationship with the boys, but once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old friends.”
quoted from: David Sheff with G. Barry Golson, editor. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (1981.)
Why did people respond to Yoko the way they did? Why do they still respond this way now?
I unpacked all of Yoko’s baggage across two podcast episodes I wrote last summer. In short: she’s a severe, uncompromising personality and a complex character. She screamed. I don’t know about you, but I find it grating. And she was this strange, older Japanese woman who’d stolen a precious Beatle away. In this world full of people with fresh memories of World War II, Yoko was called “dragon lady,” a “Jap,” and much worse. For all of these reasons and then some, the general public was just not up to the challenge of Yoko, let alone with John. What happens when you try to split up a couple in their honeymoon phase? They dig their heels in. John and Yoko absolutely courted the controversy. In retrospect, John said, “We’ve learned to come in sort of gently. We can’t come smashing in like, ‘Hi! It’s John and Yoko naked in bed with flags and Yoko screaming and him playing wild guitar in the back.’ We’re just coming in through the back door.”
They did everything together. They lived together, ate together, and went to the bathroom together. Every solo press appearance became a couples’ appearance, they used heroin together, and sometimes those two things crossed over. The couple had fully crossed into each others’ worlds; Yoko started attending Beatles sessions, and John participated in her art. Both had attachment issues, which made all easier to forge a bond around a cavalcade of misfortune.
Quite plainly, 1968 was one of the worst years of John’s life. Some of it he brought upon himself, some of it inflicted upon him. I believe this year triggered the avalanche that lead to Plastic Ono Band. While the media were obsessed with John’s divorce and his weird new girlfriend, London police were obsessed with busting pop stars for using drugs. It started with Donovan in 1966, moved up through the Rolling Stones in ’67, and had reached the Fab Four by ’68. When Ringo’s apartment was raided in October, John and Yoko were charged with possession. (Of marijuana, I have to note. Ironic, considering they were on heroin at the time.) The drug bust was a PR nightmare not even an unhinged Derek Taylor press release could fix. Yoko was also embroiled in a messy custody battle with her ex-husband over their daughter. Yoko was off heroin at the time of her arrest, but the stress of two legal battles caused her to miscarry a child with John.
Another media shitstorm came with Two Virgins; carried through their wedding in Gibraltar near Spain, and peaks when the newlyweds turn their honeymoon into a joint publicity stunt-performance art piece.
The Bed-Ins seem silly by our current standards of activism. (Even I find it unbelievable that they had the maid change the sheets!) But you have to see the Bed-In through a 1969 lens to understand it. Yoko came from fluxus; an art movement that was the sort-of son of dada. Dada was a response to World War I. These artists thought that, if the horrors of war were “rational” and “good,” they’d counter that with irrationality and randomness. You can understand why children of World War II (John was born in a bombed-out Liverpool and Yoko watched the bombing of Tokyo from her bedroom window) would respond to this concept. Like the Yippies performed deliberate irrationality as activism, fluxus was born out of randomness. It’s art of the moment, that which can never be replicated. John and Yoko thought that, if constant coverage of Vietnam acts as a commercial for war, why not make a commercial for peace?
The Get Back project rolls on in the background, becoming the needlessly laborious Let It Be. John felt that Paul kept the Beatles going for his own sake – and there might have been a grain of truth in that? We see it in the Get Back documentary when George quit the band. Paul broke down in tears; he was terrified of not being a Beatle anymore. Then there was the manager thing. Apple Corps was a disaster; the Fab Four were much better artists than businessmen. John met Allen Klein through participating in the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. Him, George, and Ringo wanted Klein to manage the Beatles, while Paul wanted his new in-laws the Eastmans. Were the Eastmans and Paul right to be suspicious of Klein? 1000%! But the more the others said “no” to the Eastmans, the more Paul said “yes.” Just like the world saying “no” to John and Yoko only made them say “yes” more. Meanwhile, the Beatles’ music publisher, Dick James, went behind their backs and sold his shares in Northern Songs to ATV. This only further complicates business matters.
Somehow, the Fab put their differences aside long enough to make Abbey Road. A few weeks before its release, John and Yoko were in a car crash in Scotland. As Julian was in the car with them, their negligence inflamed issues between John and Cynthia. Yoko was bedridden from her injuries, and unfortunately miscarried a second time.
In September, after John and Yoko had recuperated, they were tapped for a rock-and-roll revival festival in Toronto. Chuck Berry and Little Richard would be there – as would lots of drugs – so John slammed together a Plastic Ono Band with Klaus Voorman, Eric Clapton, and Yoko. The set was bonkers. (Sorry, Yoko, I much prefer your singing on Approximately Infinite Universe!)
This Is Plastic Ono Band
So, what was the Plastic Ono Band, anyway?
Basically, the Plastic Ono Band was an imaginary band; the extension of an idea Yoko had for one of her avant-garde concerts. Anyone could be in the Plastic Ono Band, even you, dear reader! The concept was in keeping with fluxus art. It’s art of the mind, with plenty of audience participation. It also played nicely with John’s want to not get stuck in another fucking band. Or worse, a supergroup! (I imagine he got an earful from Clapton about Blind Faith!) The Plastic Ono Band was whatever John wanted it to be. This extended to the “band’s” ad campaigns and physical art pieces. After the car crash, John and Yoko sent out little plastic machines to radio stations to “play” music in their place.
It seems the Plastic Ono Band epiphany was the final push John needed to leave the Beatles’ nest. Before flying out for Toronto, John told Allen Klein he wanted a divorce from the band. The guys agreed to keep it on the down-low...
...until April of 1970. Insert the Let It Be/McCartney release kerfuffle here. Paul released an interview with himself, in which he all but broke up the band.
John wasn’t mad that Paul did what he did. He was mad he didn’t come up with the stunt himself!
When asked how the breakup felt in the moment, John said he didn’t remember. “I was in my own pain...The Beatles broke up after Brian died.”
Think of the state of the world by 1970. The political violence of 1968, and the resulting election of Nixon. The Tate-LaBianca murders and Altamont in ’69. Kent State, the Black Panthers, the looming threat of the draft. John wasn’t alone in feeling the world might be headed toward violent revolution. The peace-and-love branches of the counterculture were gone. The dream of the sixties was over. For any person who believed in peace, seeing all this this violence, division, and greed was terribly distressing. Add that onto the business and interpersonal stresses of John’s life? No wonder he was abusing heroin. Something had to change.
In 1970, Freudian psychologist Arthur Janov sent his Primal Scream book to John and Yoko to review. It resonated with John – Yoko screamed all the time!
In all seriousness, think of how mens’ mental health was treated in the seventies. Men hardly have outlets to talk about their feelings and cry openly now, in 2026! John desperately needed a companion outlet to his music, and that became primal scream therapy. “...in a nutshell, primal therapy allowed us to feel things continually, and usually those feelings make you cry. That’s all,” he explained. Yoko said, “The primal scream was like a mirror, and he was looking at the mirror.” A mirror that flows continually. Keep this image in mind.
Primal scream dredged up the source of John’s anger: his unstable childhood. His father walked out on him, his mother handed him off to his aunt Mimi. Just when John and Julia repaired their relationship, she was killed by a drunk driver. Janov said John “had an enormous amount of pain, just enormous. I’ve seen an awful lot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an equal. You know, it was a terrible thing, but it was also a good thing, because it just drove him.”
John wrote what would become Plastic Ono Band while in therapy. His screaming carried over into the music: he’d do “Mother” at the end of every day. He played piano, since it was an instrument he was less comfortable on. He’s renounced the Beatles, and in returning to his childhood, he returned to his own origins as a musician: rock-and-roll. Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Elvis. Since this was such a vulnerable body of work, and the Plastic Ono Band could be whatever/whoever John wanted, he chose people he knew and was comfortable with. Klaus Voorman returned. No Clapton this time – he was busy being obsessed with his best friend’s wife! Ringo was the obvious choice for drummer. Billy Preston dropped by, of course Yoko was around, and ever-faithful Beatle sidekick Mal Evans contributed “tea and sympathy.”
Another familiar face, Phil Spector, was tapped to produce. He’d been around since Let It Be, and worked with John on the “Instant Karma” single, but he went MIA. In VH1’s Classic Albums installation on Plastic Ono Band, Ringo matter-of-factly states he has “no real memory of Phil producing this record at all. I remember he came in later.” Phil went off the fucking deep end after producing All Things Must Pass. His substance abuse intensified, his abuse of his wife intensified. He became a recluse, only popping out to produce George’s Concert for Bangladesh...or to hold his musicians at gunpoint. John Leckie had to step in and produce, John had to produce. Even Yoko had to step in, according to John! Things got so bad, John took out this ad in the October 3rd, 1970 issue of Billboard:
In Spector’s absence, the core tracks of “Hold On” and “Isolation” are not much more than John’s rough mix on seven-and-a-half-inch tape. Thankfully, the music was straight-forward. Ringo remembered, “(John) would just sit there and sing ’em, and we would just sort of jam, and then we’d find out how they would sort of go when we did em. It was very loose, actually...” He’s said he had a great experience. Klaus also remembered a loose atmosphere, but as you can imagine with the sensitive material, John’s moods were all over the place. Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money describes John experiencing dramatic mood swings, and I don’t blame him.
Lennon Remembers
As if a John and Yoko project in 1970 needed any more publicity, the fledgling Rolling Stone published a two-part interview with John and Yoko across its January 21st and February 4th, 1971 issues. Conducted in two halves, five months apart, by a then-24-year-old Jann Wenner, the popularity of these interviews pushed Rolling Stone from a cool counterculture publication where you could read Hunter S. Thompson to the mainstream music press.
In case you haven’t read Lennon Remembers in a while, allow me to refresh your memory. John was angry. All the anger primal scream therapy dredged up was still fresh in this interview. He was also angry at being boxed in with the Beatles still. (It produces proper unhinged shit when you pull it out of context, see “Magical Misery Tour.”) He felt the whole world was against him and Yoko; from his ex-bandmates, to Peter Brown and Neil Aspinall, to the press, everyone. Lest we not forget that, after granting Esquire an exclusive interview, they published “John Rennon's Excrusive Gloupie”: a racist caricature of Yoko, with John as a bug on a leash!
What else stands out to me about Lennon Remembers? Good grief, Jann was in over his head. He did not know what he was doing. He kept trying to steer the conversation to the Beatles and Paul and George and the Rolling Stones, when all John wanted to talk about was his own fucking album! He repeatedly says things to the tune of, “I can’t speak for the others…” In the immediate aftermath, John confessed his feelings toward Plastic Ono Band were always in flux. “...sometimes I can hear it and be embarrassed, just by the performance or by the music or by the instruments. And sometimes I don’t. I change daily.”
He also said it was the best thing he’d ever done!
Then you have John and Yoko’s 1980 Playboy interviews. They were the first the couple accepted in five years, conducted by David Sheff, and much less angry. John provided insight to what was going on at the time of Plastic Ono Band, how he felt about life ten years later, what changed, and what stayed the same. This interview is most famous for John going down a list of every Beatles song, saying which ones he wrote and what they were about. He covers the Imagine LP and Double Fantasy, too. John was set to cover the rest of his discography in a fourth part of the interview, but he was killed before he could do it. He never got to revisit Plastic Ono Band ten years later with Sheff, and I really wish he had. Today, Plastic Ono Band is considered one of the great Beatles solo albums with All Things Must Pass and, after widespread critical re-evaluation, Paul’s RAM. It ranks somewhere on every single edition of Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” lists, and pretty consistently in publications’ top five Beatles solo album rankings.
The highest honor, of course, was when former child actor Corey Feldman covered “Working Class Hero” for the closing track of perhaps the worst album of the century so far, Angelic 2 The Core. If there’s ever a vinyl press, I will be first in line to buy it.
Who Are We?
My favorite Beatle has always been – and will always be – George. I love his songs, I love his voice. I love his guitar playing, his raga rock, and how his music honors and opens the gates to the spiritual realm. But if you were to ask me which Beatle I’m most like...
It’s interesting that the Beatle who found his purpose through God and the Beatle who declared God a concept by which we measure our pain are the two Beatles I gravitate towards. I believe both of their philosophies. I hesitate to call it “god” by name because of the human factor, but I do believe in something bigger than us. I believe humans need to have something bigger than us to survive. And I believe one of the few ways the human race can comprehend our relationship with a higher power is through processing our pain.
John wanted to do Plastic Ono Band simple and straight. Its production is absolutely a rejection of the bells and whistles of Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road, and Let It Be. (Ironic John tapped Phil Spector for this thing. He was the one who horked up Let It Be!) He wrote similar simple confessional songs for Imagine; “Plastic Ono Band with chocolate coating,” as he called it. The lack of chocolate coating is why I like it as much as Imagine, if not more. If you’ve been here a while, you know my tastes lean to the abrasive and indigestible.
Case in point, Plastic Ono Band’s opener: one of the most uncomfortable listens on the whole album, Mother. The album begins with thirty seconds of funereal, slowed-down bells. John heard a similar sound effect in a horror movie on television (he loved the tube) and wanted the same to open his record. This is the death knell of the Beatles. It’s John singing for now.
“Julia” and “Mother” two sides of the same mother-song coin. “Julia” is a soft, gentle lullaby – and not really about Julia at all, it’s more about missing Yoko. “Mother” is actually about John’s mother, and father. It’s a harrowing listen. The simple lyrics and arrangement force you to confront what John was forced to confront in therapy. “Mother, you had me, but I never had you/I wanted you, you didn’t want me.” “Father, you left me, but I never left you/I needed you, you didn’t need me.” Sure, John was in the biggest band ever and was the most famous man in the world. But no amount of money or fame can fill the gaping hole that being abandoned by both parents leaves in your very sense of self. The first people we model ourselves after are our parents. What do you do when you don’t have those models?
(You’d think he’d have recognized this and not abandoned his own son, but there you go. The hypocrisy of John Lennon.)
John’s stomach-churning screams of, “Mama, don’t go! Daddy, come home!” were isolated by an engineer in the Classic Albums episode. It’s too much to bear. The music needs to be there to buffer it for the listener. “Mother” is a stark and honest expression of perhaps the core motivation behind the things John did and the people he sought out.
After having a good cry, Hold On is our centering exercise in song. When John feels overwhelmed, he soothes himself as a parent or partner might.
“Hold on, John,
John hold on, it’s gonna be alright.
You’re gonna win the fight.”
That’s pretty self-explanatory. He felt like he was fighting everyone except Yoko! Next, he assures Yoko, “Yoko, hold on, it’s gonna be alright/You’re gonna make the flight.” A common gripe with this period of John’s music is that it’s “all about Yoko!” I don’t see this complaint with Paul’s music from the same time and that was all about Linda. We all seem to forget my girl Linda went through it in the seventies. People blamed her andYoko for the breakup! This “making every song about Yoko” is John, a man with attachment issues, digging his honeymoon-phase heels in; asserting his love for the woman he believed saved him from a life of mundaneity. Always an advocate for utopia, he assures the world. “Hold on world/World hold on, it’s gonna be alright/You’re gonna see the light.” It didn’t seem like it’d be alright in 1970. With Vietnam and now Cambodia playing out on television sets all over the world, shit was dark. But as a wise man once said, “If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” We won’t get anywhere if we don’t reach a hand out.
“When you’re one, really one,
Well, you get things done like they’ve never been done
If you just hold on."
The instrumentation is breezy and summery, like something Fleetwood Mac would do at the time. John slaps hazy reverb on his guitar, Ringo keeps it simple and tasteful with the drums, and Klaus plays chords on the bass.
Why “cookie?” To be honest, I think it was John’s vocal stim of the day!
There’s a lot of idol-killing on Plastic Ono Band. I Found Out lists all the people John has seen through. “I told you before, stay away from my door.” Beatle fans would often show up at the guys’ houses looking for photos and autographs. “The freaks on the phone won’t leave me alone/So don’t give me that brother, brother, brother, no!” John and Yoko were by the press. They got constant phone calls for comment on this or that crazy thing John and Yoko did. What exactly has John found out?
“Now that I showed you what I been through,
Don’t take nobody’s word what you can do.
There ain’t no Jesus gonna come from the sky,
Now that I found out I know I can cry.”
No leader, guru, or messiah guided John to the answers. Primal therapy did. He’s seen through junkies (drugs,) and religion from Jesus to Paul. They’re all distractions. The answer lies within. You’ve got to have your own autonomy. “No one can harm you, feel your own pain.” “I Found Out” is a musical return to rock-and-roll. John’s chugging guitar reminds me of the sound Sun Records artists favored in the fifties.
I don’t know. I want to like Working Class Hero. I just don’t.
On paper, it’s the tragedy of a man who’s told he could In theory have it all, and is shown at every turn that not only can he not, he will not have it all. Capitalism, man! The working-class hero is abused at home, subject to corporal punishment at school, taught to be a dog in the workforce, and forced to conform. Not to mention he’s distracted with drugs and television so he won’t revolt.
“Everybody is too scared to deal with children all the time, so we reject them and send them away and torture them. The ones that survive are the conformists – their bodies are cut to the size of the suits...The ones that don’t fit the suits are either put in mental homes or become artists.”
quoted from: David Sheff with G. Barry Golson, editor. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (1981.)
But in the 56 years since this album’s release, “Working Class Hero” has become the anthem of the worst kind of John fans, and I don’t associate with them. (Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, nothing but peace and love!!) It’s the last line. “If you want to be a hero, well just follow me.” This is not John telling his fans to follow him. He’s rallying listeners to follow his example, to resist conformity, tune out the noise, and follow your own path. But I don’t know. I feel the song’s Dylanesque styling is equal parts hypocritical and self-righteous.
One of the other main critiques of Plastic Ono Band I see is from people on their high horses saying it’snarcissistic garbage. “Why does he whine so much? He was a Beatle!”
John peels back the curtain on Isolation; showing us normal folks how isolating fame can be. Fame is weird. Everybody thinks they know you, but no one knows you. You’re in the proximity of a lot of people and scrutinized by even more, but you let very few people close to you. Fame is an alienating experience, and positively un-human. We didn’t have to worry about this fame thing a century ago! Despite their big (and naive) dreams, “Just a boy and a little girl/Tryin’ to change the whole wide world,” John confesses he (and Yoko) have the same fears as everyone else. “We’re afraid to be alone/Everybody got to have a home.” But then he gets a little society, maaan. It’s not a flawless song, but the music of “Isolation” is wonderful. It’s classic John, with its lofty, ascending chords, and one of the few spots on the record where I can hear Phil Spector’s flair. The grandiosity is appropriate. When Spector was good, he was really good.
Though I appreciate Ringo’s tight drumming, Remember also passes me by. The vague rewrite of a Sam Cooke song misses me. But it’s a rare humorous spot on Plastic Ono Band. “Remember, remember, the 5th of November,” and the explosion sound effect was just John taking the piss. I don’t know. It feels mismatched to me.
A few paragraphs ago, I quoted a later John song, “How.” “How can I give love when I don’t know what it is I’m giving?” Love is the first quiet, intimate moment on Plastic Ono Band. This feels like dropping in on John at home in the bright early morning. The piano fills the room, and the gentle guitar strums allow us to exhale. The soft arrangement cradles you, as do the lyrics. In this tender, gentle space, John defines what it is we’re giving when we give love.
“Love is feeling, feeling love,
Love is wanting to be loved.”
Love is touch, love is reaching out.
“Love is asking to be loved.”
“Love is needing to be loved.”
You don’t even need another person to feel love. “Love is free.” “Love is living.” Love is trying to love: "Love is reaching." My favorite love songs are the ones that are unsure. This one is an exception.
Never one to be vulnerable for long, John gives us a nice kick in the pants with Well Well Well. His guitar is hot and Klaus’s bass is urgent, giving John a place to do some of his nice rock-and-roll wails. He was good at screaming long before Janov!
Look At Me has always been my favorite on Plastic Ono Band; dear to me for similar reasons to “Love.”
Last summer I felt lonely, sad, and unsure of myself and my place in the world. At night, I’d pop my window open, lay in the window, and stargaze. “Look At Me” was on that playlist, as were the Cure and Sun Kil Moon and Orchestral Maneouvers in the Dark. “Look At Me”’s gorgeous clawhammer fingerpicking rocks you back and forth; shoutout to Donovan for teaching John this technique in India. His double-tracked vocals barely split at the end of phrases, and words never perfectly line up. The lyrics put a voice to the inner child we try so desperately to help and please. “Look at me. What am I supposed to be?” “Here I am. What am I supposed to do?”
“Who am I?
Nobody knows but me,
Nobody knows but me.
Who am I?
Nobody else can see,
Just you and me.”
My viewers know things about me: I’m 26 years old, I graduated with a degree in art history. I have a lot of records, and I host a series called Vinyl Monday. I’m the only one who truly knows me, even in my closest interpersonal relationships, and that’s by design. But hell, I don’t know me.
One of the few lines in the song that isn’t a question, the one that kills me, is John pleading, “Please look at me.” I wasn’t properly socialized as a child. I was a weird kid at school and a difficult child to parent. I struggled to stabilize my core sense of self as a child. My first memories are of feeling isolated, ostracized, and abandoned. Struggling with my sense of self at such a young has no doubt influences how I carry myself as an adult. The song concludes with the question both inner child and adult ask. “Who are we?”
“God is a concept by which we measure our pain.”
John said he wasn’t an atheist. He hated labels of -ist and -ism, so I won’t say this is an atheist’s definition of God. It’s a human definition:
“Our pain is the pain we go through all the time. You’re born in pain, and pain is what we’re in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.”
quoted from: Jann S. Wenner, Lennon Remembers (2000 ed.)
We see this in John’s endless search for father figures. Brian Epstein, the Maharishi, Janov, and “all the -isms.” “Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism...” (He had a messy falling-out with Janov, too. He brought a camera crew into one of John and Yoko’s therapy sessions. John flipped out and said hell no, as he should have!) John has renounced it all here. Everything, from religion (the Bible, the I-Ching, Buddha, the Gita, yoga) to the mantic arts. (“I don’t believe in tarot,” Yoko very much did!) He doesn’t believe in idols, good or bad; name-checking both Kennedy and Hitler. He doesn’t believe in kings of any kind, including Elvis and Dylan; whom he intentionally calls by his surname, Zimmerman. He was going to leave a blank, “I don’t believe in” (silence,) so the listener could fill in whatever they don’t believe in. Hell, you could even say you don’t believe in Lennon! Finally, the thesis of the record. “I don’t believe in Beatles/I just believe in me.”
The Beatles sacrificed their youth to The Beatles, right? And time and time again, John said the Beatles were a myth. Ten years after the breakup, he said, “Why should the Beatles give more? Didn’t they give everything on God’s earth for ten years? Didn’t they give themselves? Didn’t they give all?” People wanting a Beatles reunion didn’t want it for the Beatles. They wanted it for themselves.
“I will talk about the Beatles forever and ever. I will discuss them intellectually and what they mean and what they don’t mean. That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is the idea that people think we can re-create it for them...I mean forget about that. Listen to the Beatles records, but dig Queen or Clash or whatever is going on now.”
quoted from: David Sheff with G. Barry Golson, editor. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono (1981.)
I read a review of this album that said “I just believe in me” is narcissistic and ruins the song. No, no. That line is necessary.
As a fan of “classic rock,” I see a lot of other fans in this space stuck. They don’t want to let their heroes grow up. They cling onto the music of their youth because some part of them doesn’t want to grow up. (We’re all guilty of this to an extent – I still listen to Taylor Swift.) The classic rock nostalgia cycle certainly doesn’t help this. A lot of our heroes can’t or won’t move on because their financial security is tied up in their triumphs from half a century ago. They’ll do this as long as the people are willing to shell out for the fourth farewell-for-real-this-time tour, the myth. John asserted he wasn’t John Beatle. He wasn’t doing anything for the Beatles fan anymore. He was just John,doing things just for John. He believes in him, Yoko and him. “The dream is over.” The other thesis of this album. As for the music, this is a perfect arrangement. Billy Preston kills it on piano, hitting all the emotional marks.
“The dream is over” would’ve been a perfect closing line. John had to wreck that movie-script ending and tack My Mummy’s Dead onto the end. It’s lo-fi, and with John’s sing-song cadence it’s child-like. It’s uncomfortable and voyeuristic for the listener. It’s effective, but it weakens the impact of “Mother.”
The Jann Wenners, Greil Marcuses, and Anthony DeCurtises of the world praise Plastic Ono Band for the wrong reasons. They praise it because John Lennon made it, John Lennon was a genius, and John Lennon is dead. They consider John a genius because he is dead. I praise Plastic Ono Band because it’s risky, rough, and raw. That is where I see the genius. I am not blinded by the man.
You can’t talk about Plastic Ono Band without talking about John Lennon, the man. This is, maybe more than any of his other albums, an artifact of John. He was riddled with contradictions. He was a cynic and a dreamer. He was an absent father after he’d experienced his own father’s absence. He used to be cruel to his woman and beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved, while calling for peace and singing “all you need is love.” John Lennon would be all for “cancelling” John Lennon. He aired out his own dirty laundry to the point of self-flagellation. We wouldn’t know about any of his mistakes if he didn’t tell us in his songs first, and he didn’t have the time to clean up his legacy the way Paul, George, and Ringo did. He died before he could. John recognized his idol status; and though he didn’t give credence to that position, he aired himself out so the world could learn from his mistakes, because at his core, John wanted to save the world. Though he made generational missteps along the way (see the opening track of Sometime in New York City...) he made efforts to better himself. Plastic Ono Band is the product of him seeking out why he was like this.
Jay Cocks (yes, that was his real legal name!) wrote in Time that “some of the best Lennon/Ono art was their life.” Plastic Ono Band is John’s life. He takes stock of his first thirty years and holds nothing back. John threw himself headlong into whatever he did: being a Beatle, Transcendental Meditation, being with Yoko, world peace, activism, politics, macrobiotic foods. Even baking bread! John didn’t half-ass anything. If he forgot the words, he kept fucking singing. That’s the quality of Plastic Ono Band I admire most. My favorite part of rock-and-roll is the human element, and damn if this album isn’t incredible insight to the human element. John stripped the music completely back to just him, Klaus, and Ringo, so youhave to listen to his anguish and words. He kills illusions of fame, pop stardom, religions, messiahs, drugs,distractions, and answers. The dream is over.
The Beatles had to die in order for this album to exist. None of this could ever come out under the Beatles name. Could you imagine “Mother” on a Beatles album? Hell no! John purged himself of everything, and from now on, he’d follow him. Plastic Ono Band is brilliant because John Lennon was singing for his life.
Personal favorites: “Hold On,” “Love,” “Look At Me,” “God”
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Cannon, Geoffrey. “The Beatles’ solo albums reviewed.” The Guardian, 12/19/1970. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/dec/19/beatles-solo-albums-reviewed-1970
Cocks, Jay. “The Last Day in the Life.” Time, 12/22/1980. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,924600-5,00.html
Doggett, Peter. You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After The Breakup. New York: It Books, 2009.
Longfellow, Matthew, dir. Classic Albums: John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band. VH1. Tubi, 2008. https://tubitv.com/movies/468284/classic-albums-john-lennon-plastic-ono-band
Marsh, Dave. “John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band, Yoko Ono – Plastic Ono Band.” Creem, 3/1971. https://www.creem.com/archive/article/1971/03/01/records
Sheff, David, with G. Barry Golson, editor. The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon & Yoko Ono. Chicago: Playboy Press, 1981.
Wenner, Jann S. Lennon Remembers. London: Verso, 2000 ed.
