The album John Lennon called his favourite piece of work: “I got down to the nitty-gritty”
By the end of The Beatles, John Lennon considered himself an artist first and a musician second. He could still write plenty of great songs in his solo career, but the days of writing disposable rock and roll tunes for the masses weren’t where his head was anymore. If he wanted to make something, it also had to mean something, and as far as he could tell, nothing surpassed what he did on Plastic Ono Band.
Even though he spent the first part of his solo career putting out various experimental albums with Yoko Ono, this was the first batch of original material Lennon had come out with since The Beatles’ breakup. And considering he was the one who started the whole thing in the first place, Lennon had a lot left to unpack.
Before he even started production, Lennon was undergoing extensive primal therapy at the hands of Dr Arthur Janov, which led to him opening up about his repressed memories from his childhood. The new John Lennon was letting all his emotions lay on the table for the first time, and hearing songs like ‘Mother’ and ‘I Found Out’ were much more revealing than we were used to.
Lennon had made political moves before, but this was an exploration of his personal state of mind. Compared to Paul McCartney, who was slowly picking up the pieces of his broken band, Lennon was content to roll around in the wreckage, talking about how he didn’t believe in the concept of Beatles anymore on ‘God’ and eventually finding a way to accept himself as a bit of an outsider on songs like ‘Isolation’ and ‘Look At Me’.
Despite his amazing work with the Fab Four and his solo career, Lennon still heralded this album as one of the best he ever made, saying, “I was really doing a sort-of inward trip. There was a lot of weird things in there, more surprising things. That’s still my favourite piece of work. It’s not the kind of thing I play for fun. I just got down to the nitty-gritty. There’s only three people on every track, and nothing else was called for.”
It’s that sparseness that gives the songs that power. Lennon could have just called on Phil Spector to bring in every single session musician he could find to fill out the sound. Still, by having just Lennon, bassist Klaus Voorman, and Ringo Starr on drums for the lion’s share of the record, it feels like you’re able to be a voyeur into his mind half the time.
You could argue that it doesn’t have the kind of hit potential that you would expect out of the same guy who wrote ‘She Loves You’, but that wasn’t the goal of the album. It was more about making something that could document a specific point in Lennon’s life, and by the time he came up for air, he had some of the most brutally honest songs that any mainstream pop star had ever released.
It also allowed Lennon to finally close the book on that part of his life. The rest of his bandmates had solo albums out by this point, but now that the dust had settled, Lennon was setting the record straight and finally being able to move on to the next phase in life. It was fun while it lasted, but Lennon couldn’t live in that dream forever, and Plastic Ono Band was the sound of him finally waking up.