{"id":1492,"date":"2007-11-10T11:15:53","date_gmt":"2007-11-10T16:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=1492"},"modified":"2007-11-10T11:15:53","modified_gmt":"2007-11-10T16:15:53","slug":"on-the-lennon-listen-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=1492","title":{"rendered":"On the Lennon Listen \u2014 Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love the Beatles. That’s… a little hard to hide. The solo careers? Those I run hot-and-cold on.<\/p>\n

George Harrison’s solo work — especially All Things Must Pass<\/i>, Cloud 9<\/i>, Brainwashed<\/i>, and his work with the Wilburys — is phenomenal. Except for the mid-70s and early-80s — Dark Horse<\/i> and 33 1\/3<\/i> aren’t especially memorable.<\/p>\n

Ringo Starr? Always listenable, if nothing remarkable, yet I think he’s had a run of good albums since Vertical Man<\/i> a decade ago, if not Time Takes Time<\/i> a few years before that. And his Christmas album — I Wanna Be Santa Claus<\/i> — is nearly required listening.<\/p>\n

Paul McCartney? He has peaks. And he has valleys. I put it like this one time, “Paul needs to lay off the fucking weed.” There’s a line in Wonder Boys<\/i>, when Hannah is telling Grady about her reaction to his book, and she says, “Your characters aren’t making decisions,” and it’s because Grady’s pot-smoking has dulled him to the decision-making process. Paul McCartney’s solo career is like that. He’s vastly<\/i> talented, yet his music sounds like everything he comes up with is worth hearing. The songs that get a lot of airplay — like “Freedom” or “Vanilla Sky” — are songs that anyone in control of his mental faculties would realize were not… that… good. And that leads to a lot<\/i> of boring music. That’s not to say there aren’t gems, but they’re usually album tracks buried under a layer of pot-induced dross. However, I do like Memory Almost Full<\/i>; it’s McCartney’s best album since Flaming Pie<\/i> a decade ago, which was his best album since Flowers in the Dirt<\/i> a decade before that. I find Wingspan<\/i>, McCartney’s two-disc greatest hits collection of his Wings decade, to be an absolute chore to listen to. And yet, the man is nothing short of a brilliant showman; I saw him in concert five years ago, and it was fan-fucking-tastic.<\/p>\n

And that brings us to John Lennon.<\/p>\n

What prompted this was something Julio Angel Ortiz wrote on his blog one day. He’d listened to John Lennon’s album Mind Games<\/i>, and I left a comment that was along the lines of, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I realized I hadn’t listened to Mind Games<\/i> in a number of years, so I put it in, and then decided that maybe it was time to revisit the Lennon canon.<\/p>\n

Over the next few weeks I’m going to tackle John Lennon’s solo career. I’ve embarked this week on a roughly chronological listen of his solo output. Which means that I’m going to be rediscovering some songs, even some albums, that I simply haven’t<\/i> listened to in a long, long<\/i> time. Roughly once a week, I’ll be posting an essay-like thing on a particular period of Lennon’s solo career, a seven-part series all told.<\/p>\n

Stay tuned. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Links<\/b>:<\/p>\n