The only music that survives is that which touches a nerve. It’s one thing to be able to write a song that a lot of people might want to listen to, but there’s usually something else at play when you let yourself bleed in front of an audience, and that same audience chooses to listen to every word of it. Although John Lennon admitted to not being fond of many songs in his catalogue, ‘Mother’ saw him working in a completely different vein.
The entire fallout of Plastic Ono Band was already going to be hell for Lennon to go through before it was even recorded. Outside of working on various avant-garde projects, the former Beatle had also been undergoing experimental primal scream therapy, which allowed him to let out all of his pent-up aggression towards everyone who had wronged him in his life.
From the minute the tolling bell starts on the album, the audience is already on the edge of their seat, but to hear Lennon go so viciously at his parents on the album’s first track left everyone in shock. Since both of his parents had abandoned him at various points in his life, one through choice and the other through death, this was Lennon’s chance to let it all out, venting all of his anger onto the tape as he screamed in anguish.
While this wasn’t meant to be the mainstream single he was used to making with The Beatles, it was enough to catch the eye of Lou Reed. Despite hating what The Beatles stood for, Reed absolutely loved the song, saying, “think it was one of the greatest songs I ever heard, called ‘Mother’. Now, with that, and he was capable of great pop stuff, which is nothing to sneeze at, but the question you asked me was ‘on another level.’”
There’s definitely an artistic angle that wasn’t there before, but just as many people were turned off by the tune. For casual Beatles fans, this was about knowing Lennon on a much more personal level, and hearing the ins and outs of his personal life was a little bit much to hear all in one listen.
Just take one of the biggest Beatles fans of all time: Noel Gallagher. As much as he shouted the praises and Lennon and his brother Liam adopted his mannerisms, he wasn’t at all impressed with ‘Mother’, saying, “All John Lennon’s shit about his mother; I’m not interested in it, doesn’t mean anything to me. All these songs about personal torment, how can it? How can ‘Mother’ mean anything to anybody apart from John Lennon?”
But does the fact that someone doesn’t relate to your music make it a bad thing? Evidently, many musos think so, but there are just as many times when someone can listen to an artist in pain and end up feeling that kind of empathy secondhand, and from the minute Lennon opens his mouth, he leaves the listener on the verge of tears.
While many cite ‘Imagine’ as his true masterpiece, ‘Mother’ deserves to be in the same conversation for just how raw it sounds. Since the rest of the rock world was focusing on the more optimistic side of what The Beatles brought to everyone, hearing one of them sounding so forlorn on a track is something that threw everyone for a loop the first time they heard it.
Once people started listening further, they saw something different. This wasn’t the rough-and-tumble man who claimed to have all the answers. This was a lonely boy who never got the attention and love that he craved from his parents and would eventually make a whole bunch of mistakes in his career related to his pent-up anger caused by that grief.
Even though a portion of his fandom would prefer that some therapy sessions stay private, ‘Mother’ is the kind of song that shows the best of what Lennon is capable of, as if he shed all of his Beatles skin and begged the audience to accept him for who he was. It wasn’t always a pretty sight, but when an artist opens themselves up this blatantly, there’s no one who can touch them anymore, and by taking himself off a pedestal on ‘Mother’, Lennon created a masterpiece that none of his former bandmates could claim to have.
