There’s a good chance that no artist in the world will ever match the rush The Beatles experienced when they first began. Michael Jackson may have come close in terms of raw sales, but when it comes to their lineup of classic songs, even the solo careers of the Fab Four don’t compare to the mythos of their collective work. John Lennon famously downplayed the hype surrounding their records, but if there was one that met his high standards, he believed it was Plastic Ono Band.
Outside of being the group’s founder, Lennon was the last one to have his final say on the matter. He may have been the one to first suggest the idea of them splitting up, but it would be Paul McCartney who cast the first stone to their legacy when he released his first solo album and said that the group wouldn’t be working together anymore.
Lennon had already been working on strange avant-garde albums with Yoko Ono while he was still with the Fab Four, but when everyone else was working on their magnum opuses, he was finding time to work on himself. All those years of being a Beatle had caused Lennon’s emotional self to erode, and it was time for him to come back down to Earth on Plastic Ono Band.
After undergoing intense primal therapy, many of the songs on the record are a fierce listen to sift through. If you came to The Beatles for the happy-go-lucky tracks, it might be a bit of a shock to hear Lennon sound so lonely on tracks like ‘Mother’ or get caught off guard by him screaming his brains out on ‘Well Well Well’.
But in between the cracks are still fantastic songs to be found. ‘Working Class Hero’ has the kind of deadpan delivery that feels almost scary to listen to, and hearing a track like ‘God’ was bound to leave every Fab fan stunned when he said that he didn’t believe in The Beatles anymore.
It was certainly a departure, but Lennon placed the record alongside songs like ‘Imagine’ as some of his definitive work, telling Playboy, “‘Imagine’, ‘Love’ and those Plastic Ono Band songs stand up to any song that was written when I was a Beatle. Now, it may take you 20 or 30 years to appreciate that, but the fact is, if you check those songs out, you will see that it is as good as any fucking stuff that was ever done.”
At the time of his death, people were already starting to get used to what Lennon was getting at. There’s almost a punk edge to a lot of his attitude on the record, and given how emotionally frail it is, that mix of acoustic tenderness and primal aggression was like getting to see hints of grunge and a partial view of what someone like Elliot Smith would be doing decades later.
Even though Lennon thought his songs would live on just as well as The Beatles’ work, it wasn’t because he wanted to write something that would become an anthem for the world. ‘Imagine’ was a plea for a better future, but Plastic Ono Band was an album Lennon made for himself, and by doing so, he helped all of us see the beauty inside ourselves and cut out all of the pressures of the world.
