The hit you know, and for a reason (it’s vintage Lennon), the rest you probably don’t know, and for a reason (they vary from fair to middling to awful), and one thing is clear–1973’s Mind Games is the work of a John Lennon who’d lost his way and would never find it again, unless you count 1980’s Double Fantasy, which was tanking until he was assassinated outside the Dakota, at which point grieving critics and fans alike decided (because the story had to have some kind of redemptive ending) that it was a return to form.
Martyrdom (if that’s what you want to call it) is a sure-fire way of winning a Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year. I recommend it to every famous artist on his or her way down.
Recorded as his relationship with Yoko Ono was deteriorating (he’d soon begin his infamous LA “Lost Weekend” with May Pang and constant companion in drunken debauchery Harry Nilsson) and he was being hassled by the U.S. government, Mind Games is a mixture of the personal and the political, but overall the album is a throwaway-heavy muddle.
Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau called it Lennon’s “worst writing yet,” adding that that Lennon was “helplessly trying to impose his own gargantuan ego upon an audience … [that] is waiting hopefully for him to chart a new course.” Another wrote that it “consisted of so-so songs that hardly lodged in the memory.” The least commercially successful Beatle wasn’t moving forward, which is hardly surprising when one considers that he was in a muddle when he wrote its songs—or rather tossed them off in the course of a single week.
Confused mental state, confused album—it’s that simple. Then add in the sad fact that perhaps the greatest Beatle of them all had simply lost the gift of writing Beatle-worthy songs (“Mind Games” excepted). Numbers like “Meat City,” “One Day (At a Time),” and “Intuition” (to pick three at random) are a lot of things, but at their best they belong on the Beatles refuse pile.
“The Infantilization of John Lennon” was the title of a piece Geoffrey Stokes wrote for the Village Voice in the wake of John’s assassination, and if it’s not as apparent on Mind Games as it is on Double Fantasy, it’s there nonetheless. When Lennon isn’t cravenly apologizing to or idealizing Yoko Ono he’s spouting more of the idealistic nonsense and hollow propagandizing that made John and Yoko the epitome of self-promoting agit-prop—no matter the issue, John and Yoko inserted themselves into it personally. That giant “War Is Over” billboard had their names on it, after all. Their collective ego was always an essential part of the equation—if the war was going to end, Joko were going to be the ones who did it. They were a kind of hippie prelude to Donald Trump.
But the real problem with Mind Games is mediocre songwriting. Its songs don’t stick in your head because they’re not good songs—the melodies are serviceable, at best, and the lyrics are mostly hackneyed.
From the forgettable “Only People” with its lines “Only people know just how to talk to people/Only people know just how to change the world/Only people realize the power of people” to the inferior pop confection “Intuition” with its vapid optimism (“It’s good to be alive”) and jejune lyrics (“As I play the game of life/I try to make it better each and every day/And when I struggle in the night/The magic of the music seems to light the way”), Lennon trucks in truisms, cliches, and tired hippie hokum. Lines like “As I play the game of life” are the last refuge of a scoundrel, especially coming from the Beatle who’d written “A Day in the Life,” “Strawberry Fields,” “Tomorrow Never Knows” and countless others.
“You Are Here” is Hawaiian island lazy easy listening hokum and wouldn’t sound too out of place on Double Fantasy. The acoustic guitar and piano-simple “Out the Blue” is a rather pedestrian paean to—you guessed it—Yoko. One critic called its metaphors “gruesome,” and he’s mostly right, although I find a line he finds offensive (“All my life’s been a long, slow knife”) one of the most interesting things to come out of his mouth on the LP. “I Know (I Know)” is drab until it kicks into gear, at which point it becomes merely workmanlike. You listen and say to yourself “This guy was a Beatle? And the witty genius Beatle no less?”
Rockers? We got rockers! The rockabilly number “Tight A$” seems mainly designed to let Lennon get away with saying “tight ass”—what a coup! It’s a throwaway for sure, but Lennon’s in good voice and guitarist David Spinozza and legendary pedal steel guitarist Sneaky Pete Kleinow both deliver the goods. Closer “Meat City” is a hard rocker about New York City as well as his desire to go to China, because who better to go to China and enlighten the Chinese than Beatle John? As he told an interviewer, “I shall go there. I will take the opportunity to try to see Mao. If he is ill or dead or refuses to see me, too bad.” The song’s not much to write home about, but lyrically he keeps things, er, interesting:
“People were jumping like there’s no tomorrow
Meat City
Fingerlickin’ chickinpickin’ Meat City shook down U.S.A
Pig Meat City”
Go daddy go!
“One Day (At a Time)” is another ode to John’s love for Yoko, complete with Beatlesque backing vocals but little else. The melody can only be described as sour, and the lyrics run along the lines of “Cause I’m the fish and you’re the sea/Cause I’m the apple and you’re the tree/Cause I’m the door and you’re the key/Cause you’re the honey and I’m the bee.” As for Michael Brecker’s sax solo, it’s boredom city.
“Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)” is a crawling drag of an apology in song to John’s spouse, and one of how many exactly? Where is the album The Many Apologies of John Lennon? A bluesy ballad, it has more going for it than most of the songs on Mind Games—Lennon sounds like he’s singing from the heart—but when a person apologizes you kinda expect them to change, and it’s not good when you find them apologizing over and over again. In other words, talk minus change equals bullshit.
Only two songs on Mind Games make it worth your time, and I have my doubts about “Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple),” a standard (but fortunately energetic) screed about freeing the people that doesn’t work as a protest song because let’s face it, who the fuck cares if John has climbed the bully pulpit of his fame yet again to make demands nobody in power cares about? He’s wasting his breath spouting empty threats and promises.
But the guitar riff—which sounds like it’s coming straight from George Harrison—and the song’s propulsion give the song a pulse, which is more than can be said about most of the songs on Mind Games. “Free the people now/Do it do it do it do it now” ain’t gonna free anyone, but Lennon puts enough energy into the words to give the song a reason for being that has nothing to do with its political message. He could be singing “Eat toast eat toast eat toast eat toast now” and it would work just as well. And would be a far more interesting song.
“Mind Games” dates back to 1969 and Lennon’s Fab Four days, and is simply smashing thanks to its sweeping symphonic feel and total mystico-hoodoo-self-help love is the answer vibe. Is its message so much hippie bullshit? Sure. Love is the answer, make love not war, and then there’s the stuff he did get out of a self-help book (Lennon, the self-helpless Beatle, was looking for answers everywhere he could), but the song’s melody is irresistible and the song has a drive that makes it one of his very best post-Mop Top efforts. It has a—dare I say it?—majesty to it that hints at the days when the Beatles were making majesty look easy.
John Lennon was the smartest, wittiest, and most pathetic of The Beatles—a lost soul he was, and not to drugs as was the fashion of the day. Infantilization is the word—he had a mother in Yoko (just check out the Anne Leibowitz photo of a naked Lennon wrapped himself fetus-like over a clothed Yoko) , and would do whatever she told him to do. I love the story where she ordered him to go out and make a tree friend—I can only imagine him going from tree to tree in Central Park, hoping in vain that one would say, “Sure, Beatle John, I’ll be your buddy.”
More importantly, he’d lost his knack for writing brilliant songs, which is the real reason he “retired” from music for five years—the whole “househusband” thing was cover. And when he did return he put out an album (with Yoko, of course) that was taking on water until marketing genius Mark David Chapman sent it to the top of the charts.
Lennon’s final years are a sad story that both he and Yoko twisted through blatant self-hagiography into a myth that lives on until this day. But the real proof is in the music. Listening to Mind Games makes me sad. It’s the work of a brilliant man reduced to writing lackluster songs filled with platitudes. Where does genius go? How does it just vanish? If I could find his tree friend, maybe he’d have some answers.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
