The John Lennon estate has been releasing deluxe reissues of his solo albums. Plastic Ono Band and Imagine have been released so far and now comes Mind Games. Each series, presented in various formats, is complemented by an expansive coffee-table book.
The Mind Games album actually came out in 1973 after the album Sometime in New York, which came out in 1972. That album was skipped over and there is no official word on if it will eventually receive the same treatment of the three albums mentioned above.
This Mind Games book serves several purposes. It is a companion to the recently released Mind Games audio and video reissue series. It expands on the beautiful hardcover book that comes with the Mind Games “Cube” and deluxe editions. It’s a sumptuous coffee-table book, from one of the premier coffee-table book publishers in the world and therefore, along with being read, it can be pulled off the shelf and dipped into and enjoyed just for the pictures, art, photography, graphics and aesthetics alone. It’s also a very important work of reference for Lennon and Beatles scholars given the depth and fulsomeness of the information. The level of detail reaches an encyclopedic, historical, journalistic and you-are-there documentary diary level.
The book reflects Lennon’s time in New York with Yoko and is often a detailed chronicle of their life, art, and work. It was obviously very important for John to chronicle everything, in almost documentary form. Forms would actually be more accurate. Both Lennon and Yoko Ono were pioneers of multi-media. Few people other than Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol were as adept at and naturally comfortable with understanding and creating media in so many different formats, while simultaneously chronicling their efforts, although McLuhan was more of a media theorist, than creator.
This approach provides us, more than 50 years later, with so much material to understand Lennon’s music and the music, art, life, and politics of his life and time. One of the most fascinating aspects of this is a section in the book entitled “Library of Esoterica.” It includes the book covers of nearly 100 books Lennon owned. The books reveal a mind fully open to exploring a variety of subjects that seek to answer the big questions, particularly books that explore non-Western religions.
The collection includes the book Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space by Robert Masters and Jean Houston, published in 1972. Many of the books resided in the bookshelves of the aquarian flower children and counterculture hippies and revolutionaries of the ’60s and ’70s, including Sand and Foam by Kihal Gibran, Don Juan by Carlos Casteneda, The Greening of America by Charles C. Reich, and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, to just name four.
The ’70s were as volatile as the ’60s in terms of the personal and collective politics of the times and Lennon’s involvement with the anti-war movement, feminism, those unjustly imprisoned or persecuted, black power, and many other causes and activists represented key players in his life in this period.
The book includes the vivid recollections of those who were there during this period including the musicians who were part of the Mind Games sessions at the Record Plant in New York, such as Jim Keltner, David Spinozza, Sneaky Pete, Michael Brecker, Rick Marotta, engineer Jimmy Iovine and others.
The two previous companion books in the series for The Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums are equally worthy of the same high level of praise. Having all three books is strongly recommended.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
