John Lennon: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

Remember John Lennon? The Beatles? Love love me do, I want to hold your hand yeah yeah yeah? Turns out Lennon wasn't the cheeky moptop the world thought he was. But not even the band's shedding of its "cute" image nor its late-'60s move toward the avant garde could have prepared the public for 1970's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. A resounding lyrical and spiritual "fuck you" to the world, it's one of the most personal, bleak, and utterly fascinating records ever released, and its recent reissue finds it losing none of its bite.

Lennon's first post-Beatles album, Plastic Ono Band, was written and recorded following four months of primal scream therapy. With John's emotions—anger, disillusionment, and especially paranoia—bubbling up to the surface, he took on in song the pain that had shaped his life. He holds God, his family, old bandmates, fans, the government, and the public responsible for his anguish. This is the sound of Lennon getting up on stage and ripping himself open, spattering everyone around him generously with blood and bile.

The arrangements are memorable yet sparse, consisting of a guitar, bass, piano, and drum setup. The production wisely keeps the instruments from detracting attention from the vocals, which are the best of Lennon's solo career. His voice moves from a thin wail to a sandpaper scream in "Mother," he performs "Working Class Hero" with a low, matter-of-fact weariness, and the gravelly nastiness with which he spits lines like, "I've seen through junkies, I've been through it all/I've seen religion from Jesus to Paul" in "I Found Out" remains unmatched for sheer anger.

Delivery would matter little if there were no substance behind the voice, but Lennon's predominantly first-person lyrics more than live up to his performance. These are not the ambiguous, fantastic wordplays of "I Am The Walrus" or "Come Together." When he sings, "Look at me, what am I supposed to be?" or, "Mother, you had me but I never had you," he leaves us no room to impose our own meanings onto the words. This directness forces us to see what Lennon wants us to, and this is from where the album draws its power.

The best and most devastating track on Plastic Ono Band is "God," in which Lennon redefines his title subject as "a concept by which we measure our pain" and then goes down a list of heroes, ticking each one off with a simple "I don't believe in..." No one is forgotten: I-Ching, the Bible, Buddha, Jesus. Even the symbols of the era he helped to define are not spared, as Kennedy, Zimm-erman, and, lastly, the Beatles are tossed aside in favor of "Me. Yoko and me," a line that sums up the center of the universe that Lennon creates on Plastic Ono Band.

The Image Control department was working overtime for this re-issue. Hence, two previously unavailable bonus tracks tacked onto the end—"Power To The People" and "Do The OZ"—that yield little more than a weak attempt to shift the album's focus from Lennon's anger and pain to his social conscience. While he does deal with societal problems in the nail-spitting folk track, "Working Class Hero," one gets the sense that it is meant more as a personal statement than as a call to arms. The two bonus songs try to suggest otherwise, as does the prominent peace-sign photograph in the new artwork. Don't be fooled: Plastic Ono Band is about Lennon, not about us, and the painful expression of his reality is what makes it one of the essential albums of the post-Beatles age. (Capitol)

—Jim Laakso

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