“Those Freaks Woz Right when they said – You Woz Dead”. Imagine. Fifty Years On.

The album Imagine was released OTD in 1971.

The people who hate the song “Imagine” hate it very deliberately and urgently. Nothing I can write can change their view of the song, because hating “Imagine” has become part of many people’s identity, a way of defining one’s own edges against those very fuzzy and tiresome people who claim to love “Imagine”.

Perhaps one test of the greatness of a song is its ability to repeatedly survive hideous and wrongheaded interpretations. By this criterion “Imagine” is a very very great song indeed. Nearly forty years ago, Joan Collins performed and recorded a spoken word recitation of “Imagine” backed by the Royal Symphony Orchestra. The song survived.

Though broadly sympathetic to the idea that you should separate the product from the producer, that art from the artist – I recognise that this is sometimes very difficult. I find it hard to look at the paintings of Paul Gauguin. Furthermore, when an artist professes the primacy of the expressive autobiographical motive in the creative process, then excluding the personality of the artist becomes even harder.

All of which invites the famous question of possessions and “hypocrisy”. David Quantick, in his Eggpod review of this album, deals with this issue head on. (Incidentally, Quantick’s generous and appreciative listening of Imagine is all the more significant given that he is so defiantly “Team Paul” on most related issues.) Quantick points out that even Billy Bragg has to get to his concerts somehow. Monies must be disbursed. Quantick points out that someone with no possessions would have been unable to record, manufacture, or distribute the song “Imagine”.

We live with the world as it is if we are to live at all. Are we to be disqualified from imagining better worlds?

If it is necessarily “hypocritical” for a wealthy man to imagine a world without possessions then I worry we’re liable to be suggesting that anyone who expresses ideals they fail to personally live up to is a “hypocrite”. Given the inherent fallibility of human nature this would then mean that we are left with a choice between hypocrisy and cynicism – in which case – please sign me up for Team Hypocrite.

Meanwhile, biblical denunciations of hypocrisy don’t seem to involve a mere discrepancy between people’s ideals and their actions. There’s usually a judgmental aspect to the instances of hypocrisy cited. These biblical hypocrites are not just people with feet of clay but holier than thou people with feet of clay who are using their heavy clay feet to kick others.

For example, a wealthy politician who blames social ills on a breakdown of “family values” in lower income communities while supporting policies that make family life all but impossible. That’s the kind of thing that constitutes a high crimes version of hypocrisy in my book…

Lennon on the other hand, tended to wear his many many faults on his sleeve.

I suppose what really irritates me is that all accusations of political hypocrisy are so tediously unidirectional. Those who preach selfish acquisitiveness usually do manage to live “up” to their ideals. I’ve never heard anyone say “that Alan Greenspan may preach unfettered capitalism but I know for a fact that he lives in an anarchist squat with only one change of loincloth…”

But what of the song itself? Well like any song that can be ruined in so many ways – it is perfectly constructed. It is relatively easy to learn on the piano. Once heard, it is lodged in the memory and won’t be forgotten.

The reason it survives, is not the the Lennon-Ono lyric as such. It’s not endlessly recycled because everybody imagines and endorses every line of the song. Indeed, it is sung or smiled at people who actually do imagine heaven and/or religion. The song, judged as a successful anthem is emphatically not a set of manifesto commitments. In fact, it inspires collectivity because Lennon’s very idiosyncracy for once inspires empathy. Anyone who has ever wanted to imagine the world as other and better than it is can get a bit dewy eyed alongside him. Anyone who has ever felt that “things” are just not right and could be better can hear “Imagine” and feel less lonely.

The specificity of the imaginary wish list is drowned in the abstraction of wishing.

Side One

Imagine

See above…

Crippled Inside

This is driven by its honky tonk “feel”. It is mainly enjoyable as an excuse to hear Nicky Hopkins on the tack piano.

Jealous Guy

The second most famous song on the album began life (as did so many Lennon songs) in 1968 as “Child of Nature” – and can be heard as such on the Deluxe White Album multi disc song. “Child of Nature” is burdened with a lyric that makes Lennon seem clumsy, po-faced, and humourless – a devotee. Rewritten as “Jealous Guy” – the harshness of the self judgement counterpoints the sweetness of the tune in a far more arresting fashion.

Fun fact – Paul McCartney says the song is about him and that John told him as much.

Now…

If “Jealous Guy” really John’s message to Paul, then Imagine is an album which expresses the following two sentiments directed at the same person on the same album.

A) “Those freaks woz right when they said you woz dead…”

B) “I am a deeply flawed individual and I am profoundly sorry that I upset you.”

John Lennon is often referred to as a man of contradictions, but could this be a contradiction too far? As “Child of Nature”, this song was incompatible with “Sexy Sadie” – which may be one of the reasons why it wasn’t developed further for The White Album.

Perhaps the song was always subconsciously about Paul, but 1971 John would never have admitted as much. When John and Paul resumed their friendship in the mid 70s, this subconscious interpretation became conscious. John was rather good at contrition. He needed to be.

It’s So Hard

Here is Lennon in slow grinding blues rock mode. Like many of the songs on this album it is flavoured with creepy strings The Flux Fiddlers (from the New York Philharmonic) which play a decisive role in preventing it becoming a slight genre piece.

I Don’t Want to be a Soldier (Mama)

This is the longest song on the album and feels it. I’ve always found it hard work but there are people I respect who are very fond of it. It’s more of a “vibe” than an actual song. I suppose I’ve come to love “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” so maybe I could come to love this. How many times has John invoked “Mama” while singing, I wonder – in the course of his 20 year performing career?

Side Two

Gimme Some Truth

This has always been a favourite of mine. It’s an old song dating from (guess when?) 1968. Although in some ways it invokes a very early seventies paranoia (Tricky Dicky in the ascendant), in other ways it has more in common with “I am the Walrus” than “Power to the People”. In the seventies, the Janov “cleansed” Lennon largely eschewed happy psychedelic gibberish. “I am the Walrus” (1967) is almost unique in that it manages to contain raw personal pain (“I’m crying”) and entertaining gobbledegook within the same song. “Gimme some Truth” to a lesser extent manages something of the same. It’s vituperative in the best Lennon tradition, with a a confused catalogue of political antagonists being suffocated with nonsense.

You will not here a better George Harrison slide guitar solo anywhere than on “Gimme Some Truth”.

When Lennon was talking nonsense, he was in a good mood. You can hear the last gasp of this during “Nobody Told Me”. Lennon was capable of taking a kind of disinterested love in the sound of words that Macca took (and takes) in melody. It was an important node of creative convergence.

Oh My Love

This song might have fit just as well on Lennon’s previous album – the searing and critically preferred Plastic Ono Band (1970). Its intimacy is almost off putting. It’s the sort of song you feel you’re not so much hearing as overhearing.

How Do You Sleep?

This wonderfully dramatic, inventive and utterly deplorable song opens by suggesting that Paul McCartney, the man who came up with the idea for Sgt Pepper, was taken by surprise by Sgt Pepper. (Some have, however, suggested that the opening “You” may not be addressed to Macca.) The remaining verses are crammed with punning anti-Macca insults. Apparently the full lyric was assembled as a result of Yoko Ono, Allen Klein, and George Harrison all throwing in suggestions. A classroom gang atmosphere prevailed.

Lennon later declared that the song wasn’t really about Paul at all but about himself. I suppose this is true in the obvious sense that it says a lot more about John than it does about Paul. Lennon went on to say that he merely used his resentment at Paul to create a song and that the song as product was more important than the initial impetus. Paradoxically, this way of thinking is far more McCartney than Lennon. Macca the Maker – the “poietes”.

The song can be regarded, charitably, as an early version of “Steel and Glass”, one of the best songs on Walls and Bridges (1974) which has a very similar vibe but which inspires guiltless enjoyment because we think it’s about Allen Klein and we don’t mind him being mean to Allen Klein. Except that John said in interview that “that one’s about me too.” Sometimes John, you’re more interesting when you’re not all about you.

How.

This song is all about the exquisite middle eight section for me. Creepy flux fiddlers take you there and take you back again.

Oh Yoko.

For some reason the piano part on this delightful and happy song reminds me of the piano on “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward”. This is not any actionable affinity and I do not recommend that the Lennon estate investigates Billy Bragg. In fact, it would break my heart if they did. What the two instrumental backings share is a strange wistfulness mingled with relentlessness. You sense that “Oh Yoko” is a song that could go on indefinitely, while still feeling much shorter than most songs you’re familiar with. You’d be happy to hear its perky rhythm accompany these naive sentiments until the cows come home. Until the cows have gone to bed, had a good night’s sleep, woken up again and had some breakfast.

And the album concludes with John on the harmonica – an instrument he has largely eschewed since 1963.

This is a varied album, which accommodates a deal of strategic syrup alongside proto-punk demystifications left over from Plastic Ono Band. It repays repeated listening and the more grounded and level headed you choose to be in your sense of Lennon – the better it sounds.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is true in physics and it’s true in Lennonology. The absurd and unsustainable canonisation of Lennon in the 1990s was destined to come plummeting to earth and leave a massive crater. Few people have been offering a more careful and sincere rehabilitation of John Lennon than Paul McCartney. John could be cruel and insensitive. He could also be tender and generous. Nobody who knew him seems to have regretted having known him. Not even Cynthia. People forgave him a great deal and there was a great deal to forgive but people seem to have regarded him as worthy of forgiveness.