When a deluxe edition of John’s classic John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album was first seriously mooted back in 2020, I was curious to see how deep they could excavate and unravel a record which famously was as ‘bare bones’ as you could get. At most, the songs featured just three instruments – guitar or piano, bass and drums – and vocals, with a few numbers offering even more slender arrangements. Coming off the back of John and Yoko’s so-called ‘primal scream’ therapy in California in the midst of The Beatles’ split, these stripped back recordings were Lennon’s way of mirroring the intent of the unflinching material and denuding his psyche, rooting out his demons and dispensing with the lavish ornamentation which often characterised the work of his former band during its later years. Recorded in just a few weeks at Abbey Road during the autumn of 1970 and released before the year’s end, this was John at his most raw, direct and uncompromising, 11 short, sharp tunes by a skeleton crew of musicians which basically invented the confessional singer-songwriter genre, infused with the spirit of punk years before that movement was a spit in anyone’s eye. So what, I wondered, could possibly fill up a multi-disc box set mined from those sessions?
How wrong I was. When The Ultimate Collection version of the album surfaced in April 2021, it was stuffed with 159 (!) tracks, including umpteen early takes, alternate mixes, demos, outtakes and isolated elements charting the development of each and every song. In short, the record was exhumed and explored from every conceivable angle, leaving no stone unturned or note unplayed. It’s an impressive testimony to the Lennon Estate’s continued ability to mine John’s (fairly limited) archive more than 40 years after his death, as well as to the proportion of the fanbase who will pay big money to hear a Beatle’s every muttering, cough and stumble while they were creating one of their studio masterpieces. That said, I must confess I don’t fall into that camp – when it comes to alternate takes and different mixes of songs we already know, I really don’t feel the need to have everything. They’re the kind of recordings I would probably listen to only once or twice in my lifetime and so – thanks to Spotify – I could sample them via streaming without shelling out for a pricey box that would take up a large corner of my spare room. And when I did dip into some of the early studio performances of the tracks, they confirmed my suspicions that there was nothing radically different about them which would warrant repeated listens. As is almost always the case with The Beatles, the finished versions are the definitive article, and all most people will ever need.
Nonetheless, I was intrigued to hear the very first demos of these tunes, largely recorded in the summer of 1970 (interestingly, around the time Paul was demoing his material for what became 1971’s Ram album). Did John have everything mapped out from the get-go or, his head still reeling from the revelations of his scream-themed psychoanalysis with Dr Arthur Janov, would the songs be sketchy, scattershot and incomplete? Would he still be grasping for the right words and most incisive phrases, and had he fully processed all the impacts of exorcising his childhood ghosts (plus the ongoing implosion of The Beatles)? Would he be even more brutal and uncompromising than on the finished record? Well, two things stood out listening to these demos. First, most of them (apart from a couple laid down when he got to the studio) featured John at home strumming his electric guitar, not the acoustic guitar or piano you might expect, which gives them a slightly different, rough-hewn flavour. But, second, the songs themselves were almost all complete, with just a line or two missing or different here and there. He may have been ready to bare his soul, but he knew exactly how he wanted to do it.
Take ‘Mother’, the album’s famed opening number. While shorn of the ominous opening funeral bells and the sombre piano chords, the structure and content of the tune is all there. John sings some of the lines with a touch more vulnerability, as opposed to the despairing resignation of the final version, and the “Momma don’t go” coda is sung only once, but otherwise it’s exactly as you know it. Likewise, ‘Hold On’, demoed in the studio, is much the same as the released take, albeit with some nice guitar vamping by John at the end. By contrast, the home take of ‘I Found Out’ is a chugging, skiffle-cum-folk rendition, and the lyrics aren’t completely there yet. There’s a reference to cannabis slang reference to ‘Mary Jane’ instead of pain (perhaps he was miffed that his, erm, quirky Beatles tune ‘What’s The News Mary Jane’ had still not seen the light of day at that point), and he sings about people sitting there with their “axe” in their hand, instead of “cock” – surely a rare example of a lyric being ramped up in its final stages as opposed to toned down for fear of offending listeners. Punches were clearly not going to be pulled on this record.
‘Working Class Hero’, as you might expect from a song performed just on acoustic guitar, differs little from the finished take, except it has a slightly less controlled, more venomous vocal. ‘Isolation’, featuring John alone at the piano, is also near identical to the released version, the even-more pared-down arrangement just highlighting was a pretty tune it is. The piano is also the only instrument on the studio demo of ‘Remember’, which is perhaps slightly slower than the one we know, and it slows down a lot more when the first verse is repeated towards the end – an interesting idea, but I think they were wise to stick with the high-energy tempo through to the end of the final version. Bar a minor lyric change, Lennon’s electric guitar demo of ‘Love’ is essentially the song we know, though it sounds a little tentative and somehow lacks much of the beauty it would acquire later on. ‘Well Well Well’ is the most incomplete of all the demos, running little more than a minute and offering little more than a bluesy repeat of the first verse and chorus. Not that he expanded it that much more, but it’s a track that was very much brought to life in the studio.
‘Look at Me’, which apparently had been hanging around since the White Album period in 1968, changed very little from its initial run-through, though benefiting from studio polish and perhaps a little more sureness of touch. The most interesting of all the demos here is ‘God’ – strummed here on electric guitar in near-Dylanesque fashion, a striking contrast to the epic piano by Billy Preston which drives the album rendition. John runs through the same litany of false prophets (no last-minute changes there), but the song ends with the “I just believe in me/That’s reality” line, the graceful (and essential) “dream is over” coda apparently added further down the line. He sings the existing words twice over here, introducing the killer pause after “I don’t believe in Beatles” second time around and briefly heading off in another direction with the line “I recall a time/when you needed a friend” before grinding to a halt. This is an intriguing look under the creative bonnet. By contrast, the demo of ‘My Mummy’s Dead’ is virtually a carbon copy of the demo-like album version, it just meanders a little longer. There are also demos of John’s first three solo singles (‘Give Peace A Chance’, ‘Cold Turkey’ and ‘Instant Karma’), the most noteworthy of which is the first studio run-through of ‘Karma’, without Phil Spector’s beefy production touches but with the George Harrison guitar part which was effectively mixed out of the released take.
The real highlight of this set, for me, is the collection of rock ‘n’ roll jams that John, Ringo and Klaus Voormann performed between takes. Alas, many of them are all-too brief, breaking down after a verse or two, or – in the case of a short medley of Elvis Presley tunes – not taken entirely seriously, but there is a sprinkling of magic moments. The most complete number, a nimble take on Lonnie Donegan’s 1956 hit ‘Lost John’, takes us back to Lennon’s skiffle days at the dawn of the Quarrymen and, while it runs out of steam after a minute, it’s always a joy to hear John sing his heart out on Little Richard’s ‘Send Me Some Lovin’’. Best of all, though, are his renditions of a batch of Carl Perkins numbers, especially perennial Beatles favourites ‘Honey Don’t’ and ‘Matchbox’, the latter featuring a stinging Lennon guitar break towards the end. Although John later tackled some of his favourite ‘50s and ‘60s rockers (in a very different style) on his 1975 Rock ‘n’ Roll album, it would’ve been fascinating to hear him properly record some covers with this three-piece line-up (perhaps augmented by Billy Preston on piano for a few tracks to mix things up) – his vocals here are a little more relaxed, and the end results would have been quite different to the full-blown fairground music extravaganza which characterised the later album. But the jams here (which also include an early reading of Imagine’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Be A Soldier’) are mostly threadbare throwaways never intended for mass consumption. And the inclusion of “versions” of ‘Get Back’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ – brief, meandering guitar tune-ups which feature nothing more than a few notes from each song – represent record company piss-taking of the highest order.
So there you have it. I suppose releases like this are not really for people like me, who have little interest in works-in-progress and unpicking a song’s gradual evolution. But even by the standards of other deluxe sets, there’s hardly anything here I’d want to listen to again, because the journey from Lennon’s initial ideas to the finished product is so short. Unlike, say, Paul’s acoustic demos featured on his expanded Flaming Pie box set – which had some subtle differences and parts he later reworked or dropped altogether – John pretty much had everything worked out from a very early stage, just changing an instrument here or altering his vocal there when he got to the studio. In one way, that’s in keeping with John’s renowned desire to work quickly and make records with the minimum of fuss, but I think it’s also interesting to note that he was more of a craftsman than he liked to let on. Even on a record as splenetic and uncompromising as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band he channelled his talent and vision in a very controlled, precise way. As musicologist Wilfrid Mellers once wrote, the album – though aurally very different – is every bit as conceptual as Sgt Pepper, boasting the same carefully considered structure and flow. These demos reaffirm that, but otherwise tell you little new. The completed album is still the one you’ll keep going back to.
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