Okay, here’s the history lesson for the totally clueless: John Lennon—along with The Beatles—didn’t so much revolutionize pop music as streamline it into a series of memorable ground rules that were easy for anyone to apply. They’re timeless constructs that never sound old and when any given band applied them just right, they can enjoy the same successes The Beatles did due to simple accessibility. Don’t think it’s that simple? The cases have already been made for that fact by everyone from Nirvana to the 1990s to Sloan to Green Day to Oasis. Even before The Beatles broke up though, John Lennon was beginning to get sick of it all. Getting progressively angrier (attested by a variety of sources using rear-view binoculars), Lennon had apparently made the decision to break free and his first, finest bow shot away from the Fab Four was Plastic Ono Band—his debut solo effort. Even before the demise of The Beatles, the rumblings of discontent were present on the album. Classic Albums attempts to decode what was at work in the singer’s head; at the beginning of the program, a tremendous amount of time is spent trying to figure out this record by a most stymied songwriter. He was sick of the saccharine trust that The Beatles had become and, together with the reviled Yoko Ono, love wasn’t all he needed. With Plastic Ono Band, he was trying to make music that mattered to him, music that had more to do with what he was seeing as the world changed around him, as well as attempting to break free of the addictions that were beginning to take over his life. Scream therapy helped—that gets addressed here—and is presented as a driving, necessary force in the record.
That out of the way, the DVD eventually makes its way onto the changes that Lennon wanted to make in order to break from The Beatles. After the late, orchestrated records like Sgt. Pepper, the singer wanted to strip his sound back to basics. Little bits of the process that ultimately yielded the album are revealed, like the fact rough mixes were used regularly by Lennon during this period, or that the singer had to track “Mother” at the end of the night because performing the vocal would demolish his voice. These and other effects are what characterize the method of operation for this record, contrasted by the precious beauty of songs like “Hold On."
Plastic Ono Band also breaks from the set formula that Classic Albums has relied upon so heavily since its inception. While there is the occasional stock image of the producer twiddling with knobs and buttons to break down the songs bit-by-bit—which has always been so omnipresent in this series—it takes a backseat here to exposing Lennon’s mental atmosphere during the sessions and writing as informed by Yoko Ono and Klaus Voorman (Ringo Starr helps along the way too); in that way, Plastic Ono Band is more a psychological study than a musical one. As the album was too, this installment of Classic Albums is a brand apart; not always easy, but an important transition worth discovering.
