John Lennon – a complicated individual, I think it can be said. I’m not in the huge wave of people who declare him a monster every time his name is mentioned. But he did go through some shit. His mum was killed outside of his home when he was a teenager, and his dad left the family and only returned when he became famous. Those two things pretty much set him off for life. Those events are enough to mess any kid up. But being thrown into the spotlight as a member of the biggest music group in the world, I’d have to assume he had to put those events behind him somehow. It wasn’t until the Beatles split and he had all the time in the world with Yoko Ono, that his mum and dad came to the forefront of his writing. And fair to say, at that point in time (1970), John was a bit pissed off with everything.

A common thread on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is Lennon’s feelings of being let down by the people he once looked up to when he was younger. And that album begins with the subjects from which most of his pain stemmed from: his parents. ‘Mother’ starts it all off with an ominous funeral bell that tolls slowly. In the middle of the forth toll, Lennon’s voice erupts with a wail accompanied by Ringo Starr’s drums and Klaus Voormann’s bass guitar. The first verse concerns his mother, the second his father, and the third verse sees Lennon warn the listener to not follow in his footsteps. Maybe because he had tried to hide his hurt underneath his wit for all those years, I’m not so sure myself. And god, does he sing every word so honestly. The vocal melody’s sort of all over the place in terms of the scales and leaps from one note to the other. It’s like there’s not one syllable in a word that stays on one note. Such an engaging listen, earnest and so, so real.

Then comes the “Momma, don’t go/Daddy come home” ending, which I have to say actually frightened me a bit when I heard it the first time in 2010 or so. Sounds innocent enough when Lennon first sings that. But as the song continues, that singing gradually turns into guttural screams that properly distort the microphone he’s using. He starts to play lower down on the piano during this coda too which gives the whole track a darker tone and feel. I feel like all of this is a method to make the listener feel as uncomfortable as possible, particularly those in 1970 who still wanted some good old Beatles music. I think he succeeded with this goal. A couple months back, the album was re-released in this huge package with new mixes and demos. A raw mix of the album version that removed its fade out and the echo-effect on Lennon’s vocal’s on there, and I might even like that one better.