John Lennon – ‘Mind Games’
It was all starting to come apart for John Lennon. Three years after The Beatles split up, Lennon had occupied his time with increasing political activism, a move to New York, primal scream therapy, public protests, and recording two of his most beloved albums, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine.
After crafting the highly-charged Some Time in New York City, Lennon’s world started to crumble around him. His outspoken views had caused him to become one of Richard Nixon’s main targets, with his fight for a green card coming up against constant FBI surveillance. His marriage to Ono was also failing, with his infamous move to California for his ‘Lost Weekend’ just around the corner. Through all of his difficulties, Lennon decided that it was time to record a new studio album.
After more than a year of not writing any music, Lennon hunkered down and completed the material that made up his third solo studio album Mind Games in just one week. Launching with the euphoric and sweeping title track, Lennon decides to focus on the positives of his marital troubles, even referencing the art piece that brought him and Ono together more than half a decade prior. Without Phil Spector to assist in production, Lennon conjures up his own version of the Wall of Sound, folding in strings, keyboards, and slide guitar into the song’s arrangement.
After frontloading Mind Games with the album’s best song, Lennon proceeds to weave his way through a series of mostly lightweight tracks that are light on lyrical insight and heavy on early 1970s musical styles. ‘Tight A$’ is a tongue-in-cheek rockabilly track that shows off Lennon’s humorous side to mixed results. Lennon’s constant switches between serious and non-serious topics are whiplash-inducing, and if you don’t know the full context behind what was happening in his life at the time, Mind Games risks faltering under its lack of truly memorable material.
‘Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)’ is an apologetic ballad that sees Lennon channelling his personal turmoil into song. It’s a strange choice, considering how Lennon and Ono had separated by the time Lennon recorded the song, but it shows just how dedicated Lennon was to Ono – at least until he absconded to the other side of the country with his assistant, May Pang, a few months later. Just as David Spinozza’s guitar solo reaches its apex, the song suddenly drops out with just a lingering organ chord.
Lennon continues his odes to Ono on ‘One Day (At A Time)’, with Lennon positioning himself and Ono as counterparts in nature. The personal material on Mind Games would end up ageing well once the couple got back together in the latter half of the 1970s. In the moment, however, it must have come off as a particularly desperate reach for Lennon to keep Ono around. By the time Mind Games hit record store shelves at the end of 1973, Lennon was already befriending Harry Nilsson and causing debauchery in Los Angeles.
‘Bring on the Lucie (Freeda Peeple)’ marks a return to political content, specifically Lennon’s brand of general “peace and love” that he trotted out on songs like ‘Power to the People’. Lennon makes this clear in the opening lines ,”We don’t care what flag you’re waving / We don’t even wanna know your name / We don’t care where you’re from or where you’re going / All we know is that you came”. For Lennon, politics were about connecting with the most amount of people as humanly possible. Critics might take issue with his lack of specifics, but ‘Bring on the Lucie’ fits right within Lennon’s wheelhouse of simplistic yet inspiring messages.
After a brief moment of silence that Lennon dubbed ‘Nutonian International Anthem’, side two kicks off with the self-referential ‘Intuition’. Even when Lennon decides to hang loose on Mind Games, the cheesier aspects of early 1970s studio production and popular music occasionally render the album limp and lethargic. ‘Out The Blue’ at least returns Lennon to his stripped-down fingerpicked acoustic guitar expertise. A stirring ballad that finally sees Lennon playing to his strengths, ‘Out The Blue’ contains flashes of the Beatles past that are too few and far between on Mind Games.
The rubberiness of ‘Only People’ is so odd that it overshadows the entire track. Lennon’s attempts to gather the populace together are noble, but since ‘Bring on the Lucie’ already covered that territory, ‘Only People’ feels redundant. ‘I Know (I Know)’ starts in an almost identical fashion to ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, furthering the lack of real originality in Mind Games. Writing the entire album in a week was probably an attempt to capture some spontaneity, but Mind Games would have certainly benefited from a bit more time and attention when it came to lyrics and musical composition.
‘You Are Here’ is a welcome shift into Hawaiian-tinged soft rock. Beautifully languid harmonies float around slide guitar swoops that create Lennon’s dreamiest and most relaxed atmosphere on record. For someone who was struggling to keep his life together, Lennon sounds very chill and content on ‘You Are Here’. With the lighthearted rocker ‘Meat City’, Lennon closes out Mind Games on a rollicking and listless note.
The bitter truth about Mind Games is that, had anyone other than John Lennon made it, the album would likely have been forgotten as a relic of early 1970s pop rock. It’s nowhere near the bottom of Lennon’s discography, but it also doesn’t come anywhere near his best work and isn’t even chaotically fun like his follow-up, Walls and Bridges. Thanks to being a former Beatle, plus a lot of heavy lifting from the album’s title track, Mind Games continues to float through pop culture. But its staying power has everything to do with the man who made it and little to do with the album itself.
