The 1973 album John Lennon wished he never released: “Ruined”
John Lennon was never going to apologise for the kind of music that he made.
He may have been told to keep some of his personal feelings out of his songs whenever The Beatles gave interviews back in the day, but he didn’t want to be defined by the kind of “safe” version of rock and roll for the rest of his life. After all, some of his greatest influences were the ones that pushed the envelope every so often, but he did admit that some of the records that he released may have been a bit too radical for the times every now and again.
While a lot of what Lennon was doing might not seem like one of the most revolutionary careers in the world nowadays, it was unheard of to hear someone doing what he was doing circa 1968. No one had heard sounds like the ones that he came up with in the back half of The Beatles’ career, and especially when he hooked up with Yoko Ono, most people probably would have been glad if they didn’t have to be subjected to the cover of Two Virgins with him and Ono posing completely naked.
But Lennon was the kind to express himself and then move on with his life, no matter what he was doing. If he felt strongly about a particular topic, it wasn’t hard for him to end up writing a song about it, and by the time he had aired out all his grievances for two albums, he felt that he wasn’t always the problem in these situations. He had his fair share of emotional baggage, but the greater problems with the world was something he couldn’t ignore when working on Some Time in New York.
Having moved to ‘The Big Apple’ to be closer to the artsy side of life, Lennon wanted to turn his voice up a little more when seeing the corrupt side of politics. He was already willing to stick his neck out on the line when making a tune like ‘Revolution’, but his collaborative album with Ono was like every single thing that he was talking about in ‘Working Class Hero’ brought to the forefront. For people who like that song, that should be great, but it does get a bit monotonous after a while.
Even if we ignore the fact that a lot of the songs are super dated these days because of the subject matter, a lot of the problems that Lennon had with the album had more to do with the people around it. None of his songs is terrible per se, and even the Ono cuts on the first disc of the record are perfectly serviceable pop tunes, but since the public began looking at him like some quasi-revolutionary, the fact that the album was simply “okay” made Lennon wish that he had never put it out in the first place.
He could be brutally honest about how he felt, but this was one of the first times where he felt like the public spoiled the kind of album that he wanted his new record to be, saying, “[The public] almost ruined it. It became journalism and not poetry. And I basically feel that I’m a poet. Then I began to take it seriously on another level, saying, ‘Well, I am reflecting what is going on, right?’” But the problem was that Lennon and Ono did start to realise that maybe their collaborations had become detrimental to each other after a while.
And when you look at Ono’s decision that she needed a break from Lennon, the next few years would see him grappling with what it was like living on his own for so long. He felt like he had found his soulmate, and even if he was trying his hardest to make it up to Ono in song, Mind Games and Walls and Bridges does paint the picture of a broken man who was trying to come to grips with the fact that he was walking through without one of the most important people he had ever known.
So when you think about it, Some Time in New York City is actually one of the most important albums that Lennon ever made. Because when you remove all of the political doctrine and the guitar riffs, what the album represented is his collaborations with Ono finally reaching an impasse, and the aftermath that it left meant that he would be lost for a long time before finally coming back to his other half in time for Double Fantasy.
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