“My idea of fun”: the album that made John Lennon a musician again
There were always major contradictions in how John Lennon operated during his lifetime. He was always willing to preach about love and peace on his records whenever he could, but at the same time, he could make something like ‘How Do You Sleep’ that left nothing to the imagination about his feelings on Paul McCartney. That was all a part of what made him who he was to most Beatles fans, but he felt he needed something to help bring him back from the more pointed side of his career after a while.
If Lennon had a voice as a solo artist, though, he knew he wanted to make sure he said something that mattered. A lot had come and gone throughout the 1960s that The Beatles needed to keep their mouths shut about, and when Lennon finally had a platform to say what was on his mind, he wasted no time in pumping out one political song after another, whether that was ‘Give Peace a Chance’ or ‘Power to the People’.
And it’s not like he wasn’t good at it, either. His anthems for a peaceful world was a great way of building off the anthems that he had worked on in his old group, and when listening to his more direct material like ‘Gimme Some Truth’, he could somehow find a way to make the words flow even if the song itself was a mouthful to get through.
There was a moment where everything came to a halt, though, and Some Time in New York City was where he reached his limit. He had good reason to be worried since the FBI was listening in on all of his conversations, but when hearing him go to bat for his beliefs over the course of a double album of material, it was clear that he had started to alienate pieces of his fanbase as well, especially with the live disc that bled into dissonant noise after a while.
“Mind Games, to me, was like an interim record between being a manic political lunatic to back to being a musician again. [It’s] like the cross between them.”
John Lennon
Some change needed to happen, and Yoko Ono was the one to instigate everything. She wasn’t about to roll over and keep making political material until she burned herself out, and when things started to push back against them, she realised that they only needed a break from each other to start figuring themselves out. So with Lennon on his own for the first time since his Beatles days, Mind Games was the first time he was officially flying solo.
Despite having some reservations about dipping his toes back into pop music, Lennon would later claim he needed to make the album in response to all of the political material, saying, “Mind Games, to me, was like an interim record between being a manic political lunatic to back to being a musician again. [It’s] like the cross between them. I was really playing mind games, mind games is what it was. I had enough of this trying to be deep and think … ‘Why can’t I have some fun??’ And my idea of fun with music was to sing. Sing anything.”
Although a lot of the songs on Mind Games do have a tinge of regret at breaking away from Ono, it’s not like they don’t have some shining moments as well. ‘Meat City’ is a fun rocker that calls back to Lennon’s early days in The Beatles, and while ‘Bring on The Lucie (Freeda People)’ is firmly in political territory, he sounds a lot more rejuvenated now that he wasn’t as angry about the state of the world.
While this would eventually prompt Lennon’s infamous “lost weekend” and show him reach one of the romantic lows, Mind Games was at least a step in the right direction. Because if Lennon had kept up his streak of political material, there’s a good chance that he could have become a one-trick pony really quickly.
