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John Lennon: Mind Games

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Apple Records
Released: 1973.10.29
Time:
 40:41
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): John Lennon
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.johnlennon.com
Appears with: The Beatles
Purchase date: 2014
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Mind Games (Lennon) - 4:13
[2] Tight A$ (Lennon) - 3:37
[3] Aisumasen [I'm Sorry] (Lennon) - 4:44
[4] One Day [At a Time] (Lennon) - 3:09
[5] Bring on the Lucie [Freeda Peeple] (Lennon) - 4:12
[6] Nutopian International Anthem (Lennon) - 0:03
[7] Intuition (Lennon) - 3:08
[8] Out the Blue (Lennon) - 3:23
[9] Only People (Lennon) - 3:23
[10] I Know [I Know] (Lennon) - 3:49
[11] You Are Here (Lennon) - 4:08
[12] Meat City (Lennon) - 2:45

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


John Lennon - Lead, Harmony & Backing Vocals, Rhythm, Slide & Acoustic Guitars, Clavichord, Percussion, Arrangements, Artwork, Producer
Ken Ascher - Piano, Hammond Organ, Mellotron
David Spinozza - Lead Guitar
Gordon Edwards - Bass
Jim Keltner - Drums
Rick Marotta - Drums on [5,12]
Michael Brecker - Saxophone
Sneaky Pete Kleinow - Pedal Steel Guitar
Something Different - Backing Vocals

Roy Cicala - Engineer
Dan Barbiero - Engineer
Tom Rabstanek - Mastering
Bob Gruen - Artwork
Yoko Ono - Artwork

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Recorded in July-August 1973 at the Record Plant Studios, New York.

Mind Games is John Lennon's fourth album, and was recorded at Record Plant Studios in New York in summer 1973, and released in November of that year. The album was Lennon's first self-produced recording without help from Phil Spector. Like his previous album, the politically topical and somewhat abrasive Some Time in New York City, Mind Games was poorly received by some music critics upon release. It reached number 13 in the UK and number 9 in the US, where it was certified gold. The album was recorded while Lennon was having difficulties with US immigration and at the beginning of his 18-month separation from Yoko Ono. The title track was released as a single at the same time as the album. The album itself was later reissued several times throughout the 1970s and 1980s.



After the hostile reaction to the politically charged Sometime in New York City, John Lennon moved away from explicit protest songs and returned to introspective songwriting with Mind Games. Lennon didn't leave politics behind - he just tempered his opinions with humor on songs like "Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)," which happened to undercut the intention of the song. It also indicated the confusion that lies at the heart of the album. Lennon doesn't know which way to go, so he tries everything. There are lovely ballads like "Out of the Blue" and "One Day (At a Time)," forced, ham-fisted rockers like "Meat City" and "Tight A$," sweeping Spectoresque pop on "Mind Games," and many mid-tempo, indistinguishable pop/rockers. While the best numbers are among Lennon's finest, there's only a handful of them, and the remainder of the record is simply pleasant. But compared to Sometime in New York City, as well as the subsequent Walls and Bridges, Mind Games sounded like a return to form.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine - All Music Guide



Released in 1973 after the dismal musical detour that was Sometime in New York City, Mind Games showed John Lennon returning to the emotional pop sounds of Plastic Ono Band and Imagine. But while the glorious title track (the album's only hit) was every inch a worthy successor to "Imagine," the rest of the songs were written off by most critics as half-baked experiments. In retrospect, most of them, while not classic stuff, are still better than the bulk of what passed for rock music in the early 1970s. "You Are Here" and "Out of the Blue" are definitely on par with Lennon's best solo work, while "Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)" couches its political barbs in silly good humor. Even better is "Meat City," a rocker as wild and surreal as the "White Album"'s "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey." The 2002 remastered reissue is fleshed out with three "home version" takes of album tracks.

Dan Epstein - Amazon.com



Mind Games is, to my knowledge, the first release from the conceptual country Nutopia, whose existence John and Yoko proclaim in a Declaration on the lyric sheet. Oddly enough, it isn't all that different from the records he has been making in America these last few years. Those have revealed a steady decline from the high points of his post-Beatle work, Plastic Ono Band and "Instant Karma." There, he distilled his simplistic humanism into a single moving statement of belief — at once his most accessible and intelligent attempt at autobiography and philosophy.

With Imagine he began affecting attitudes bereft of emotional force. As he turned to petty gossip and didactic social commentary, his gambit of combining simple thoughts with simple music backfired. What was moving when applied to his own life was unbearably pretentious when used to offer aphorisms concerning larger issues.

Musically, Mind Games is a return to the form of Plastic Ono Band, employing some of the same simple chord progressions, similar instrumentation, and tunes that on closer inspection prove devoid of melodies, consisting only of pleasant collections of pop song, gospel and folk-rock cliches, particularly dependent on Dylan's apocalyptic mid-Sixties style.

The album's music might have served as the basis for a good LP if it had been paired with some new lyrical insight and passion. But instead, Lennon has come up with his worst writing yet. With lines like, "A million heads are better than one/So come on, get it on," a listener can only accept or reject them. I've done the latter.

Lennon's lyrics aren't offensive, per se — just misguided in so underrating his audience's intelligence. John Lennon's admirers do not need to be preached at about the importance of love. They might even be able to withstand something more challenging than the repetition of the hollow shells of ideas they already share. But then, perhaps Lennon's didacticism, preaching and banality are part of the mind game of the album's title, yet another attempt to push his luck to the brink of self-annihilation.

Mind Games remains listenable, which is certainly more than can be said for Some Time in New York City. Lennon's voice is in good shape, his production a cut above average and his performance occasionally forces us to take him more seriously than we would if he seemed less determined. "Mind Games," "One Day," "Intuition" and "Only People" (with some lines remarkably reminiscent of "Revolution") all have one or another touch to recommend at least a few listenings.

Mind Games reveals another major artist of the Sixties lost in the changing social and musical environment of the Seventies, helplessly trying to impose his own gargantuan ego upon an audience that has already absorbed his insights and is now waiting hopefully for him to chart a new course.

JON LANDAU - January 3, 1974
RollingStone.com



John Lennon‘s spot on the list of all-time rock greats has long been safely secured. But in 1973, he still struggled to escape the long shadow cast by his work with the Beatles, and not always successfully.

That year found Lennon smarting from the scathing reviews that greeted his most recent release, 1972′s ‘Some Time in New York City.’ His confidence shaken following the critical rejection of some of his most politically oriented and willfully controversial songwriting, Lennon decided to take a step back for his next release, retreating into more personal focus and trying to entertain rather than provoke. His fourth solo LP, ‘Mind Games,’ released on Nov. 2, 1973, reflected this change in direction, restoring a bit of Lennon’s commercial luster in the process.

But while ‘Mind Games’ presented smoother sounds than those Lennon crafted for ‘Some Time in New York City,’ behind the scenes his life had spiraled into near-complete turmoil — both on the legal front, where he was battling to avoid deportation from the U.S. while being harassed by FBI surveillance, and on a personal level, where his marriage to Yoko Ono had entered the infamous 16-month rocky patch later referred to as his ‘Lost Weekend.’ They were trying times, to say the least; as Lennon later told biographer David Sheff, “Well, first I thought, ‘Whoopee! Bachelor life! Whoopee, whoopee!’ And then I woke up one day and thought, ‘What is this? I want to go home.’ But she wouldn’t let me come home.”

In hindsight, it’s unsurprising that all this tumult helped produce one of Lennon’s safest sets of songs — odes to peace and domesticity whose arrangements lacked the dark, yearning edge of his earlier work. Ironically, the same critics who blasted ‘Some Time in New York City’ for its heavy-handed leftist bent were also less than satisfied with ‘Mind Games.’ Rolling Stone‘s Jon Landau, for one, argued that the record contained Lennon’s “worst writing yet” and complained, “With lines like ‘A million heads are better than one / So come on, get it on,’ a listener can only accept or reject them. I’ve done the latter.”

The record’s simplicity was derived partly by design and partly through necessity. Not only was it written and recorded within the span of a few weeks, it also found Lennon producing himself after relying on Phil Spector for his previous two LPs. And while subsequent ‘Lost Weekend’ sessions sometimes proved frustratingly unfocused, Lennon was impressively productive while working on ‘Mind Games,’ even writing a castoff track (‘Rock and Roll People’) that he ended up giving to Johnny Winter.

As Lennon later explained to Sheff, the album’s working title was ‘Make Love Not War,’ but “That was such a cliché that you couldn’t say it anymore, so I wrote it obscurely, but it’s all the same story. How many times can you say the same thing over and over? When this came out, in the early ’70s, everybody was starting to say the ’60s was a joke, it didn’t mean anything, those love-and-peaceniks were idiots. ‘We all have to face the reality of being nasty human beings who are born evil and everything’s gonna be lousy and rotten so boo-hoo-hoo … ‘ ‘We had fun in the ’60ss,’ they said, ‘but the others took it away from us and spoiled it all for us.’ And I was trying to say, ‘No, just keep doin’ it.’”

It was a message warmly embraced by Lennon’s fans, who sent ‘Mind Games’ into the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic and turned the title track into a worldwide hit. And while Lennon would suffer his share of negative reviews during the remainder of his career, the success of ‘Mind Games’ seemed to help him find his footing as a solo artist. His next release, 1974′s ‘Walls and Bridges,’ was even more popular, topping the charts while spinning off the No. 1 hit ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.’

Jeff Giles - November 2, 2013
UltimateClassicRock.com
 

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