'I've
rarely seen pain like John's, and I've seen a lot of pain,' said the psychologist Arthur Janov about John Lennon. ‘John had a huge reservoir of unexplored and unexpressed feelings that
could be responsible for his bitterness, pessimism, jealousy…’
Wow, Arthur, you sure know how to gee a guy up. Oh sorry, you haven’t finished.
‘...cynicism, violence, lack of confidence...'
OK, you can stop now! That's maverick psychotherapists for you, I guess - not much in it for them to say to a potential client 'nah, you're fine'. Especially ones as rich as John Lennon. Famously, Janov became a major figure in Lennon's life for a time back in 1970, inspiring his first conventional solo album. But while Lennon's Plastic Ono Band was certainly groundbreaking, was it actually any good?
But first, let's rewind to late 1968, when John and Yoko released the first of three
rather, let's say, challenging experimental albums. The first, Two Virgins,
famously features the pair naked on the cover, an act that scandalised
the world and prompted a young Sissy Spacek to record a song called
John, You’ve Gone Too Far This Time. Meanwhile the third, The Wedding Album, was so
impenetrable that the critic Richard Williams inadvertently
reviewed a half hour test signal, unable to distinguish it from the
actual music.
When the Beatles' broke up in early 1970, John and Yoko had a bit of
down time on their hands. And, as luck would have it, at the same time
Janov's famous book, The Primal Scream, had just been published. His newly minted primal therapy was very fashionable, very Hollywood - more a cultural happening than a science. Janov, though, made all kinds of wild claims for it - that he could fix everything from alcoholism and menstrual cramps to - here it comes - 'homosexuality.' Asked for proof it worked, he said 'feelings explain so much that statistical evidence is irrelevant'.
Someone threw it the Onos way, they
gave him a call, and he booked them right in for the next five months.
Now, Janov must have been a busy man, so you have to admire his
professional dedication in giving up this amount of time to treat the
multi-millionaire pop stars.
Janov’s therapy was based on the idea that adult neuroses are caused
by unresolved childhood trauma, and that the cure is to violently wrench
that trauma from the system. Lennon liked this idea - his dad had been a
drunk who ran out on the family, returning only when John was rich and
famous. This certainly gave Janov plenty of material to work with - one
session saw Lennon ‘on his knees, pounding the wall as he screamed the
words 'daddy, daddy' over and over again’.
When the album emerged Janov's influence was all over it - songs about absent dads and dying mums sit alongside John's hamfisted social commentary. But above all it was a chance for John to return repeatedly to his favourite topic: himself. After all, he had plenty of form. The previous year's No Bed for Beatle John tells the story of John visiting Yoko in hospital and getting turfed out of a bed because it was needed by someone who was actually, you
know, ill and stuff. Jeez, and you thought things were bad in the NHS these days. Plastic Ono Band,
though, took self-obsession to new levels. 'Just a
boy and a little girl, trying to change the whole wide world’, he
humblebrags. There's even a song called Look at Me. Janov was right, of course, that Lennon had plenty of issues that did need 'fixing' - not least his violent tendencies, especially towards women. Funnily enough, there isn't a song about that.
This was a much more conventional record than his previous solo output, complete with
piano, choruses and Ringo, so you can only imagine how relieved his fans were
to hear some actual songs from the erstwhile moptop. That must account for its rapturous reception. Learning point: the value of setting yourself an exceptionally low bar.
Because if you’d imagined
some pretty transcendent music must have emerged out of those soul
searching therapy sessions, you'd be wrong. Lumpy blues and
sporadic bouts of pub singer howling, more like. While Lennon may have been many
things (‘bitter, pessimistic, jealous…’) he wasn’t really much of an
experimenter. There are some nice moments; Love is pretty enough, as is Isolation. But it's mostly pretty midding, stodgy fare. John, you haven’t gone far enough this time.
God, meanwhile, is a temper tantrum of a song in which he rails against the world, renouncing everything from Jesus, Bob Dylan, er, God, and mostly shockingly of all, the middle bit of Yellow Submarine. ‘I don’t believe in yoga!’, he sings. Nobody’s forcing you to, John. Try a zumba class, whatever. Perhaps he could have just cut to the chase and screamed ‘I’m nothing like Paul!’ over and over for 45 minutes. Or ‘help me if you can I’m feeling down’. There you go.
As for Yoko’s record, she was at least good at this stuff. Her Janov album is genuinely batshit, all insane, frazzled jams and basically screaming the fucking place down. True, only a very few brave sonic conquistadors have ever made it to side two. But at least it sounds like a look into someone’s deepest psyche. Lennon’s is more like being stuck next to a bloke ranting at you in the pub. Of course, Yoko’s album was ignored while Lennon, the male genius, was fawned over by the critics. Fortunately time has been kinder to Yoko than to post Beatles John, I think.
Meanwhile McCartney was holed up somewhere windy wearing heroically large jumpers and writing the opus that would become Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. Now tell me again, who was the best Beatle?
