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Before there was the Lost Weekend, there was the Political Year. When John Lennon arrived in New York, home of radical politics, art statements and Yoko Ono, he found himself plunged into an environment very different from the relative calm of life at his Tittinghurst country house, where his home was open house to everyone from the radical Yippies to folkie Phil Ochs.
Defying the authorities, Lennon allied himself with every cause going, from the jailing of White Panther John Sinclair to the Bloody Sunday shootings. And where once his songs had been vague musings about mind games and having no possessions, now he was singing slogan songs even more specific than Paul McCartney’s Give Ireland Back To The Irish.
Ironically, given his former opposition to live performances in his previous band, Lennon was also part of the New York live scene, hooking up with local rockers Elephant’s Memory and playing shows with them and Yoko. All this activity did nothing to endear him to the FBI, but then nothing short of going back to England would have.
This outpouring of creativity and activism was recorded, some of it released at the time (the spontaneous-sounding Some Time In New York City) and some of it not (a concert with Elephant’s Memory). Now it has all been put together in an epic nine-CD collection, including most of Some Time In New York City, both live shows, and a collection of home demos, some of which feature Phil Ochs. The result is not so much a snapshot of an era as a very detailed portrait of a short period in Lennon and Ono’s lives.
Once you strip away the flim and the flam – the booklets, the photos and the new mixes – you are left with some reasonably good live music (Elephant’s Memory bring to Lennon’s music a bluesy heaviness that sometimes suits it and sometimes doesn’t), some intriguing demos (arguably the best material here, whether it be rare Lennon originals or decent rock’n’roll covers) and most of Some Time In New York City, an album that suffers from: a) being terrible, especially The Luck Of The Irish, a song that makes Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl sound like The Chieftains), and b) the omission of its one great song, whose title means it has been excised from the album.
One for the history buffs.
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