FILTER REISSUES
Lennon’s act of contrition; his fourth solo album gets a lavish, rejuvenating box-set treatment.
John Lennon ★★★★
Mind Games: Ultimate Collection
CAPITOL/UME. CD/DL/LP
ON APRIL 2, 1973, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a press conference in New York City to announce their latest peace project: the birth of a nation. Nutopia was “a conceptual country”, they said in a statement, with “no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.” Citizenship was awarded by declaring “your awareness of Nutopia.” The statement was actually dated April 1 – April Fool’s Day.
Nutopia was one of the couple’s “mind games”, Lennon admitted to the press corps. “We put the thought out, then we’ll react to whatever the reaction is.” There was underlying tension in the gag. Lennon was effectively stateless, fighting deportation from the US by the Nixon administration. The ex-Beatle was soon homeless as well, evicted by Ono from their newly purchased apartment in the Dakota as their marriage hit the rocks.
Before he left New York in October 1973 for his ‘Lost Weekend’ in Los Angeles, Lennon was apologising profusely, pleading for reunion, on Mind Games, his fourth solo album, recorded at the Record Plant that summer and released in November. One Day (At A Time), Out The Blue, I Know (I Know) and You Are Here were all slow-dance mea culpa, Lennon writing as obsessively about guilt and need as he had about his devotion to Ono on 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and 1971’s Imagine. He even tried to get a message through in amateur Japanese, on bended knee in Aisumasen (I’m Sorry).
It didn’t work. Lennon spent 18 months in exile while Mind Games – filled out with peace march tunes and ’50s-rock revivalism in stilted neo-Phil Spector fidelity – barely made it into Billboard’s Top 10, a decent recovery after the radical-chic misfire of 1972’s Some Time In New York City but not enough to dispel the suggestion of a spent force. “It sounds like outtakes from Imagine,” Robert Christgau wrote in Creem, one of the kinder reviews. Quoted in the massively detailed book that accompanies this extravagant reapprai
