The 1980 Listening Post - John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy

 John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Double Fantasy

#445

By Stephen Romone Lewis

John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Double Fantasy

Genre: Pop 

Allen’s Rating: 4 out of 5

Stephen’s Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Allen’s Highlights:

Just Like Starting Over

I’m Losing You

Beautiful Boy

Watching the Wheels

Stephen’s Highlights: 

Watching the Wheels

(Just Like) Starting Over

I’m Your Angel

Hard Times are Over

    First listen 2020.

    I needed to listen with fresh ears to honestly evaluate this album. I failed. 

Two years into a Beatles obsession, Lennon was assassinated. I was 13. My first experience with loss. My parents gave me Double Fantasy, an early Christmas present, 18 hours after his death. It’s impossible, even now, to disassociate my feelings of adolescent heartbreak from this music. Whatever emotions John and Yoko intended me to have listening to their songs are replaced with grief, hopelessness and anger. Lots and lots of anger. These are not sappy songs of blissful matrimony, they boil my blood.

Listening to “Beautiful Boy” I can only hear myself scream, “Ronny, you could have stopped Hinckley! A bullet to your lung. You almost bled out you…”

As a kid I thought the lyrics to “Woman” seemed like dreck, but now they sound like me shouting, “WHEN WILL WE STOP ARMING THE MENTALLY ILL!”

Is it over produced? I don’t know! I don’t hear production. All I hear is an increasingly hoarse voice crying to John. “You should have gone to England; the worst he could have done was stab you. Right, George?”

Do Yoko’s songs ruin what could have been a pop masterpiece? I don’t know! I stopped paying attention after I flipped the disc. Forty years of congressional “leaders” confusing “a well regulated militia” with well armed psych wards. Every song leads me deeper into a revenge fantasy where…

Wait. 

The widow is singing, “It's been very hard, but it's getting easier now. Hard times are over, over for a while.”

It’s difficult to maintain a decent hate spiral while people chant, “Hard times are over.”

BUT! But! Sandy Hook!

“Hard times are over.”

You don’t sound like you believe yourself anymore than I do, Yoko.

“Hard times are over.”

But… 

“Hard times are over.”

Okay.

“Hard times are over. Over for awhile.”

https://open.spotify.com/album/1NWA2fPLUAW5df7UGI5thp?si=m3oauSzMSHasKzfeLrG9kA

The 1986 Listening Post - John Lennon - Menlove Ave.

John Lennon - Menlove Ave.

#518

November 3 1986

John Lennon

Menlove Ave

Genre: Rock

2.75 out of 5

Highlights:

Steel and Glass

Requisite 80s Cover: “To Know Hier is to Love Her”. There are other covers here but this time Lennon is covering a Beatles version of a Spector track and he seems to be trying to should like David Bowie circa 1974 and it falls really flat. 

I am the wrong guy to assess this, I fear. I have never been a Beatles lover. I don’t care for the solo works of the 70s, for the most part, while I liked Double Fantasy enough, I bet it would have scored higher had it not been for Yoko. But, then again, if it was just John it might have included stuff from Milk and Honey and it would have scored…about the same.

This is a lot of leftovers, yes?

It feels half baked to me. 

Is this it? Is there a sea of posthumous Lennon releases on their way, ala Tupac? Cuz…ugh. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp7J3EjCo4U

The 1984 Listening Post - John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Milk & Honey

John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Milk & Honey

#14

January 27 1984

John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Milk & Honey

3.25 out of 5

Highlights:

Don’t Be Scared

Nobody Told Me

Grow Old With Me

I really enjoyed the back and forth duality of Double Fantasy. It felt organic in the playfulness and charming in Lennon’s rebirth. This feels compiled, which I guess it was. 

Strange that the strongest Lennon tune, and the one that sounds the most fleshed out, doesn’t come until the end of Side One. Why not lead off with a song that could set the tone for the album. If this record would score higher I would probably rearrange the tracks to lead off with it and put “Steppin’ Out” in it’s place, at the end, where it belongs. So you can get up and turn the record over when it comes on because you also know that Yoko’s Side One ender “O’ Sanity” is a 1 minute trifle but a kind of hilarious one that opens a little window into what she must have been going through. I applaud it’s ending. Big ups to you, Yoko. 

It’s really challenging to be objective about this record given the circumstances but so much of it is not great and that plodding mediocrity falls on both Yoko’s work and John’s. And, when it succeeds, it’s just fine. I’ve never been a fan of Lennon’s solo work and less so Ono’s. 

But, as the album draws to a close and the lo-fi “Grow Old with Me” plays after the melancholy “Let Me Count the Ways” I am struck by how much this song, with that tambourine and it’s playfully wistful melody that calls to mind McCartney’s work, has found me with a lump in my throat.

Context is everything in this case. 

Less an album than a final statement or a closing chapter. Wholly appropriate that Ono gets the last word. Impossible for her to tell John what she wants to and it’s she that will live on, in real life and as the album closes that chapter. 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/milk-and-honey/916330318