A new ‘deluxe box set’ of John Lennon’s 1973 album Mind Games came out on 12 July. The Lennon estate was busy whipping up enthusiasm all the first half of the year, despatching it far and wide across the Beatlemaniac Youtuber community – probably their leading sales avenue these days.
They have tried hard to make this release a credibly ‘collectible’ something. The deluxe box set comes as a tasteful cube, filled with books, blu rays, posters, postcards and multiple CDs. There are little secrets and puzzles sprinkled within: if you shine an ultraviolet light on the CDs, spectral Yokos appear.
Oh, and one other thing: it costs £129.99.
To quote the man himself: Oh My God. What’s happened to we Beatlemaniacs? What kind of sick, desperate hunger would cause any of us to splurge a full ton on this gristle, however tastefully repackaged?
Any even vaguely well-tutored Beatlemaniac ought to know to avoid this album, to shun it with as little pity as we would McCartney’s Press to Play, or Ringo’s Rotogravure or Harrison’s Extra Texture.
Such Beatle solo efforts are traps set for unwary, beginner Beatle fans. They offer a kind of incoctrination: we stumble across them in record stores, offered at bargain prices, and hope to have struck gold. Then we take them home and learn the ugly truth: that pretty much any Beatle solo album recorded from the mid seventies onwards should be approached like a burger from a roadside van – with an excess of caution, and much suspicious sniffing.
Some are willing to give the album a pass because it’s not the stagnant bilge of Lennon’s ’72 disaster flop Some Time in New York City. On Mind Games, the line goes, he at least seemed to have dropped the feeble politics. But even apologists used to accept the basic, unfortunate truth: that Lennon stalled and nosedived in ’72 and never really recovered.
The original album
Lennon produced Mind Games wretchedly, making a din out of everything. It is one of the most lyrically bankrupt of his albums, criminally boring, and occasionally laughable.
The opening track and single, Mind Games, is the strongest track, but never quite gets where it’s reaching. Tight As is middle of the road, boshed-off rock and roll, featuring such immortal lyrics as ‘well if you can’t stand the heat you’d better get back in the shade.’
Aisumasen is a whining apology to Yoko. One Day at a Time is twee, falsetto nonsense of a kind that might make even McCartney shiver: “cos I’m a fish and you’re the sea /you’re the honey and I’m the bee”. It may be the only track in Lennon’s entire career where it’s possible to hate his vocal.
Bring on the Lucie is an Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da of a political song, where his peace credentials finally went to die, mocked and buried in a shallow grave flooded with the tears of session guitarists.
Intuition, perhaps the low point of the entire album, is a wretched mix of rain-dropping synth, shitty vocal and Rhubarb and Custard guitar (is that guitar? Harpsicord? How do I make it stop? ). Also, what the hell do you mean, ‘Intuition takes you back’ John?
You are Here is the droning of a preachy beatnik bore: “East is west and west is east”. Deep, John. Only People is godawful jangly muzak. Meat City rounds the album off by confirming that the man has fallen very far from Yer Blues and Revolution : it’s a jerky nonsense of a thing.
There are a couple of half decent moments, little flashes of something almost accomplished. Out the Blue is nice enough. I know is kind of OK. But really, there is nothing outright good here. Mostly it is very bad.
The ultimate edition
The new Mind Games release manages to serve up the same tracklist in five separate forms – none of which offer much of a new flavour.
One CD contains ‘elemental’ mixes – that is to say, versions of the exact same recordings, stripped of certain instrumentation, creating simpler but evidently incomplete versions.
This blows a little life into some tunes: Lennon’s vocal on tracks like Mind Games and Aisumasen is more striking. But doing this to every track is a pretty shabby way to justify the word ‘ultimate’ or the whopping price tag. The exercise is in itself an admission of the godawfulness of the original production.
The Lennon camp then has the barefaced cheek to offer another CD of ‘element’ ‘mixes’: this would be…the exact same tunes without any vocal: literally, just pulling out certain instrument tracks and playing them in isolation: this involves us being asked, for instance, to listen to only the organ off Mind Games, followed by the guitar off Tight As. It’s pretty hard not to see this as taking the piss.
The Evolution documentary tracks include some demo content – You are here begins as a very different song. So does Meat City, which sounds initially like it might have gone somewhere more promising. But no tune is salvaged or reborn out of these simpler versions – certainly nothing approaches the way that George’s All Things Must Pass demos bring astonishing new vitality,often better than the overproduced final tracks.
That album merited the ‘Super deluxe/ ultimate/ special edition’ tag. Not only did it breathe new life into the established album tracks, it offered virtually an entirely new album of unreleased songs. Mind Games Ultimate Edition offers not one single new or unreleased tune. Just the same 12 middling numbers reheated again and again and again, in search of merit that just isn’t there.
You are here
Still, what do I know? The Lennon estate are obviously confident they’ll persuade a sufficient number of maniacs to buy this thing and justify all this repackaging and marketing. Youtubers I have seen are generally enthusiastic.
Time and streaming must have addled our minds, made us vulnerable to these gimmicks. Or maybe a few years ago the Lennons unleashed some cold, calculating AI on us, infiltrating our devices, flooding our minds with subliminal algorithmic marketing – honed to instill a burning need to own shoddy albums in cube form.
Then again, maybe the Lennon estate didn’t instigate this at all. Maybe we did that ourselves. Perhaps they’re inundated with requests from we cash rich, sense poor, middle aged addicts for endless ultimate editions, however thin the material.
Maybe it’s insane to even care about this: this is the world we live in. If some Beatlemaniacs have the cash and the inclination, let them spend it, right?
Maybe. Yet this album is so manifestly not good, so utterly undeserving of special treatment – shouldn’t we maniacs feel obliged to draw a line here, to maybe divert our £130 into a few of the countless other music makers out there, both old and new, struggling to so much as afford the rent? If we don’t make a stand here, then where? Will we even end up shelling out 130 quid for 5 versions of this?
Based on this Mind Games release, we can’t rule it out.