Scheduled to coincide with John Lennon’s 70th birthday on October 9, Gimme Some Truth is a mammoth box set featuring eight remastered solo albums, a newly stripped down version of Double Fantasy produced by Yoko and Jack Douglas, an expanded edition of the Some Time In New York City live album (with extra tracks like ‘Jamrag’ and ‘Scumbag’, which make Sun Ra sound like Steps), plus a plethora of compilations, ‘experience’ editions (?!!), outtakes and demos. Trust me, you’d need NASA hardware to keep track of the thing. The deluxe edition alone contains 11 full CDs including 13 unreleased demos, most of which are intriguing enough, including acoustic takes of tunes like ‘Nobody Told Me’ and a Ray Charles-ish ‘Serve Yourself’ (a riposte to Dylan’s ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody’.)
This listener received a preview of the box set via download. Spared the lavish packaging and liner notes, you can disrupt chronology and channel-hop through the many ages of John. My favourite remains the Plastic Ono Band album, an emergency telegram/primal scream issued from that white mansion on the hill. The remastering job is as crisp as January. Songs like ‘Mother’ still have the capacity to gut you like a fish, although there are still a few bones to pick. Lennon’s songs were most powerful when we could read ourselves in the Rorschach blots, but when the diary entries got too particular to his superstar situation (‘Hold On’), we couldn’t relate. There’s a case to be made for art as therapy, but not when it commits the cardinal sin of excluding the listener.
The main problem with reappraising Lennon’s legacy is you need a sledgehammer to separate the church and state of work and mythology. Nobody needs be told again about the bed-ins, the FBI files, the year-long lost weekends. Even 20 years after his murder Lennon proved a formidable agitator: ‘Imagine’ was one of the songs blacklisted by corporate US radio after 9/11.
So the man’s historical importance is not in question, but there’s no doubt that as an artist he was inconsistent. The heretic might put forward the case for any amount of equally gifted craftsmen and women: Neko Case, Tom Petty, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Warren Zevon, Steve Earle. Yes, John Lennon capable of genius. But so is Jinx.
I liked him best when he was angry. The man was a vicious polemicist, did righteous disillusionment better than anyone else (‘Working Class Hero’ sounds as stark and brutal as the day it was recorded). He was also a vocal Irish Republican in an era of IRA atrocities: ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ is funky, radical and seditious (although we’d best cough and tiptoe past ‘The Luck of the Irish’). And ‘Gimme Some Truth’, this box set’s flagship track, might be the greatest protest song ever written. A razor sharp lyric and a vocal that drips anger, disgust and weariness in equal measure, it constitutes a howl against corruption of the soul that should be blared at mind-numbing volume in banks, Vatican palaces and Leinster House.
Key track: ‘Gimme Some Truth’