It's sad that Lennon died so young. I understand that he was planning his first concert tour as a solo artist shortly before he died in 1980. He did have a whole decade as a solo artist prior to that, but the last five of those years were spent away from the music industry. In those first five years, he played live for a few songs here and there, but the only full-length solo concerts he ever did were on August 30, 1972. He played an early show and late show as a benefit for the "One to One" charity. The early show was later officially released as the album "Live in New York City."
For Lennon's 1972 album with his wife Yoko Ono, "Some Time in New York City," he found an existing band called Elephant's Memory to back him up. They also backed him up for the "One to One" concert, going by the name "Plastic Ono Elephant's Memory Band" when collaborating with Lennon and/or Ono. They had several days of rehearsals, since they'd never done a full concert together. I'm a bit hazy on the details. I believe there were rehearsals at least on August 18th, 20th, and the 21st. I'm giving this the date of the 21st since that seems to be the culmination of the rehearsals, when most of the best recordings are from. But if anyone knows which songs were done on which days, please let me know.
Different bootlegs from the rehearsal sessions have leaked out over the years. They haven't been given the attention they deserve, in my opinion, especially since the amount of Lennon solo material is rather small due to his untimely death. I haven't seen any one bootleg that gathers all of the rehearsals together, so I compiled this together from about four different sources. There's so much that I broke it into two parts.
Maybe one reason these recordings haven't gotten more notice is due to poor sound quality. True, this doesn't sound amazing. But I did a lot of editing of the songs to make them sound better, especially by boosting the lead vocals. Then I passed the files to musical associate MZ. He did even more work. For instance, one problem was that the best versions of some songs came from old vinyl bootlegs that had pops and scratches. He systematically went through it all and removed over 100 pops alone. Then he made other changes, such as spectrum changes and fixing volume balance issues. The end result is very listenable, in my opinion, and a significant improvement over the bootleg versions that have been floating around. Kudos especially to MZ.
Another thing I did was separate the wheat from the chaff. There were some multiple takes that were redundant, as well as some instrumental jams that weren't that good, in my opinion, so those got cut. Also, I didn't include any song with Yoko Ono on lead vocals. I'm not saying she wasn't musically talented. She definitely was. However, her screaming style as a limited appeal, and it doesn't appeal to me. I'm reminded that a couple of decades ago, I used to shop at a certain record store that would put on a Yoko Ono album near closing time every night to get people to leave. It worked.
That said, there were a couple of Yoko Ono songs that I thought were good musically, except for the Ono vocals. So I used the UVR5 audio editing program to completely wipe her vocals, and present them as instrumentals. One is here, "Move On Fast." The other is on Volume 2. Sorry if that offends anyone, but I make these albums mainly for myself, and this is how I like it.
I have no idea what the proper chronological order of these songs is, especially since these came from multiple bootleg sources. So I shuffled the order a bit in order to mix Lennon's originals with the covers he did. Clearly, he was looking to do one or more rocking covers from the pre-Beatles days. Ultimately, he played only one in the concerts, "Hound Dog." But he did a whole bunch in these rehearsals. Between this album and Part 2, there are more "oldies" covers here than on his 1975 covers album "Rock 'n' Roll," and they're largely different songs. So this is worth listening to just for all the covers alone.
I'm including two versions of the song "Come Together," the sole Beatles song he did in the rehearsals. The version here is quite interesting, because he sang the song a whole octave lower than he usually did. The other version was sung the normal way, and is on Part 2. There also is a significantly different version of "Give Peace a Chance" on Part 2.
This album is 54 minutes long.
01 Come Together [Low Voice Version] (John Lennon)
02 Honky Tonk Blues [Instrumental] (John Lennon)
03 New York City [Edit] (John Lennon)
04 It's So Hard (John Lennon)
05 Honey Don't (John Lennon)
06 Ain't That a Shame (John Lennon)
07 Move On Fast [Instrumental Version] (John Lennon)
08 My Babe - Not Fade Away (John Lennon)
09 Woman Is the Nigger of the World (John Lennon)
10 Give Peace a Chance [Solo Vocal Version] (John Lennon)
11 Unchained Melody - It's Only Make Believe (John Lennon)
12 Well Well Well (John Lennon)
13 Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On - It'll Be Me (John Lennon)
Luckily for my purposes, there are some photos of Lennon taken during these very rehearsals. They're all black and white, so I picked one I liked and colorized it using the Palette program.
Thanks for this, sounds like an interesting listen
ReplyDeleteNice Job!
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