Just a few notes on the listings…  Any songs that are struck through are actually sung by someone other than the specified ex-Beatles, whether it is Yoko Ono or Denny Laine.  Meanwhile songs in italics are instrumentals.  These two types of songs are far less likely to make the cut for the album, as there are not a lot of previous examples of these two types of song on the officially released Beatles albums.

One of the advantages of being a Beatle at this time is that you can release pretty much any album you want.  While this wouldn’t be true in the eighties (see Somewhere In England or Old Wave) in the late sixties and early seventies, even Ringo had enough clout to release an album as noncommercial as Sentimental Journey.  However, despite the minor critical drubbing of the Magical Mystery Tour TV movie and Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane only going to #2, neither John or Paul had really faced the kind of failure that greeted both Wild Life and Some Time In New York City.  This sent both Lennon and McCartney back to the drawing board to craft something a little more palatable for their respective follow-ups.

For Paul this meant scaling back his initial plans for a double album.  Gone were any songs sung by Denny or Linda.  In fact, the whole pretense of Wings being any sort of democratic collaboration of equals is pretty much out the window.  Red Rose Speedway is now credited to “Paul McCartney & Wings” and there is no one else pictured on the cover but Paul whose mug is up-front and center. 

Not that McCartney has given up on experimentalism completely.  Red Rose Speedway ends with an eleven-minute, four-song medley.  Unfortunately it won’t make anyone forget the song suite on Side Two of Abbey Road.  Nor is it a compact multiple-part single song like Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey or the title track for Band On The Run, since none of the four songs feel terribly related to each other.  What we get instead feels more like a clearinghouse for some unfinished fragments.

The most experimental thing on John’s next record is two seconds of silence entitled Nutopian National Anthem.  Lennon is refraining from the more specific political sloganeering that made his last record feel instantly dated.  Instead we have more vague statements like Bring On The Lucie (Freda People), Only People, or the title track.  Even the love songs feel less specifically about Yoko and more like the generic romantic lyrics of a typical pop/rock song.

There may be a reason for this as Mind Games captures Lennon in an odd space, transitioning from the 24/7 art experiment of life with Ono to his hedonistic “lost weekend” in L.A.  The large but setting sun of Yoko while a tiny John walks away on the cover encapsulates this period better than anything else actually on the record.

Mind Games also marks the first time John ever really produced anything by himself without Phil Spector and/or Yoko Ono helping.  John is finally learning how to hire and direct studio musicians himself (including David Spinozza, who had also worked on Ram).  Unfortunately, it does appear to that this type of leadership is something Lennon is really up to yet.  As a result most of the backing is pretty lukewarm and bland with the sound remaining pretty stale across the whole album.  While Paul sanded down his rough edges to try appeal to the masses, John is trying to water down his music.  Neither approach results in particularly strong albums, but both certainly were received a lot more warmly than their previous efforts.

While John and Paul were making up for albums that were lacking, George was making up for a lack of albums.  While bursting out of the gate with the triple-disc All Things Must Pass, the subsequent three years only saw the release of a lone single and its attendant superstar charity concert.  While Living In The Material World did pretty well both commercially and critically, almost anything would seem like a disappointment after the monolith of George’s debut.  Plus listeners were starting to feel hectored about Krishna as Harrison’s lyrics started getting preachier.

While George, John, and Paul all turned in pleasant if bland albums for this round, Ringo surprised pretty much everybody by knocking it out of the park with his first non-country or standards album, Ringo.  Sure, a lot of the credit here could be laid at the feet of his former Beatle-mates, still it took Starr’s affable charm to bring these otherwise acrimonious musicians together for the same album, if never the same song at the same time.  While John had yet to score his first #1 solo hit, Ringo managed to get 4our singles from this album to place on the charts.  At this point one could even argue that Ringo would be elevated from junior to full-time status, just as Abbey Road did for George four years earlier.  However, creating sixteen song playlists with four tracks from each would be somewhat untenable, and so I will keep the ratio of tunes the same.

Still Ringo features a number of great little tracks that I didn’t include in this round, including the quasi-theme song penned by John, I’m The Greatest, Paul contributing the wistful Six O’Clock as well as playing kazoo on the popular cover of You’re Sixteen.  George even wrote or co-wrote three tracks for this album, creating a template for all subsequent Ringo albums that would constantly mimic but never come close to equally this masterpiece.

We open this playlist with another handful of popular singles starting with the title track to Mind Games.  It’s a pleasant enough song, but unlike most of the tracks on this album, at least the songwriting isn’t as workmanlike as the backing musicians.  From there we go to undeniably schmaltzy, yet effective, My Love.  Continuing with the theme of catchy, popular tunes is George’s Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) which not only reached the number one spot on the charts, but actually replaced Paul’s My Love when it did so.  It was an exciting time for fans of the ex-Beatles.

While three pretty big hits is a good way to start one of these playlists, this one continues on with one of Ringo’s biggest singles, Photograph.  Originally written by George with some lyrics preaching the joys of Hinduism, Ringo rightly nixed the first set of words, penning his own with the traditional romantic subject matter of most pop/rock songs.  As a result Photograph stands as one of the few songwriting collaborations between any of the Beatles after the break-up.

Of course nothing could maintain this level of commercial success forever, and from here we pivot to Tight A$, one of the few upbeat tracks on Mind Games.  While the use of the dollar sign isn’t fooling anybody, it is nice to see Lennon having fun and taking himself a little less seriously.  In general, the better tunes on Mind Games are the more up-tempo rockers as opposed to the more maudlin ballads which are undone by the ham-fisted playing of the session musicians.  Speaking of having fun, we go from here to Miss O’Dell a George Harrison B-side where he is given over to an attack of the giggles (as well as blurting out Paul McCartney’s personal phone number).  Paul responds by trying to laugh through the beginning to his B-side, C Moon, but somehow it feels forced as McCartney jokes about missing “the intro I was supposed to be in”.  Still it helps keep the more laid-back, relaxed vibe going to wrap up Side One.

Side Two opens with the other real rocker on Mind Games, the nonsense-filled Meat City.  I have no idea what the words are supposed to be about here, but I didn’t with I Am The Walrus or Come Together and it doesn’t really matter.  Plus the bits of backwards vocals providing a steady beat during the breaks is one of the finest production touches John brought to this whole album.

Next up is Red Rose Speedway’s opener Big Barn Bed.  After the undeniably cheezy My Love, it’s important to remind listeners that Paul could also rock too.  While John and Paul have left their inter-personal bitterness out of their songs after Dear Friend, George has got something to say with the funky Sue Me, Sue You Blues, although it’s not certain if he’s really mad at the other three Beatles or just all of their lawyers and managers and handlers. 

While most of Ringo’s best moments were either covers or songs tailor-made for Ringo, he hadn’t given up writing songs for himself completely.  While this album would feature Starr’s first collaboration with Vini Poncia, who would be his main songwriting partner for the remainder of the seventies, he did write a couple of decent tracks by himself for this album.  One is the cutesy When I’m 64-styled shuffle Step Lightly which features Ringo tap dancing (which I almost added to this playlist instead of Photograph just because Ringo wrote it by himself, not because it’s a better song).  The other track written by Ringo alone ended up not appearing on the album itself, but rather the B-side to Photograph, Down And Out.  Sure, as a song it’s about as complicated as Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, but still it’s fun to hear Ringo doing a simple fun rocker, even calling out to George for the solo the way he used to do on early tracks like Boys and I Wanna Be Your Man.

Next is the only ballad on Mind Games that even partially works.  And the part that works is the first verse that Lennon performs alone on a fingerpicked acoustic guitar.  Once the rest of the band kicks in, they clobber this delicate little song into submission, leaving one to almost forget how promising the tune was when it started.  Despite having three years to craft a follow-up to All Things Must Pass, George went back to that album and resurrected a song originally planned from those sessions as a song for Ronnie Spector, replaced her vocals, and added it to Living In The Material World.  Still it’s a great song, and one that David Bowie of all people, would cover in his later years.

For the finale of this playlist, we are going to need something appropriately cinematic – and what could be more cinematic than Paul’s James Bond theme song Live And Let Die?  The single featured the first time any of the ex-Beatles went back to George Martin and is as bombastic as you would want the theme song from an action movie to be, even if it has a little reggae breakdown in there that does feel a little out of place, even after all these years.

While this round is not nearly the dismal misfire of Round Three, in some way it’s almost more disappointing to hear the former Beatles, some of the most innovative recording ever, play it safe with such a slick, yet undistinguished collection of platters.  It’s no wonder that Ringo’s album seems so magnificent in comparison.