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.

This was another tricky round to decide how to divide up.  Since I really prefer Back To The Egg, George Harrison, and even Bad Boy to Tug Of War, Gone Troppo, and Old Wave, I toyed with the idea of pairing Double Fantasy with the former to avoid dealing with the latter.  I was also tempted to meld both Double Fantasy and Milk & Honey into one grouping since both are just half-John albums recorded around the same time.  I ultimately decided to keep things more accurate chronologically, as this gives us a chance to look at how the Beatles might’ve declined had they overstayed their welcome.  One of the nice things about the Beatles canon is they don’t have anything like The Rolling Stones’ 1986 album Dirty Work to sully their reputation.

On Abbey Road, the Beatles used the new synthesizer technology elegantly and tastefully.  By the Eighties it was slathered onto everything and even the solo Beatles were not immune.  Even though it never seemed as egregious to me, Double Fantasy even required a Let It Be Naked do-over to remove the 80s production from it.  Really there’s a number of other albums that are far more deserving of this treatment.  Gone Troppo Stripped anyone?

It’s hard to believe, but by this point, Paul had technically only released two solo albums, both of which are low-key, self-titled, one-man-band experiments.  Everything else has been co-credited to Wings or at least Linda.  With Tug Of War, Paul finally started the solo career we always expected he would have: glossy productions, radio-friendly singles, big name guest stars.  He even was openly courting the older Beatles fan-base by using Ringo on drums and George Martin to produce.  Another album like this (Pipes Of Peace) and McCartney’s solo career would be solidified enough for him to make his vanity project solo film debut (Give My Regards To Broad Street).

Meanwhile, George’s career seems to be coasting mostly on inertia.  After getting his last album rejected by his record company, as well as the specter of being a potential target of a madman, made Harrison even more reluctant to continue as a rock-star than ever before.  He even realized that the success of All Those Years Ago was a fluke, and didn’t bother to do any promotion whatsoever for Gone Troppo, a lazy shrug of an album.

While George could be bothered to try and sell his newest record, Ringo was in an entirely more humiliating position.  While Lennon’s death had renewed interest in the Beatles, the public response to Stop And Smell The Roses was pretty tepid.  As a result, Ringo couldn’t find any company willing to distribute Old Wave in either America or England.  So it just came out in Canada and the rest of Europe and disappeared completely.  Which is a shame, this is not nearly as bad as many recent Ringo releases have been.  Starr had definitely traded up by ditching Vini Poncia and replacing him with future-brother-in-law, and only Eagle with a sense of humor, Joe Walsh.  The two of them get along so well on this album that you don’t even mind the absence of any other Beatles or any of his usual gang of famous friends.  It’s not a great album, but Old Wave didn’t deserve to be disregarded like that.

The playlist opens with Nobody Told Me, a song that was probably too upbeat and poppy to work as posthumous single.  It probably would’ve been better had it been sung by Ringo as originally intended.  From there we go to the regal-sounding Wanderlust one of the few post-Beatles songs that Paul re-recorded for the Give My Regards To Broad Street soundtrack.  The first single off of Gone Troppo disappeared from the charts pretty quickly.  It’s not a bad song, but the synthesizers on it are pretty obnoxious.  The synth sound is pretty similar to the first track off of Old Wave, In My Car making the two segue into each other pretty.

The first really successful sing on here is Paul’s duet with Stevie Wonder, Ebony & Ivory.  While there are not any real duets with outside vocalists in the Beatles catalog, I think all four Beatles would’ve been enamored enough with Stevie Wonder to give this a pass.  Michael Jackson, on the other hand, seems less likely.  I Don’t Want To Face It is another up-tempo song from Milk & Honey which is, on the whole, far more danceable than Double Fantasy.  The title track from Gone Troppo has a very mild island vibe to it, although some of the weird lyrics feel almost like an attempt at a Jamaican patois without the actual accent. 

Side Two opens with Paul’s attempt to better All Those Years Ago with Here Today.  It certainly sounds sadder than George’s tribute and one can only hope that it was motivated more by sincere emotion than simple callous commercialism.  While (Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess is nowhere nearly as good as Bless You off of Walls & Bridges, it’s nice to hear that John was still addressing his foibles and failures in his latter days, as this era is usually presented as the culmination of John’s reaching a state of pure and perfect love.  As much as it counteracts a happy ending to his life, John was still a jealous guy who had his demons to work on. 

While George may not be having a lot of success as a recording artist in this era, he had transitioned into a fruitful role as a movie producer.  Having bankrolled Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, Harrison hooked up with Terry Gilliam and helped produced the charming time-travel comedy Time Bandits.  Besides the millions of dollars, one of the things Harrison provided that film was the song Dream Away.  While it is not a great song it does have more of George’s enthusiasm behind it than most of the Gone Troppo songs.   While Joe Walsh co-wrote a number of songs with Ringo for Old Wave, there is still the usual number of covers on the album, and one of the most effective ones is the Leiber-Stroller composition I Keep Forgettin’ which features Starr singing in his lowest vocal register.

From here we have Somebody Who Cares, another soft maudlin ballad from Paul.  Not about John necessarily, just somebody.  For whatever reason this has always been a track I have gravitated towards, even if it is not one of the more famous off of Tug Of War.  That’s The Way It Goes is another deep cut, that was surprisingly covered by Joe Brown during the Concert For George, a tribute concert that featured nothing from George’s solo career that wasn’t on All Things Must Pass.  The album ends with Grow Old With Me, a song that should just been one of the many pleasant love songs in Lennon’s catalog, but given that much more weight by the fact that John didn’t get much older than when he wrote it.  It’s almost impossible to ignore that fact when listening to it, because unlike the rest of Milk & Honey this is still clearly just a demo, with John singing into a home tape recorded with the piano and some obnoxious metronome/drum machine.  At least there’s the version on Anthology which has string supplied by George Martin, making it a lovely counter-point to Here Today which opened Side Two.

And that pretty much wraps it up for this thought exercise.  Without Lennon, there’s no way to even squint enough to pretend this is the Beatles any more.  Harrison and McCartney’s careers from this point on never really sync up again in any sort of meaningful way.  While this isn’t exactly the highest note to go out on, since this whole series is nothing but conjecture and hypothesis, It’s nice to at least imagine John doing more with his music had he lived, and inevitably altering and influencing the other three’s career in the process as well.