From this point onward, it’s very difficult if not pointless to continue this thought experiment.  Not only is there no more new Lennon material, but both George and Ringo took extended hiatuses in the mid-80s.  Ringo did return with the All-Starr Band and the comeback album Time Takes Time while George did return with the Traveling Wilburys and the comeback album Cloud Nine.  While Time Takes Time marked the beginning of a series of pleasant-enough Ringo albums every three or four years from here on out, Cloud Nine proved to be the last studio album that George released until after his death 14 years later.  In fact, were it not for his death, George would probably still be halfheartedly tinkering around with Brainwashed.

Paul on the other hand can’t even stop making music while he sleeps.  Despite being seen as less experimental than Lennon, McCartney dabbled in everything from ambient electronica to classical oratorio.  Paul even recorded an album of songbook standards like Ringo’s Sentimental Journey and two albums of fifties rock covers like John’s Rock’n’Roll.  But even on these covers albums, Paul couldn’t help but penning an original or two.

While Paul tried to stay in the limelight by collaborating with whoever was hot at the moment (Michael Jackson, Elvis Costello, Youth, Kanye West), he never again was quite the hit-maker he was in the sixties and seventies.  While John’s tragic death gave his life the appearance a fairytale ending it didn’t really have, it also catapulted him in the public consciousness way above his old songwriting partner.  For years Lennon was seen as the tortured genius while McCartney was dismissed as a commercial hack.

In recent years though, there has been a reevaluation of Paul’s role in the Beatles (as well as Yoko’s) that has led to a definite diminishing of John’s beautification in the public eye.  I think a lot of problem is that if Paul releases a duff album (and he has) it is easier to ignore or forgive because he’s go like 30+ albums to choose from.  But since John’s solo career only lasted ten years, and five of them he didn’t release anything; every Rock’n’Roll or Some Time In New York City is that much more frustrating as it is another missed opportunity that we are never going to get back.

1982’s The John Lennon Collection was the first of seemingly never ending series of greatest hits compilations from John designed to make sure he kept having product in the marketplace.  Some were better than others, some even had specific themes or tie-ins, but mostly they all boil down to Shaved Fish plus Stand By Me and the Double Fantasy singles.  Five years later, Paul’s All The Best appeared, the first compilation to treat Wings as just one period in McCartney’s overall career.  Unlike Wings’ Greatest this one did use the two discs necessary to showcase Paul’s prodigious hit-making talents, although the specific hits featured would differ based on the territory it was released in and what songs were hits there.

1989 saw the release of both Best Of Dark Horse 1976-1989 and Starr Struck: The Best Of Ringo Starr, Volume 2.  While both of these tried to correct for the slights of Blast From Your Past and The Best Of George Harrison, since both Ringo’s and George’s biggest hits came from the first five years of their solo careers, which these new compilations couldn’t include, not of these packages felt inessential and are now out of print.  It wasn’t until Photograph: The Very Best Of Ringo Starr (2007) and Let It Roll: Songs By George Harrison (2009) that George and Ringo finally got some really comprehensive collections, although to add insult to injury, Let It Roll includes a number of George’s Beatles songs, even if they are the live renditions from Concert For Bangladesh.  And the tracks were personally selected by George’s widow, Olivia.  They even used a Beatles-era picture of George for the cover.

Really the only point of possible connection between the ex-Beatles’ career are the songs either right before or right after The Beatles Anthology when Paul, George, and Ringo all had tunes produced by ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne.  While George was the only one who let Jeff produce an entire album; if you take some of the tracks from Cloud Nine and add the two from Time Takes Time and the half of Flaming Pie that has Lynne’s fingerprints all over them, you at least have a playlist of former Beatles that has a consistent sound.  It’s more ELO’s Zoom than anything Beatle-y, but it’s something.  You can even add Free As A Bird and Real Love (the Phantom Menace of Beatles-dom) to give John as much of a presence on that playlist as possible.

While there are a few good songs and even a couple of decent albums (like the aforementioned Cloud Nine and Time Takes Time as well as Flowers In The Dirt) after John’s passing, none of it ever felt as vital or as essential as those seventies albums.  With George and John gone (and Ringo never much of a songwriter), by the 2000s the only new ex-Beatle material we’re going to get are either unearthed outtakes, or something new from Paul.  As McCartney has aged into the elder statesman and by-default Beatles spokesperson, he is far more content with his legacy.  He is no longer trying to prove to the world that he is more than just that band from the sixties.  He is ok with his place in popular culture and more than happy to go out and flog whatever video game or acrobatic circus the Beatles have licensed their name too.  While I’m glad he has found this personal contentment, I think we may have seen the last truly awe-inspiring work from the collective once known as the Beatles.

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.

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.

By the time John’s son Sean was five, he no longer required (or was able to keep) all of his father’s attention.  After a particularly productive jaunt to the Bahamas, John decided the time was right for a comeback. So he found a new record label, Geffen, and a new producer, Jack Douglas, and he released Double Fantasy.  Not only was this his first album in five years, it was his first collaboration with Yoko since 1972’s Some Time In New York City.

Although John had predicted it after hearing the B-52s, Yoko’s tracks on this album were far more cutting-edge, forward-looking, and even commercial than Lennon’s.  John’s half of the album was just as pastoral and domesticated as critics accused Paul’s records as being.

As for Paul, Wings were never quite the real band he was hoping for.  But even the facade of Wings was pretty much over by 1980. Their tour of Japan had been scrapped last-minute after Paul spent 8 days in jail for entering the country with a small amount of marijuana.  And much like the last time his band broke up at the beginning of the decade, Paul decided to record a one-man-band record entitled McCartney. I was always a little disappointed that he didn’t release an album called McCartney III in 1990. In fact, after this album Paul never quite returned to this “playing all the instruments himself” technique.

The biggest difference between McCartney and McCartney II is that Paul had gotten into synthesizers.  Also McCartney II has far fewer instrumentals than its predecessor, with only two and a third with only a few words compared to the five on McCartney.  Unfortunately, Paul decided to use a racial epithet in the title for one of these instrumentals. Since there are no words in the song, it was completely unnecessarily. It’s not as horrific as the single from Some Time In New York City, but still completely egregious.

While Double Fantasy should have been a pleasant, if unassuming, way to ease Lennon back into the music business, some asshole with a gun turned what should’ve been a minor entry in John’s catalog into a career capstone and summary of an entire lifetime.  One of the less important tragedies of John’s murder is the way it catapulted Double Fantasy into a prominence and importance that its modest charms could not really live up to. John clearly intended this album to be commercial, although who knows how well it would’ve sold had he not been killed.  Death is the ultimate publicity stunt. As John himself said, “Everyone loves you when you’re six feet in the ground.”

George on the other hand, was either so uninterested in or unable to be commercial that when he first submitted Somewhere In England to Warner Bros they rejected it and insisted that Harrison record four new songs, although the tracks they chose to cut (including a pair of Hoagy Carmichael covers) weren’t really that much better than the ones that stayed.

One of the new song that George recorded was a song he initially wrote for Ringo, All Those Years Ago. Having ditched Vini Poncia by 1980, Ringo had decided to go back to the Ringo drawing board for the first time since Ringo’s Rotogravure. All four of the Beatles had written songs for Ringo to sing: Paul had Attention and Private Property, George had All Those Years Ago and Wrack My Brain, and John had the unfortunately titled Life Begins At Forty and Nobody Told Me. Ringo even wrote two songs himself (the last two for which he would have sole songwriting credit), Wake Up and You Can’t Fight Lightning which as originally going the be the title of this new Ringo Starr album. But much like Somewhere In England, the released album was changed a bit from its original conception.

John died just days before he was to lay down his tracks for the album, and Ringo didn’t feel comfortable recording them without him (although he would cover Grow Old With Me in 2019). George’s song All Those Years Ago was done in a key that was out of Ringo’s vocal range, and so that was never completed. Ringo even decided that his own songs weren’t strong enough and cut those too. The final album, now titled Stop And Smell The Roses was filled out with songwriting and production work by Ron Wood, Stephen Stills, and Harry Nilsson; and was one of Ringo’s best in a long time. But nobody noticed and the album did not sell well. While John’s death may have helped sales of Double Fantasy, it may have been hard to convince Beatles fans to invest in the lightweight whimsy of a Ringo Starr solo album in the wake of such tragedy.

I have started this playlist with John’s (Just Like) Starting Over, which is a good thesis statement for this round as we are getting the whole gang back together after an extended absence. From he we have Coming Up, a song from McCartney II although the single is not actually on the album. For whatever reason, Paul released the live version by Wings as the single, which kind of feels like twisting the knife in an already dead body; but the single did pretty well on the charts.

From there we have the song George originally wrote for Ringo about John. John had given an interview in which he complained that he was barely mentioned in George’s autobiography, I Me Mine, and this song was meant to be an apology for that. To be fair, hardly anybody was mentioned in George’s book. Not so much an autobiography, I Me Mine was more of an interview padded out to book-length with the inclusion of all of George’s handwritten lyrics. Despite being lavishly produced and expensively produced, George’s book was skimpy not only on details, but on content. However, after Lennon’s death, Harrison reworked some of the lyrics to either express his grief or cash in on his friend’s death. By having Paul overdub some bass onto the track, the single did pretty well, mostly on the novelty of having all living Beatles playing on the same song for the first time in ten years. Unfortunately the more Ringo-styled bounce and feel to the track do not fit well with the morose subject matter, and as a result the song has not aged as well as song tributes to Lennon’s death, like Paul Simon’s The Late Great Johnny Ace.

From there we have the other song George wrote for Ringo, Wrack My Brain, although he did also produce Ringo singing a cover of You Belong To Me for the Stop And Smell The Roses album. This was the first, and best performing, single from the album. Even though it is a fun little ditty, it didn’t exactly set the world ablaze. From there we slow things down a little bit with John’s tribute to his son, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy). The song is probably best remembered for including John’s last really great lyric: “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”

Not to be outdone, we have a McCartney ballad, Waterfalls. While it didn’t do much as a single at the time, the song did surprisingly enough become the basis for the TLC hit of the same name. Much like Rod Stewart’s Forever Young is neither a cover nor completely independent from Bob Dylan’s Forever Young, there’s not a lawsuit to be had, but definitely a tip of the hat. While working our way through the slower ballads, we end Side One with George’s surprisingly soulful cover of Baltimore Oriole. Why George recorded this at this time is hard to say, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this version.

We open Side Two with Woman, a song that is probably not intended to be a direct sequel to Rubber Soul‘s Girl. While that is a plaintive and straightforward love song, I thought it best to segue from that to Temporary Secretary, a song that was considered for years to be Paul’s most annoying track. Recently though, it’s had a bit of a resurgence as a club track, and surprisingly, the song that gained quite a bit of estimation since it was released. Paul even includes it in his live set these days. I do enjoy how abrasive and obnoxious it is. Something that is particularly rare for Paul McCartney.

Next up is George’s Teardrops, another tune that like All Those Years Ago where the peppy, funky music is totally at odds with the downbeat and melancholy lyrics. From here we get one of the songs that Paul wrote for Ringo, Private Property. The second single from the album, it did even worse than Wrack My Brain. Both Linda and Denny play on the track and give you a slight indication of what Wings would’ve sounded like had they continued on post-Back To The Egg. While there’s not a lot of John tunes to choose from on Double Fantasy, I chose I’m Losing You, as it is almost the only Lennon track on there that shows any sort of anger or pain. As much as we want to think of the last five years of John’s life as the happily-ever-after that he always deserved, it wasn’t ever as simple as that. From there we get another new song that George had to record for Somewhere In England. In a bit of a case of biting the hand that feeds you, the lyrics of the song are all about how pissed he is that he has to record new, more commercial songs for his record company. But it is surprisingly fun and easy to dance to.

While there are number of tunes that I really like from McCartney II like One Of These Days, On The Way, and Darkroom, I decided to end the album with the perennial seasonal classic Wonderful Christmastime. I think people have heard these song so many time that they forget just how wildly inventive it was at the time. Although credited to Wings, it was recorded during the McCartney II sessions and features many of the strange and experimental synth textures as that album. For chronological reasons, this tune is often lumped in with the Back To The Egg bonus tracks, but it really fits much better with the McCartney II vibe.

And really what better way to end an unintentionally tragic playlist than with a simple wish for a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Plus Paul referencing George’s Ding Dong, Ding Dong is a nice note to close on.

It’s at this point that we’ve really each the end of the road in being able to draw one-to-one comparisons between the ex-Beatles albums.  John and Paul who were so divergent in the last round are no longer even in the same arena anymore.  For one thing John drops out of the limelight completely, releasing no music for five years, and not even making much (although there are a handful of demos from this period).  Paul on the other hand, makes Wings a ubiquitous commercial presence, churning out popular and catchy tunes that do sometimes threaten the milquetoast realms of Barry Mannilow and John Denver.  George no longer feels much of a compulsion to try and prove himself to his former band-mates and relaxes into putting out a slickly produced, if halfhearted album whenever he feels like it.  And he doesn’t feel like it very often any more.  Ringo keeps trying to keep himself busy and recapture the glory years of Ringo, but nobody pays him much mind these days.  

Ironically enough, this final parting of ways between the ex-Beatles coincides with the ending of their record contract with Apple/EMI/Capitol.  Whether this is a coincidence or not is hard to say, but it does make a good demarcation point.  While there would be a few good albums after this point, for the most part their glory years are behind them.  All four of their best albums (Plastic Ono Band, Ram, All Things Must Pass, and Ringo) come from their first few years following their departure from the Beatles. 

In fact the closest you have to any sort of comparable albums are the four greatest-hits compilations that Capitol issued to squeeze one last buck out of each ex-Beatles expiring contracts.  While Paul had more than enough hit material to fill a double-album, Wings’ Greatest was streamlined into a single disc, even if it meant leaving a few big singles off of there.  John didn’t have nearly as many big “hits” but he did have to edit almost every song in order to fit all of his single A-sides up to this point (except for Stand By Me) onto the single-disc of Shaved Fish.  There’s interesting and unique mixes on that compilation in order to get everything to fit.  Ringo’s Blast From Your Past, on the other hand had plenty of room barely clocking in at over half-an-hour.  While that might seem a trifle insulting, it’s not as bad as The Best Of George Harrison, who didn’t even get a whole album of solo hits as Side One is a collection of his biggest songs he wrote and recorded with the Beatles.  Everything about this album, from the uncreative title to the shoddy artwork, shows how little faith Capitol had in George’s catalog.  Of course, the title of Paul’s compilation wasn’t much better – but the inclusion of such non-Wings songs as Another Day and Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey on something titled Wings’ Greatest shows how much of a farce the idea of Wings being an actual band was by the late seventies.  For some reason, despite having the most quantifiable commercial success, Paul was the last of the four to be featured in a compilation of this sort.

The second half of the seventies creates something of a dilemma for continuing this though experiment.  Without anything usable from Lennon at the time, how do you really round out, even out, or fill up these playlists?  There’s some good material from this time period, but for the most part it doesn’t really relate to each other.  It’s easiest just to skip these years, and go to what will sadly be the finale in 1980, but let’s take a few moments to appreciate what Paul, George, and even Ringo were doing while John was busy playing househusband.

Paul followed up Venus & Mars by thanking the rest of Wings by making his most concerted effort yet to give the appearance that this was an egalitarian band.  At The Speed Of Sound features two songs sung by Denny Laine, as well as songs by guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, drummer Joe English, and wife, Linda.  Wings thanked Paul for this spotlight by once again abandoning him on the eve of recording a new album.  For London Town, not only were Wings reduced to the same power trio that made Band On The Run, but they also decided to record the album at least partially in an exotic locale, choosing a yacht in the virgin islands rather than a studio in Lagos, Nigeria.  Unfortunately, the same Band On The Run lightning did not strike twice, so even though the album sold okay, it was not quite the hit (commercially or critically) that Paul was hoping for.

After the somewhat soft rock of London Town, Paul decided to once again try to reconstitute Wings and this time try to show those young whippersnappers who was really punk.  While Back To The Egg is one of my all-time favorite McCartney albums, it went over about as well as one expect an attempt at punk rock by Paul McCartney would.  Of course, it didn’t help that at the same time he was doing this, Paul also recorded and released Goodnight Tonight, a single that attempts to cash in on the whole disco craze, even after Ringo the 4^th had definitively proved that Beatles and disco don’t mix.

While the title Ringo the 4^th seems to imply that this was another attempt to recreate the winning formula of Ringo, the album is actually a bit different from those three.  First off, there’s the obvious disco sound from producer Arif Mardin.  Plus there are no contributions from John, Paul, or George here.  In fact six of the ten songs (plus the B-side Just A Dream) were all written by Ringo and Vini Poncia, the rest of the album being covers.  Unfortunately the album looked like a blatant cash grab, and when it failed to meet its objective, it was derided rather harshly.  Vini then stepped up to produce Ringo’s next record, Bad Boy.  It featured only two new Starkey/Poncia originals with a bunch of covers and a yacht rock sound that did Ringo’s limited vocals no favors.  These two albums are frequently seen as the low ebb of Ringo’s career, proving that Ringo was a fluke and every attempt to copy thereafter was simply diminishing returns.

George also returned to the more slickly produced arena, with the far more polished and upbeat Thirty-Three & 1/3.  While it is not nearly as rough-hewn as either Dark Horse or Extra Texture, it is not nearly as memorable either.  It is a pleasant album, with a couple of minor hits like Crackerbox Palace and This Song, George’s response to the whole My Sweet Lord plagiarism trial.  Much like Try Some, Buy Some on Living In The Material World or You from Extra Texture some of the best songs on here originated during the All Things Must Pass sessions.  At least this time George actually re-recorded Woman Don’t You Cry For Me and Beautiful Girl instead of merely replacing Ronnie Spector’s vocals.

Harrison then realized that he neither wanted nor needed to put out an album every year, so he took his time creating his self-titled follow-up.  Much like the last album, George Harrison is slick and polished and somewhat unremarkable.  He did score another minor hit with the breezy Blow Away, while resurrecting the White Album outtake Not Guilty and penning another sequel to a Beatles hit, Here Comes The Moon.  While George doesn’t seem as tortured during these years as he did on the Dark Horse tour, you also get the impression that he doesn’t really care much about making albums anymore and is mostly doing it out of habit.

In fact in general, these years for the ex-Beatles is a lot of MOR soft rock, with the best stuff being failed experiments to ride on the coattails of whatever fad was popular at the time.  Without the somewhat withering and bitter judgments of John Lennon, the rest of the Beatles have slid into complacency.  This would get worse in the eighties and beyond, but the second half of the seventies were not a great time for fans of the ex-Beatles.  No wonder John was being seen as a reclusive savior during this period, whose comeback would surely set everything right again.

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.

Having completed both of their divergent objectives in Round Five, John and Paul were no left to decide what to do next. Both Lennon and McCartney then decided to return to their rock’n’roll roots.  But this too meant completely different thing to them.  For Paul it meant once more getting a band, going tour, releasing records, getting on the radio with their latest singles, playing larger and larger venues until you’re finally headlining your own arena tour.  For John it meant going back to singing songs by Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, with or without Phil Spector.

Paul found some anonymous lackeys to fill the holes in the Wings line-up so that they co start playing live shows again.  From there, McCartney quickly wrote and recorded a follow-up to Band On The Run while he was still on a hot streak.  The album, Venus & Mars, was clearly designed to be played live at shows so that the audience could go home and buy the new record after they saw the concert.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it did feel a little mercenary, even if the singles were catchy as hell and very effective.

John on the other hand, was a little more reluctant to continue on as a rock-star.  However, he had a number of commitments that just were not going to go away.  For nicking the line about an old flattop in Come Together from Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me, part of the settlement included Lennon promising to record three tunes from Morris Levy’s music publishing catalog.  In that vein John first decided to record an album of covers titled Oldies But Mouldies after finishing work on Mind Games.  And who better to helm this type of record but John’s old pal Phil Spector.

Only it turns out that Phil Spector is completely nuts (shocking!) and before the album was done Phil had absconded with the master tapes and disappeared completely.  So John moved on, first producing Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats album (and destroying his vocal cords in the process) and then recording his own Walls & Bridges which ended with a brief snippet of Ya-Ya to appease Morris Levy.  Unfortunately, this was insufficient, so John was going to have to get the tapes back from Phil Spector and finish the album himself.  Adding to this drama, someone else had managed to get to Phil Spector’s tapes first and was advertising a bootleg titled Roots on TV.  If that wasn’t enough, Elton John had gotten Ono and Lennon back together and now Yoko was pregnant.   If John wanted to stay home and raise the child Yoko was carrying, he still had one album left on his Apple contract, and he wanted to get that discharged before the baby was born. 

And so the Rock’n’Roll album is both drawn-out and chaotic (under Spector) as well as quick and methodical once Lennon got the tapes back and knocked the rest out.  It is a confusing, underwhelming mess.  John was not in the best state of mind while recording many of these songs and Phil was simply overwhelming him with his characteristic Wall of Sound.  While Lennon is a great vocalist, he’s a better songwriter.  Even under the best of circumstances, a covers album feels a little like a stop-gap solution to a case of writer’s block.  In fact, the most disappointing thing about the final album is how little of that drama chaos makes it onto the record as John’s additions and revisions to Spector’s first pass usually tighten everything up and leave us with a half-hearted shrug of an album that could’ve been a moment of John really reconnecting for the first time in a long while.  There is little to no investment in these songs, and it is clear John wasn’t interested in playing music anymore.

Paul on the other hand is clearly relishing his moment.  Writing songs about how great it is to go see a rock show (subtly imply how great it is to go to his rock show), as well as breaking out all the usual Paul McCartney-isms.  There’s his usual Honey Pie soft shoe shuffle with You Gave Me The Answer.  There’s the childish whimsy of Magneto And Titanium Man that wasn’t going to make any sense whether or not you were actually familiar with the X-Men villain.  In an attempt to placate his lesser Wings-mates, he lets Denny, and even new guy Jimmy, sing a song apiece – although that may be part of the patterning of this album for the stage.  McCartney was going to need a song or two to rest his vocal cords, so throwing them a bone helps him out too. 

Paul has bombastic rockers and weepy ballads on the album, he’s also got stabs at New Orleans cool and R&B and even a country song that didn’t make the cut.  Probably the least calculated and commercial moment of Venus & Mars is the final song, a one-minute cover of an instrumental theme song from a British soap opera.  There still has never been any good explanation for why Paul covered this; much less released it on his album.  As usual for Paul, there are enough non-album singles and B-sides and outtakes this could’ve easily be extended to a double album.  That does always mean that Paul has plenty of material to choose from when he re-releases all of his albums in various deluxe or archive versions.

While John rebounded from Some Time In New York City with the slightly better if bland Mind Games, and Paul came back from Wild Life with the slightly better if bland Red Rose Speedway, George decided to follow-up Dark Horse with the slightly better if bland Extra Texture.  Nobody told George that he didn’t need to release an album every year and that waiting for a couple of years might help him build up a stockpile of worthwhile songs.  Once again George dip back into the unreleased Ronnie Spector album he was working on during All Things Must Pass and replaces her vocals with his.  Not only that, but he pads the album out with the cleverly titled A Bit More Of You which is just another 45 seconds of the song You.  For this album George has decided to use his blown vocal cords to his advantage by leaning heavily into a blue-eyed soul with lots of ARP synthesizers for Extra Texture.  He includes the first of his two tributes to Smokey Robinson on this album, as well as writing the first of his two Beatle-sequels with This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying).  There are some cool jazzy tunes on this album, but it is hardly the comeback that George needed after Dark Horse.

In addition to Smokey Robinson, there is a tribute song to comedian (I think) Larry “Legs” Smith.  I am not familiar with his work, but considering that George was also hanging out with Monty Python, you would assume he has good taste.  However, there is no way to tell from this track as there are two simultaneous track of spoken going on simultaneously in either ear, making it impossible to understand anything that “Legs” is saying, much less determine if it is funny at all.

While George had a sequel to While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Ringo decided to redo the whole Ringo album with Ringo’s Rotogravure.  All three of his ex-Beatle mates are on this album as well a couple of oldies covers alá You’re Sixteen and Only You.  There’s also a song written by Eric Clapton, as well as the only songwriting collaboration between Ringo and his girlfriend at the time, Las Brisas, an attempt at mariachi music.  Overall the album was seen to be as much of a step down from Goodnight Vienna as that album was seen to be a step down from Ringo.  Plus no one really knew what a rotogravure was.  It’s not a terrible album per se, but there’s not much on there that is particularly notable or enjoyable on there.  It does feature one of the last songs written by John before retreating into his househusband phase, although there’s so little going on in Cookin’ (In The Kitchen Of Love) that it’s hard to imagine that John spent  more than ten minutes on it.

I open the playlist with one of the few original songs attempted during the Rock’n’Roll sessions, the Phil Spector co-write Here We Go Again.  In essence it shows John’s attitude during this era as well as setting us up for another record.  Plus, it’s one less cover I have to put on this playlist.  From here we get the single edit of Venus & Mars/Rock Show which also tees up the album and Paul’s feelings as well.  From here we get the closest thing to a hit from Extra Texture, You – which may be one of the dumbest things you can name a song.

From one All Things Must Pass leftover to another, we get Ringo’s I’ll Still Love You.  While George did allow Ringo to record this for his album, unlike Paul or John, he did show up to play on the recording sessions for his song.  Something must’ve really irked him because George ended up suing Ringo over this version of this song, although I was never able to quite parse out what Harrison was so upset about.  But while we’re talking about lawsuits, the next track, You Can’t Catch Me is the tune that led to the lawsuit that led to the creation of Rock’n’Roll.  Ironically it’s also one of the best songs on that album.

Since we’re rocking out, we next have the slinky cool groove of Paul’s Letting Go.  Sure Listen To What The Man Says was a bigger hit, but I just can’t stand that tune.  I think I may be allergic to the soprano sax.  While Band On The Run’s Bluebird might be Paul’s answer to Blackbird and he had to be thinking about Yesterday when he wrote Tomorrow for Wild Life, there is no sequel as direct as This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying) – except for maybe Here Comes The Moon.  While it does come across as a bit of a desperate gambit to remind listeners of his former glory days, the song itself is really good.  It is not nearly as good as the White Album original, but it is one of the best tracks on Extra Texture.

Side Two opens with John’s biggest hit from Rock’n’Roll the straightforward cover of Ben E. King’s Stand By Me.  It’s as good as the original, although the original isn’t that great to begin with either.  Still it is a competently done cover and features John’s most engaged vocals.  From there we have one of the trippier ballads on Venus & Mars, Love In Song.  It’s got a little bit of a spooky vibe to it, elevating it above Treat Her Gently or Call Me Back Again.  “Can’t Stop Thinking About You” is a fairly standard Extra Texture track, but it does have a little more life to it than say Grey Cloudy Lies or World Of Stone so it get a place on this playlist.

Neither John’s Cookin’ (In The Kitchen Of Love) or Paul’s Pure Gold are particularly good and feel more like leftover given to Ringo rather than tailor-made for him.  Instead I went with the single A Dose Of Rock’n’Roll as it fits in well with John’s Rock’n’Roll covers.  From there I just picked and of John’s covers almost completely at random.  I went with Be-Bop-A-Lula but it could’ve been Ain’t That A Shame or Peggy Sue for all I cared.  The best thing that can be said about John’s Rock’n’Roll is that it’s better than the Beach Boys 15 Big Ones.  From there we get another Paul rock anthem in the non-album single Junior’s Farm.  I’m not sure what the lyrics are about, but it’s a strong song.  We wrap up the album with what has always been the hidden gem of Extra Texture Tired Of Midnight Blue.  I’m not sure why all the elements coalesced to work on this track when they failed everywhere else, but I love this song.

And I needed to end on some sort of high note as this was one of the toughest rounds to put together.  There were very few connections between any of the albums or songs in this period.  Of all the playlists so far, this is the one most illustrative of why they couldn’t keep making music together.  Sure, they were angrier at each other on previous playlists, but they don’t even have enough common ground to attempt a compromise at this point.  And they were never going to get any closer to each other again musically.

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.

While they both stumbled in Round Three and picked themselves up in Round Four, it isn’t until this round that John and Paul finally get what they’re going for.  Of course by this point, what they’re going for has diverged completely.  For John this meant commercial success.  While Lennon had sent his former drummer a congratulatory telegram for the Ringo album, he was probably a bit bitter and only have joking when he asked Ringo to wire him a hit song. 

For Lennon, being the last Beatle without a #1 single probably made him feel like a fraud or a fake whose success in The Beatles was a fluke – or even worse, all Paul’s doing.  So John took a look at what was popular on the radio in 1974, and decided to mimic that.  And what was popular at that time was Elton John.  So John essentially wrote his own Elton John song.  To make it even more convincing, he even had Elton play piano and sing with him on Whatever Gets You Through The Night, and despite Lennon’s initial skepticism the song became his first hit… and last during his lifetime.

Paul, on the other hand, had no issue achieving commercial success.  McCartney could have a hit singing Mary Had A Little Lamb (and did).  However the critical acclaim that the Beatles enjoyed eluded Paul in the early 70s.  For whatever reason, the critics had their knives out for him, whether they blamed Paul for breaking up the Beatles or they just felt his particular brand of whimsy was at odds with the anger and angst of the era.  To win the music journalists over to his side, McCartney was going to have to give himself a winning story of overcoming adversity to try and get the cognoscenti empathizing with him again.  In that vein, Paul decided to record his next album in a dilapidated studio in Lagos, Nigeria. 

However fate was going to make the recording of Band On The Run that much harder for him as 40% of the band ran away on the eve of flying down to Africa for this recording adventure.  This left Wings as essentially as the same one-man-band that recorded McCartney only with Denny Laine guesting on guitar.  (I can’t imagine Linda was adding much on the keyboards.)  Paul was so grateful, he even let Denny sing and co-write No Words for the album.  The gambit paid off and this was exactly the kind of hard-luck-story that made publications feel okay about saying that McCartney was cool again, even if in hindsight, bot Ram and McCartney are as good if not better than Band On The Run.

While John and Paul were finally fully recovered from their respective missteps, George hadn’t yet had his full-on landing-on-his-face moment like Wild Life or Some Time In New York City.  Maybe that’s why Harrison decided to tour America in ’74.  I can’t figure out why the one Beatle who hated touring the most agreed to this plan otherwise.  George, who was used to only have to sing a couple songs per show, was ill-equipped to be a front-man and soon wore out his already weak and fragile voice.  To make matters worse, while rehearsing and touring at night, George was trying to finish up an album he could plug on the tour during the day.  The result is the rather hoarse Dark Horse.  While the album is nowhere as disastrous as its reputation suggests, it’s not one of George’s best.  It took Harrison three years to craft the follow-up to All Things Must Pass and George just didn’t have the songs written yet.  There are only nine tracks on the album, one of which is a cover and another is an instrumental.  It’s almost as skimpy as Wild Life.  Still it’s kind of refreshing to finally hear George in a little less of an extravagant setting than his first two albums.

Ringo also wants to prove that Ringo wasn’t a fluke and that he could have hits on his own without relying on the other Beatles.  As a result, George and Paul are not to be found on Goodnight Vienna, leaving only John to help out.  Still Starr doesn’t have the songwriting chops to fill up an album on his own and once again makes an album with more than a little help from his famous friends.  This time around he’s got Harry Nilsson, Elton John, and Allen Toussaint helping him out as well as number of covers to fill out the album.  Still Ringo managed to release four singles from the album, and while it wasn’t praised as much as Ringo, it was still considered a worthwhile follow-up.

While Band On The Run is still one of Paul’s best-selling and critically lauded records, Walls & Bridges hasn’t had nearly the same longevity.  John himself decried the album as workmanlike craftsmanship in his later years. Which is a shame because, other than Plastic Ono Band, this is my favorite Lennon solo album.  Relocating to LA and hanging out with Harry Nilsson and the Hollywood Vampires got John in touch with a much more sympathetic back of studio musicians, especially Jesse Ed Davis.  The songwriting is far more personal than anything on Mind Games, and while the production is much better than on that album, you almost wish that John had gone for a stripped down, Plastic Ono Band­-styled approach to these songs.  If you can track down the out-of-print posthumous collection Menlove Ave, Side Two is precisely that: raw direct recordings that show how good the songs on Walls & Bridges really are.

This playlist opens with #9 Dream, the second Walls & Bridges single.  While the song itself is as weak and wimpy as anything on Mind Games, it works so much better with this more confident production.  It even became something of a minor hit.  From there we have the title track to Band On The Run.  I will admit that some of my favorite tracks on both that album and Walls & Bridges are not the singles, so I had a hard time balancing what I wanted to hear and what would make the most sense for this playlist.

After on title track, we get another with George’s Dark Horse.  While the brag that you shouldn’t have underestimated Harrison would’ve made more sense after the success of All Things Must Pass instead of 4 years later, when everyone has already got their expectations raised and then disappointed.  Still it’s a fun track and an ideal choice for the lead single, as well the name of George’s future record label and his personal avatar.

Elton John and Bernie Taupin wrote the goofy Snookeroo for Ringo, while it’s not quite the humble-brag of I’m The Greatest from the last album it still works pretty well.  From the Elton John-written song to the Elton John pastiche and duet we have John’s hit Whatever Gets You Through The Night.  While I’m glad John was finally able to get his number one single, this song is a little too peppy and poppy for the real heart (and hurt) of the album, which are mostly anguished cries for forgiveness and mercy from Yoko Ono.

Another big hit single that isn’t as good to me as the album tracks is Jet.  I debated swapping it out for Mamunia, but I figured people will really want Jet on there, although I don’t really understand why.  Side Two ends with another single, George’s Ding Dong, Ding Dong.  While there are plenty of rock songs written for Christmas (including big hits for both John and Paul), there is a relative dearth of New Year’s Eve carols.  As such, this slight song manages to have the entire holiday niche to itself.

Side Two opens with sounds of wolves howling and John’s Scared.  There are a number of vulnerable, pained songs like this that I considered for this slot: the Harry Nilsson collaboration Old Dirt Road, the jazzy Bless You, even the How Do You Sleep? for Phil Spector/Allen Klein, Steel & Glass.  Really any one of them would’ve worked to introduce a darker undercurrent to Side Two.  From there we have the strident bop of Mrs. Vanderbilt, a tune that was little more than an album track.  In 2008 Paul had a web poll to add a new song to his live set list, and this was the track that the fans voted for given some belated acclaim.  I have no idea what the song is actually about, but it is one of my favorites from the album.

From there we go to Maya Love one of the funkiest tracks on Dark Horse.  I know it gets a lot of crap, but I personally always loved the cover of Bye-Bye Love that George recorded almost entirely by himself for this album.  I think a lot of critics were mad that Harrison had pretended that both his ex-wife Pattie and her new boyfriend, Eric Clapton, played on the track – especially he had rewritten a few of the lyrics to referenced that whole situation.  While that may have left a poor taste in lot of people’s mouths, I still like that version.  Just not enough to include it over Maya Love on this playlist.

Since we have the title tracks to Dark Horse and Band On The Run, it only felt right to include the Lennon-penned (It’s All Down To) Goodnight Vienna.  Besides it much more appealing than the other singles, the oldies cover Only You and the No-No Song which in hindsight knowing about Ringo’s battles with alcoholism is not nearly as cute or funny as it must’ve seemed when it was released at the time.

Speaking of songs whose perception has changed over time, there’s the achingly beautiful Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down And Out).  With all the accolades and praise that was heaped on John after his death in 1980, it’s hard not to hear this song without a bitter, knowing irony.  Even John knew this would happen – and how sincere or lasting this type of praise is.  George’s anger and apathy is even more apparently in the appropriately titled B-side, I Don’t Care Anymore.  Unlike the tracks on the album itself, this tune feels as ragged and rough and rushed musically as George’s vocals otherwise imply.  While he dismisses up top as merely a B-side, it may be one of George’s most sincerely felt and personal tunes.

After two bummer tracks like that we need some appropriately apocalyptic yet grandiose to close this playlist off.  Rivaling even Live and Let Die is the climatic Nineteen Hundred And Eighty-Five.  There’s really no other place to put a song like this except at the end of an album, even if it didn’t feature a brief snippet of Band On The Run as a reprise.  It is only fitting for a round that feels as much like a triumph over adversity as this round.  In a lot of ways this is the ending of the last part of the ex-Beatles story where things really line-up neatly.  The next round will focus on what each former Beatle wants to do with their life and career from here on out now that they have accomplished their goals and proven to the world, themselves, and their former band-mates that they are more than just that one band from the 1960s.

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.

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.

After two rounds containing two of John and Paul’s best albums, it is inevitable that things can’t maintain this level consistency.  Two of the least loved solo Beatles albums came out in late ’71 and ’72.  While trading timeless for timely, both John and Paul have missed their mark, although neither album is nearly as dire as their popular reputation suggests.  There are some surprising connections between the two.  While John had recorded three albums with Yoko prior to this, Some Time In New York City was the couple’s first joint foray into straight forward pop/rock music and not experimental noise and sound collage.  While some of John’s output had been technically credited to the Plastic Ono Band, there’s not a lot of chance of collaboration in a group with no actual members on any sort of permanent basis.  So this album really represents the first time since the Beatles that John had worked in his usual milieu with someone else.

By the same token, Ram was credited to Paul & Linda, but Linda’s contributions seemed to just be helping with the backing vocals and taking credit for some of the songwriting for legal reasons.  With Wings, Paul had finally achieved his dream of getting a band together that he could take on the road again.  Of course, how much Wings is a “band” how much it is a “Paul McCartney backing group” depends on Paul’s mood on the album.  But at least at first, with Wild Life, Paul was trying to convince us that Wings were a fully-functioning, collaborative musical unit.

At the time of this record, John was (as the title suggests) living in New York City.  His battles with the American government over his immigration status, led him down a rabbit-hole of radicalism, hanging out with activists like Jerry Rubin and yippie-founder, Abbie Hoffman.  This only intensified Nixon’s personal paranoia, and probably delayed his green card more than anything else.  While Lennon had always been outspoken in his political beliefs, with songs like Revolution or Imagine or even Give Peace A Chance, he always dealt in generalities and philosophies rather than anything terribly specific.  On Some Time In New York City however, John and Yoko are finally naming names, protesting actual events, and citing specific examples.  As a result, a lot of the lyrics on this album dated fairly quickly, and will be of no meaning to your average listener today, without looking up all the references on Wikipedia.

Paul’s album with his new group is also pretty rushed, but not because of the political nature of the lyrics.  Instead, Paul wanted to get this new group off the ground long before they were ready to leave the nest.  The line-up hadn’t fully formed, and this is the only iteration of Wings as a four-piece.  There are only eight tracks on Wild Life, of which one is a cover, one is an improvised jam session, and one is an outtake from the Ram sessions.  Apparently inspired by tales of Bob Dylan’s frenetic recording sessions, Paul decided to take his band into the studio to knock out an album in a week, before they had the songs really ready.  Both the one-man-band ethos of McCartney and the elaborate production of Ram required some time and forethought and effort.  Paul thought he would try to do something quick and slap-dash.  While it was a noble effort, it is not a style that a control freak like McCartney thrives in, and as a result, Wild Life is a one-off experiment that was never attempted again.

While the ephemeral nature of the political lyrics are the most commonly cited reason for the dislike of Some Time In New York City, I think a lot of it has to do with the prominence of Yoko (and her idiosyncratic vocals) on most of the tracks.  Of the ten songs on the studio album, Yoko sings 30% on her own and duets with John on another 40%.  If you don’t want any Ono on your Lennon songs, that leaves only New York City, John Sinclair, and the first song on the record, which is not a lot.

Speaking of the first song (and the first single) from the record, I’m not typing out that title.  We all know what it is.  While I believe in freedom of speech, and John’s right to sing that word if he wants to; I don’t want to listen to it.  Especially not from a white guy.  While I agree with the general sentiment of the lyric (women are treated poorly), there’s got to be a better way to say it that doesn’t include that word.  It’s not even slipped in there like on Dylan’s Hurricane or sung from a different point-of-view, like on Randy Newman’s Rednecks.  It’s part of the title and the chorus and he sings it over and over again.  Some people trying to find the one god thing to say about Some Time In New York City, will champion this song (which was included on his greatest hits, Shaved Fish) saying that if you can get past the word itself, the music is pretty good, but I can’t even get into that.  It just sounds like a fairly standard Lennon track, not nearly as good as Power To The People, with a cheezy sax solo.

Of course, George’s third record was equally unimpressive.  Luckily for him, it was boxed up with previous two superior discs so critics weren’t as harsh.  Subtitled Apple Jam, the third record of All Things Must Pass contains nothing but instrumental noodling from George and what was beginning to coalesce into Derek & The Dominoes.  While the caliber of musicianship on display is quite impressive, there’s nothing particularly notable about any of these tracks besides the titles.  It all feels somewhere between filler and showboating.

George wasn’t the only ex-Beatle needlessly tacking on a whole extra disc onto their latest release.  Some Time In New York City came bundled with a second record subtitled Live Jam that did this record no favors in improving its reputation.  Side one featured two songs performed live from a UNICEF benefit concert from late 1969, featuring George Harrison, Keith Moon, and a bunch of people from Delany & Bonnie.  There’s an eight-and-a-half minute version of Cold Turkey that slowly devolves into a Yoko Ono-style noise experiment followed by a sixteen minute version of Don’t Worry Kyoko that starts out as a Yoko Ono-style noise experiment and only gets more unlistenable from there.

The second half features John & Yoko sitting in with Frank Zappa and the Mothers.  While there’s a pretty straight-forward cover of Well (Baby Please Don’t Go) most of it sounds like what you’d expect a Zappa/Ono mash-up to sound like.  Apparently John & Yoko assumed the band were all jamming and not playing the Zappa composition King Kong, so they took credit for the tracks, all while mixing out Mothers’ vocalists Flo & Eddie.  When Zappa finally released his version in 1992 on Playground Psychotics it featured a different mix, track breaks, songwriting credits and song titles (including the painfully accurate A Small Eternity With Yoko Ono).

In general, most people tend to just pretend this whole second disc doesn’t exist.  It’s kinda of like a much longer Revolution #9 to most fans, only it’s been quarantined to its own record making it that much easier to skip.  It’s funny that after defining the double-album with 1968’s self-titled album, none of the solo Beatles really released a 2 disc set during their career.  Certainly Paul threatened to a number of times (Red Rose Speedway and McCartney II) but each time he chickened out at the last minute.

For this playlist, there is a dearth of big hit singles to really open with, so instead I decided to start with the John & Yoko duet The Luck Of The Irish, one of two songs on this album inspired by the 1972 Bogside Massacre.  The other track, Sunday Bloody Sunday shares a title with U2’s composition on the same subject, but I chose this song as I enjoy its sarcastic bent (joking that this is an example of good luck for the Irish) while plying on every stereotype and trope about Ireland they could think of.  However, John and Bono weren’t the only one moved to put pen to paper in response to these killings.  In the rare instance of two ex-Beatles writing about the exact same thing, McCartney’s first single release was the rare political stab, Give Ireland Back To The Irish.

It may seem somewhat hypocritical after decrying “too many people preaching practices” on the last album; Paul’s song may be more convincing as an argument, if not as a song.  McCartney starts by buttering up his audience, reminding Britain how tremendous they are.  From there he tries to put the listener in the angry Irish patriot’s shoes, and reminds England of that IRA members also have families and believe in the Judeo-Christian god.  He also remarks their similarities in appearance to Paul McCartney himself.  Comparing and contrasting these two songs is a pretty quick way of seeing and dissecting the differences in approach between Lennon and McCartney.

While neither George nor Ringo have songs about “Bloody Sunday”, Harrison did release his big political single, Bangla Desh, around the same time, continuing the playlist’s political theme.  It’s a fine funky workout, with most of the heavy lifting done by Leon Russell.  The single didn’t sell that well though, prompting George to create the modern rock-star benefit with Concert For Bangla Desh.

Ringo also wrote a song inspired by the events of the day.  But for the B-side to his sequel to It Don’t Come Easy, Starr penned a tune for the spaghetti western he was in and recounted vaguely the plot of the film.  While the movie’s producers were more than happy to employ Ringo as an actor playing a Mexican bandito, they declined his offer to use this song in their film.  It’s a shame because this one of Ringo’s more adventurous and experimental productions, featuring timpani and vibra-slap and woodblocks and all sort of odd percussion.

From here we get another overtly political song from John Lennon, this one titled John Sinclair.  This song features some nice slide guitar work from Lennon on the resophonic guitar.  The lyrics paint a nice portrait of the jailed poet and activist, although the message is nearly undone by Lennon’s over-use of the repeated “got to, got to, got to…” hook.

Since there is a dearth of usable material from Apple Jam and George only had the one single, I have called an audible and included the Early Takes Vol. 1 version of Woman Don’t You Cry For Me in the mix.  While he isn’t playing a dobro, the use of the bottleneck guitar helps tie this song in with the previous one.  Plus this is one of the more produced demos of the time, with George’s audibly tapping foot and someone playing a jaw-harp in addition to the vocals and guitar.

We close Side One with Paul’s Dear Friend.  McCartney sounds genuinely pained as he responds to the wounds that Lennon inflicted with How Do You Sleep?  It is one of the most personal and stunning songs in Paul’s cannon.  Even his song for John after his murder, Here Today, doesn’t sound as vulnerable.  It’s a great way to close the side, although much like the title track, this song could’ve (and occasionally does) end a couple of times, before rising back to life and continuing on for a couple of minutes.  It’s a good song, but there’s not much to it.  It doesn’t need to be nearly six minutes when there is really only the two verses.  Paul could’ve used an editor here.

Side Two Opens with John & Yoko’s seasonal non-album single Happy Xmas (War Is Over).  It’s a simple sing-along, which is exactly what you need for an effective Christmas carol.  Since we have a number of John’s duets with his wife on this playlist, it’s only fair that we include one of the only duets between Paul and his betrothed, I Am Your Singer.  Linda only got a handful of lead vocals during the run of Wings (the pseudonymously released Seaside Woman, and the album cut Cook Of The House). Paul has written more tunes for Ringo to sing than he did for Linda.  While Linda is not a great singer, her voice isn’t quite the acquired taste that Yoko’s is, so this is nice pleasant little track and matches Happy Xmas well even if it doesn’t have the seasonal trappings.

With its gentle acoustic backing and toggling back-and-forth between major and minor chords, Deep Blue is a nice continuation of the good-natured feel of the first two track while hinting at darker things to come.  Ringo’s second rock’n’roll single feels much more like a solo composition than It Don’t Come Easy.  Since Ringo is a drummer, it is only fitting that Starr pen a tune with the drums as up-front and center as Back Off Boogaloo.  The song came to Ringo in his sleep and is either a tribute to Marc Bolan or a swipe at Paul McCartney.  This is the song that Ringo has returned to more than any other having re-recorded versions of it for both 1981’s Stop And Smell The Roses and 2017’s Give More Love.  It definitely warrants it.  It’s a great song.

We conclude the album with an instrumental jam medley.  Ideally these next few tracks will all be edited together and cross-faded into each other.  Not only did John and George release whole bonus discs of this type of material, but Paul even opened his first Wings album with something similar.  A lot of people knock Wild Life for opening with the tossed-off Mumbo followed by the trite throwaway Bip-Bop, but for my money, these are two of the best tracks on that record.  From Mumbo we use George’s fifty second birthday greeting to John to segue into Scumbag, one of the only tracks to have the same title on Some Time In New York City as Playground Psychotics.  It is also one of the more straightforward and tuneful tracks on the Live Jam disc.  Mumbo Link is then used as a link to the next song.  Much like the inclusion of The Lovely Linda and My Mummy’s Dead violated the “four songs apiece” rule; I don’t really think of these two interconnecting passages as songs really unto themselves.  The whole jam medley wraps up with Plug Me In.  I selected this Apple Jam track (credited to Eric Clapton, Jim Gordon, Dave Mason, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock, and George Harrison) not because it stick out from the rest of them, but because it was easily the shortest of the four. This is a tough period of the Beatles to enjoy or romanticize.  While The Beatles sixties career was pretty much flawless, this is the first time any of them ever really fell on their faces.  And to have all of them (except Ringo) to fail at the same time is kind of heart-breaking.  Still, it shows that by this period in their respective careers, none of them were that concerned with the effect on album could have on the reputations and at least felt secure enough to try really venturing out of their wheelhouses into uncharted territory here.  For those who don’t care for this kind of thing, don’t worry.  The next round will all be a retreat to their strengths on a lot of levels.

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.

After the laid-back aesthetics of McCartney and Plastic Ono Band, both Lennon and McCartney decide to add what John referred to as “sugar-coating” with much larger and more elaborate productions.  John and Paul start addressing each a directly, Paul with the somewhat oblique Too Many People while John lashed back with the unmistakable How Do You Sleep?  Both albums feature a simple twelve-bar blues with a shuffle feel for their second song (3 Legs and Crippled Inside). 

Ram was critically lambasted at the time but has since grown to cult-favorite and is now considered one of Paul’s best. Ram was technically credited to Paul and Linda McCartney, with Linda receiving co-writing credit for several songs. There is some skepticism about how much Linda actually contributed and how much of the co-writing credit was just a dodge to retain control of half of the songwriting royalties as Paul’s publishing was still tied up in Beatles-era deals. It did result in a lawsuit that was eventually settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum. Meanwhile, Yoko only managed to belatedly get co-writing credit for the song Imagine just in the last few years.

While Ringo showed up on Plastic Ono Band, Imagine features George Harrison on several cuts.  Paul eschewed the whole one-man-band aesthetic and used a handful of session musicians for Ram (and as probably as a try-out for his next band, Wings).  In fact this is really the first time either Paul or John fired studio musicians directly rather than just getting friends to play on their records or having George Martin contract the string players or their beheast.

While Plastic Ono Band consists of newly written songs dealing with the Beatles’ break-up and John’s involvement in primal scream therapy, Imagine contains a couple of songs first started during the Beatles’ days, including Jealous Guy which was originally written for The White Album under the title Child Of Nature but left off because it was too lyrically similar to Paul’s Mother Nature’s Son as well as Gimme Some Truth which the Beatles worked on for a bit during the Get Back sessions.

While George’s three biggest hits are one disc one of All Things Must Pass, I personally prefer disc two.  It gets goofier with songs like Apple Scruffs and I Dig Love, as well as containing my favorite version of Isn’t It A Pity (since it’s the shorter version).  In fact, if you removed the empty padding of the Apple Jam disc and the extraneous version of Isn’t It A Pity, the massive-seeming All Things Must Pass is whittled down to a mere 17 songs at a little over an hour and eight minutes.  That is a little short for a double-album honestly, although if George had finished off some of the songs he either started or demoed during these sessions (I Live For You, Beautiful Girl, You, Try Some, Buy Some, Woman Don’t You Cry For Me, I’ll Still Love You, Window Window, Nowhere To Go, Cosmic Empire, Tandoori Chicken, etc.) he would ultimately have an album that earned the reputation for length as well as brilliance as All Things Must Pass is assumed to have.

Ringo finally got around to releasing his first solo rock material – even if it was just a single.  Ringo also upped the number of solo compositions he had written from three to five with this release, although, clearly George had an un-credited hand helping with the A-side.  In fact, bootlegs of George’s guide vocal on It Don’t Come Easy as well as some of Ringo’s own comments, makes one wonder if Harrison was in fact the sole author.  The B-side however is clearly Ringo’s own, as he clumsily attempts to mask the identities of the other three Beatles and humbly admit to his own shortcomings as a multi-instrumentalist.  It is one of my all-time favorite Ringo tracks.

The playlist kicks off with one of John’s political-slogans-turned-singles Power To The People.  This is certainly a better song and a fuller recording than Give Peace A Chance.  Around this time John was also threatening to release a reggae song entitled Make Love Not War.  Luckily this never came to fruition.  From here Paul chimes in with Too Many People, chiding some of Lennon’s more blatant politicking.  Despite the opposite messages of the lyrics, it’s a good one-two punch of upbeat strong rockers that show than Lennon & McCartney are going to step up their production game this time around.

From the state of the world to the state of the Beatles we get Ringo’s autobiographical Early 1970 to help relieve some of the pressures and pretensions that have accumulated thus far.  From there George lets us know that he understand the grief inherent in big changes, such as the death of a loved one (or the Beatles break-up).  But he reminds that such change is inevitable and should not be fought against.

Since we’ve all moved on now, Paul gives us Another Day.  This is simply a stunner of a single and a shame that it didn’t actually appear on Ram.  While the production may be more pop-oriented and upbeat, the way McCartney decries this poor working woman’s life of drudgery and her unsuccessful attempts at maintaining some fleeting happiness is just devastating.  I love the lines about her begging her man to stay, and he does … until the next morning.  This is a portrait of Eleanor Rigby as a young woman.  I think it’s better than Yesterday.

You know who doesn’t think Another Day is as good as Yesterday?  John Lennon.  He’s back with a vengeance.  Only slightly better veiled than Early 1970 is How Do You Sleep?  This may also be one of my favorite Lennon tracks, featuring a cutting George Harrison guitar solo.  While I can’t get behind the mean-spirited content of the lyrics, this is one of his best track musically.  It is funky and John’s vocals are impressively bitter.  Sure, I doubt Paul would’ve allowed this on any album he was on, but I couldn’t pass it up.  I even toyed with the idea of following this up with Wild Life’s Dear Friend to sort of close the whole back-and-forth between John and Paul, but I just didn’t feel it fit.  Besides, I love Ram, and would hate to have to lose any more of those songs to make room for that.

The side ends with George’s warning about too much negativity Beware Of Darkness.  Much like a pacifist unsuccessfully breaking up a fight, it’s a worthwhile effort, but completely futile and just as like to stoke the fires as it is to extinguish them.  John may not completely see the error of his ways, but he’s more than happy to tell others that they need to be more peaceful.  Thus Side Two opens with what may be John’s most famous solo song, Imagine.  It’s become a well-loved classic for a good reason.  The sentiment of the lyrics is truly hopefully (certainly after the vindictive spleen of How Do You Sleep?) and the music is an appropriately stirring anthem to match.

But since everyone is in an angry and foul mood, we next get Paul’s harshest and grittiest vocal, Monkberry Moon Delight, even if the lyrics are complete gibberish and he can’t really express why he’s so pissed off.  George wants to get in on the loud/angry bandwagon too with The Art Of Dying.  While George’s vocals have never had that kind of bite to them, the song is proto-metal with some screaming electric guitars and a kick-ass horn section.  From here things cool down a bit with Ringo’s self-effacing It Don’t Come Easy, a great little track that fits him well.

Rather than continue to get angry at McCartney, or disappointed in humanity, John decides to wrap things up on a fun positive note.  And for Lennon, that always means declaring his love for Ono.  The fun and silly song ends with some frantic wheezy on the harmonica which easily leads into the next track, Harrison’s ode to the Beatles’ fans, Apple Scruffs.  Both songs are breezy and light, which is always much more in Paul’s wheelhouse.  So Paul wraps things up with the ultimate goofy ditty Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.  A sort of Abbey Road style suite of three or four semi-related song fragments, this so is both very complicated and yet utterly naïve and guileless.  It’s a perfect way to end the playlist.

Ultimately these songs feel much more coherent together than the last round.  Not only is George’s lushness no longer at odds with the starkness of John and Paul, but the lyrics are beginning to address some of the same topics, even if they have radically different points-of-view on them.  Enjoy this match-up, because it’s going to get rockier from here on out.

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 a tough one to decide how to divvy up.  John’s 3 pre-Plastic Ono Band A-sides are some of his most iconic work.  Yet I’d hate to short-change my favorite solo Lennon albums just to make room for all of these tracks.  Especially since, in contrast, McCartney only has like half an album to pick from.  I even toyed with the idea of pairing Paul’s debut with just those three singles and then matching Plastic Ono Band with Ram.  I ultimately decided against this because not only are there not enough John songs to work with but because McCartney and Plastic Ono Band are so similar in their own ways.

Putting aside McCartney’s soundtrack to The Family Way and Lennon’s three albums of experimental non-music with Yoko, these are both John and Paul’s first real albums.  There are some interesting parallels.  Both are very stripped down and intimate.  For Paul this means a cozy and quaint like quiet at home in front of the fire; for John this means an intense and exposed like a raw-nerve.  

Paul was probably trying to scoop the Beatles’ break-up to promote his solo album and so he pads his debut out with a few instrumentals that feel far more “unfinished” than any of John’s experiments with Yoko that actually got the Unfinished Music moniker attached to them.  He has also included a completely unnecessary instrumental retread of a song that had already appeared on the album (Junk).  This gives McCartney something of a rushed feel, which adds to its rough-hewn charm, but also makes the album feel a little under-done.  It even ends with an unnecessary, heavy-panting drum solo from Paul.  He’s not a bad drummer, but Ringo is much better, and it took a lot of time and cajoling to get him to play even the one quick drum solo he has at the end of the Abbey Road medley.  McCartney was released on 4/17/1970 and Plastic Ono Band came out 238 days later on 12/11/1970.   So clearly John had more time to work on his response, as well crafting three pretty popular singles while Paul was stretching just to fill his one LP.

While Paul used several songs that had been bandied around since the Beatles days (Teddy Boy for Let It Be and Junk for The White Album as well as Hot As Sun which actually dates from 1959), John was deliberately writing from the perspective of a post-Beatles life.  Plastic Ono Band was recorded while John was deep in his fascination with Dr. Janov’s primal scream therapy, and it shows (for good or for ill).  This album may be John’s finest record as a solo artist.  It is painfully honest and sometimes embarrassingly direct.  It can be a bit much to take, but it is a painful and powerful listen.  It’s a shame he never again tried anything so vulnerable and confessional.

Without each other to turn to any more, Lennon and McCartney are turning to their newly minted spouses as their new sparring partners and sounding boards.  Paul credits wife Linda with backing vocals while John gives Yoko credit for “wind” (?!).  Paul played all the instruments on his album while John used Ringo on drums and Beatles’ longtime associate, Klaus Voorman, on bass, so both keep the sound and the sidemen very much in the Beatles family.

While both John and Paul and trying to live up to the initial ethos of the Get Back project and make things a little less-produced, George is taking his new-found freedom to go all out.  He releases a three-LP set and let’s Phil Spector go to town with his “wall of sound”.  While Plastic Ono Band was also technically co-produced by the notoriously lush (in both sense of the word) Spector, you could hardly tell by listening to it.  Notice that being “stripped-down” does not necessarily mean “unplugged”.  George’s lush productions feature lots of acoustic guitars, while both Paul and John used more distorted electric guitars in general.  I had toyed with the idea of using the collection of primarily All Things Must Pass demos that was released as Early Takes, Vol. 1 as the basis of this first round since it more closely mirrored Paul and John’s aesthetic during this period, but ultimately it felt a little disingenuous to poor George who was finally getting a chance to shine here.

Since George did release one three album set on his first time out of the gate and then waited nearly three years to deliver a follow-up, I have used one disc per hypothetical album.  To the surprise of many, Harrison’s was the biggest hit initially.  And all of the big hits from All Things Must Pass come from this first disc, including the double-A side of My Sweet Lord/Isn’t It A Pity, as well as What Is Life. 

For Ringo’s songs, I generally stuck with his singles rather than his full albums, since he didn’t have many full albums to draw from at first.  His first album, the standards covers collection Sentimental Journey actually pre-dated the “end” of The Beatles, and therefore, I felt was as disqualified as Two Virgins or Wonderwall Music.  His second album, also from 1970 and also all covers, is the country flavored Beaucoups Of Blues which was recorded in Nashville with Pete Drake and a bunch of profession session musicians.  The title track was released as a single with the non-album B-side, Coochy Coochy.  This song is the only the third solo songwriting credit that Ringo has received after Don’t Pass Me By and Octopus’s Garden, so I thought it was fitting that it should be included.

Already violating the “four songs apiece” rule, I have opened this round with The Lovely Linda and closed it with My Mummy’s Dead, two sub-one-minute ditties to work as an invocation and benediction for the album, mirroring each at the start and the beginning.

For the first real song, I have used John’s majestic Instant Karma! as it is a good opening.  While there were no singles officially released from McCartney it was always clear from the beginning that the stand-out track was Maybe I’m Amazed (which was belatedly released as a single from the live Wings Over America album).  While some of the luster of George’s My Sweet Lord has dimmed from the plagiarism lawsuit, it still is one of the biggest hits of George’s career, and it’s hard to deny it inclusion in this opening triumvirate of hits.

But such over-the-top grandiosity can’t be maintained, and we go from here to Ringo’s humble Beacuoups Of Blues.  For the next track, I picked Cold Turkey a song that John had even tried to get the Beatles to record after Abbey Road but was vetoed by Paul and George because it was too blatantly about drugs.  Still it is a cool, rollicking, funky song that reminds me a little of Come Together.  I would’ve loved to hear what bass part Paul would’ve come up for it since it is so prominent.  Perhaps as a joke, this song is followed up by Junk – a song that is not actually about junk as the drug slang term, but actually sung from the point of view of items being left outside for a garage sale.  The album side wraps up with Isn’t It A Pity a song that apes “Hey Jude” both in its length and its endlessly repeating chorus at the end.

Side two opens with the raw emotions of John’s Mother which are immediately undercut by Paul’s little less sincere maternal paean Teddy Boy.  From here we get a pair of country numbers featuring Pete Drake on pedal steel.  First we have the one of the few fun songs from this period of George’s Behind That Locked Door followed by Ringo’s goofy one-chord jam Coochy Coochy. 

God may be John’s big statement from Plastic Ono Band but I wasn’t sure about including a song with the line “I don’t believe in Beatles” on even a completely made-up Beatles album.  Give Peace A Chance is a great slogan and catchy chorus, but there’s no song there, and even less of a recording, so I chose to leave that off.  Instead I have decided to give Lennon’s final slot to Working Class Hero.  It is one of my all-time favorite John tracks ever.  Then again, I’m a huge Dylan fan.  From there we go to the rather straightforward riff rocker of Oo You before closing with George’s Let It Down.  I know I skipped What Is Life but frankly, I have never been too much of a fan of that song.  I’m trying to temper some of my more obnoxious contrarian tendencies and include most of the big hits and singles, but I think I will just pass here.

It is an odd and not terribly coherent listen as a playlist, but it does contain some of their best music as a foursome.  Perhaps they were still riding that Beatles-high, or were all trying to prove something to each other, but this is a good batch of songs, and unlike some rounds, I had a hard time whittling these down to a mere fourteen tracks.