The Home Key #18

   As frequent readers of this column might remember, Adam Braver, Marc Woodworth, and I have been talking and writing about The Beatles for quite some time, now. As a group effort, as a community project. Perhaps owing to our sense that the story has more urgency to it, now that the remaining Beatles are growing older, our conversation has become more intensive since, e.g., the Get Back release of 2022. Almost whenever there is news of significance, we have taken a shot at it. See, e.g., our column on the “last” Beatles song, “Now and Then.” Last year’s Mind Games deluxe package, masterminded by Sean Lennon, with its meditation remix and multiple versions, also sort of seemed like it might serve. It’s an album that, for whatever reason, I scarcely listened to in the seventies, though everything before and received my close attention. The other guys seemed to have a similar relationship with that record. I made a sort of whimsical suggestion, that we try to bear down on the “Lost Weekend” period of Lennon, in which each of us attempted to make a greatest hits playlist of Lennon from that period, under the theory that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as people are sometimes liable to suggest. And so we all retreated to do some heavy listening to the Lennon solo material. Marc and Adam, because I probably muddled the instructions, believed that they could use material from any period of his output. But: whatever the approach, each of us came away from the Mind Games experience a little bit disappointed. Mind Games, it seems, is an album that really confounds one’s reverence for the intensity and engagement of the younger John Lennon, the John Lennon of Plastic Ono Band, and the slack feeling extends into the less vivid tracks on Walls and Bridges, the next album of new material. There are some songs in this period that are great, but also some that perhaps illustrate dramatically the exhaustion and distraction that Lennon was feeling. It’s hard not to feel that way.

A resolution to our lassitude with respect to Mind Games, however, came with the Living in the Material World re-release that followed soon after. George Harrison’s album, back in the heavy Beatles solo period, was nearly coterminous with Lennon’s Mind Games, and preceded a bit of a Lost Weekend for George, too, but it retains some of the enormity of Harrison’s earlier, monumental release, All Things Must Pass. So, in order to shake off the complexity of wrestling with Mind Games we compared George’s album with Lennon’s, and then, because we realized that we just have never dealt respectfully enough with Ringo’s career, at all, we finished this piece by writing a few lines each about Ringo Starr’s brand new Look Up, which clearly reinvigorates Ringo’s solo work in a significant way.

This is an idiosyncratic assemblage of bits about the solo years, then, which took place over a great many months, and which clearly has at least one enormous gap. No Paul McCartney! I think this oversight suggests that we will get to his work at some point before long too. We probably should have done it when Egypt Station came out! We could have discussed whether that’s really an electric sitar on the bridge on “Come on to Me.” I bet we’ll get there, if not to Egypt Station, at least a broader consideration of the McCartney solo work.

In the meantime, here are the three other Beatles, all of whom, with Klaus Voormann, played on Ringo’s recording of “I’m the Greatest,” and on that subject see more below.

RM: The origin point of this conversation was the expanded rerelease of John Lennon’s Mind Games an album which, in my case, I barely listened to as a younger person. I was sort of exactly the right age to hear Walls and Bridges when it came out (I purchased it!), likewise Shaved Fish (his greatest hits of solo albums), and then, of course, Double Fantasy, etc. And I knew Imagine well from the radio. But the less well-known works by John Lennon were less well known by me too. As a discerning record-collecting adult I did in fact listen to everything by John a bit, exploratorily, and became somewhat fanatic about Plastic Ono Band (and Yoko’s early releases), but for all of that, I had a disdain for the “Lost Weekend” stuff. I felt like the arrangements were overstuffed, or merely ornamental. I would go further, based on our conversation around the release of “Now and Then,” when I made some disparagements about the “domesticated” qualities of the later Lennon albums. To some degree, I stand by these perceptions. I think, by the time of Imagine, that John Lennon had written his last truly great songs. I guess it’s pretty good, though, when your last truly great song (“Imagine,” arguably) is among the most powerful and moving of all pop songs! Ever!

   That said, Adam and I found ourselves kind of liking some of the new versions of the songs on Mind Games. I think we both suddenly found “Aisumasen” way better than we expected. (Adam, feel free to disagree!) And thus came about what I understood to be an assignment for the three of us–a list of acceptable or pretty great solo songs from the wilderness years of John Lennon. Which I took to be the period after Imagine and before Double Fantasy.

   My album of these “Lost Weekend” songs is a double album, and I’m going to post it here (I changed the title!), and it has some curveballs. I will explain below.

John Lennon, THE WILDERNESS YEARS

Side A
Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
Jamrag (Sometime in New York City mix)
#9 Dream

Side B
Out The Blue
Ain’t That a Shame
I’m the Greatest (Mind Games Ultimate Mix version)
Aisumasen (I’m Sorry)
Fame (David Bowie and John Lennon Live, 1975: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkLE1Gno724)

Side C
Rip It Up/Ready Teddy
I Know (I Know)—Mind Games Raw Studio Mix
I Saw Her Standing There (with Elton John, live, 1974)
Listen the Snow Is Falling (Yoko/Plastic Ono Band)

Side D
Scumbag (Playground Psychotics/Mothers of Invention mix)
Mind Games

This album has on it almost nothing from Sometimes in New York City on it because I really find the “protest songs” on that album dated and the arrangements hard to get comfortable with. But Sometime does have a two different mixes of the live recording of John and Yoko playing with The Mothers of Invention. I think everyone on this thread knows that I have a soft spot for Frank Zappa (my sister really liked him, and she turned me on to him, and his was the first concert I ever went to), and so I love these crazy Mothers recordings, which on my album we have in the two different mixes. The John mix (on Side A), and the Frank mix (on Side D). The other two curveballs, obviously, are “I’m the Greatest,” of which I originally had the Ringo version (quite superior, I think), and “Fame,” but here I am using a sort of demo-ish version of the latter, not the Bowie recording, and this demo version you can see on YouTube as shown. Definitely a Lennon song in part, and definitely from the Lost Weekend time!

   I don’t know if Sean Lennon’s mixes are so superior that they rescue the Mind Games album from its self-inflicted difficulties. More, I think it is that I have softened on the kinds of absolutisms that made me not care about this period earlier. For example: I really do think that “Number 9 Dream” on Walls and Bridges is one of the very greatest of John Lennon’s songs. Just gorgeous. And I do like Rock and Roll a lot, as a document of enthusiasms. (It just didn’t fit with the other tracks very well.) Mind Games, the album, seems possessed of some phoned-in songs, yes, but it also features some that are moving, plangent, and heartfelt, if lyricially uncomplicated. John Lennon the poet is sort of not in the house, but that melodies are still great.

   And: I have to say I really love the song “Mind Games” so much. It’s just a wonderful song. I really think that guitar melody is so like something George Harrison would have written, and it is dazzling. That counterposed against the downward force of the bass lines. Really an indelible work of art.

   If you want to hear this as a sequence, it’s here: John Lennon Out The Blue

   Any thoughts?

MW: I mistook somehow the actual start-point of the exercise and at first included songs from Imagine on my list—once I deleted those tracks, it’s pretty sparse. I’ve been largely un-invested in solo Lennon, not with good reason and with a nagging sense of being in the wrong. It turns out there was a lot I hadn’t even listened to, a cause for some chagrin. So going track by track through the records, including the ones through Imagine, turned up a lot of music I like well enough. I even had a moment when I convinced myself I would revel in a rich ‘rediscovery’ of this part of Lennon’s songbook and that it would come to mean something more to me. The enthusiasm waned and I find myself roughly back where I started: I’d trade it all, including “Imagine,” for McCartney’s “Jet.” Maybe we’re not here to compare post-Beatles solo work, but there are post-Beatles McCartney, Harrison and Starr songs that are essential to me and still evoke so vividly their moments, but the only Lennon solo song that functions that way for me is “Mind Games,” the beauty and depth of which Rick describes so well, even if for me the song does so in a lesser way than “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” or even “Photograph.” I like in concept Plastic Ono Band’s primal moment but more as an idea than as music I want to revisit regularly. And I find Sometime in New York City largely unlistenable however intense the politics that inform it. The music itself seems merely a convenient vehicle, somehow a necessary annoyance. Aside from “Mind Games,” the closest I come to having a live connection with Lennon’s solo work involves Double Fantasy because it’s so fully attached for me to Lennon’s death. What I felt at the time of his murder informed that record for me so thoroughly that I’m unable to imagine what I’d feel about those songs otherwise. Even with the combination of his death and that record, it’s not one I’ve listened to a lot since the year it came out, a time when I played it over and over. Listening again, however, brings back a feeling still available to me in some of those songs. And I’ve come to think feeling something strong is the signal mark of valuing a song over time. If I don’t feel it, it becomes an exercise in thinking about what I ought to feel, what I ought to like. Reading of Rick’s affinity for Yoko’s work in the late 60s/early 70s and Plastic Ono Band makes me wish I were more moved by the experimental than I am—I think it a sign of capaciousness and a fuller musical intelligence to be provoked by and appreciative of that work. When I still believed we were including Imagine songs in our list, I thought a lot about “How Do You Sleep” and was moved by Lennon’s later claim that he was writing about himself as much as he was writing about Paul in that song, that songwriters are always perhaps mostly writing about themselves whatever they think they’re doing. Still, for all its bite and focus, “How Do You Sleep,” one of Lennon’s best solo songs, protests too much—even the minor McCartney song to which it responds—“Too Many People”—has more going for it than a lot of Lennon’s songs of the period. But fortunately we don’t have to choose between bodies of work as we don’t have to claim Paul or John as our main Beatle.  Whether the interiority of the beautiful vocal on “Old Dirt Road” or the candid turn of a phrase like “I am only learning to tell the trees from wood,” in “I Know (I Know)” are now aspects of Lennon’s art I can turn to when I like with more appreciation and pleasure.

Out of the Blue
I Know (I Know)
Mind Games
Old Dirt Road
Going Down on Love
Much Mungo / Mt. Elga
Fame
Watching the Wheels
I’m Losing You

AB: I confess that I may have been the one holding this up, kind of avoiding writing on the subject. It has been a difficult task on many levels. First, like Marc, I misunderstood the parameters of the assignment, and included songs from Imagine and Double Fantasy. While greatly admiring Rick’s breadth in his choices, especially in his ability to see and be moved by some of the sonic tracks during this period of Lennon’s career, I found myself struggling, curiously even with the inadvertent inclusion of the two impermissible albums. Still, I did put together a list that I stand by, but in many respects almost all the songs felt like the only options I could earnestly pick. Outside of some undeniably wonderful and/or important songs, it was hard to shake the sense of compromising. It stunned me to some degree how weak I saw the Lennon oeuvre during that period, stunned me in a way that upended what had been my memory or belief in his importance during that era.

   Without question, I have always loved, and still do, Plastic Ono Band. Its raw honesty and delicacy still moves me immensely, and although we know its backstory of his primal scream therapy, the issues of his recent post-Beatles life, for me it still maintains as a piece of art that is not reliant on its context (something I’m sure I never knew much about when the album first came to me anyway). I have similar feelings about Imagine, an album that I believe deserves all of its accolades, with songs that are forever and gratefully wired into my brain. But for reasons that probably are more visceral than anything else, as a complete work the album never moved me from start to finish in the way of Plastic Ono Band. And then Mind Games, the occasion for this exchange, felt like an extension of that in extremis—a few amazing songs, such as the title song, that in many way define the Lennon sound. Yet at the same time, many songs that recall the worst tendencies of Lennon’s solo career.

   Again, it is difficult for me to even be writing this, but I find a kind of laziness to so many of the songs, and I’m often left with the sensation that Lennon himself didn’t quite believe in them as songs, perhaps more focused on them as either messages of love to Yoko or didactic political commentary, or maybe even as the product of a cultural expectation placed upon him by people such as myself. No question that in the conceptual, I am deeply affected by his constant expression of love, and his commitment to humanity. But in terms of songwriting and arranging, those artistic elements too often come across as a secondary priority to this listener—especially when we move into, say, Sometime in New York City. Again, I need to emphasize, perhaps by way of guilt or apology, how hard it is for me to admit to this, or even experience songs by John Lennon this way. As I have said, he is among the top people I have admired as a songwriter, musician, vocalist, activist, artist, and human being.

   I suspect, the reactions I am experiencing through this contemporary listening of his work is not something that is new or coming with perspective. Rather, it is a matter of facing on the page what likely I’d overlooked or dismissed in favor of the songs and eras of his career that in fact were nothing more than pure genius. Listening to much of the solo work in total, I find what is hard to swallow is how strangely so little of this solo era of Lennon’s moves me.

   In contrast, today, as I write this, George Harrison’s Living in the Material World was re-released for its 50th anniversary (including a secondary disc of scaled-down versions of all the songs in alternate takes). I won’t argue that it’s a through-and through masterpiece, but I will say it is a record that manages to get to me through much of it (in a similar but perhaps less intense way as Plastic Ono Band). My point here is not to compare or pit Lennon versus Harrison, but merely to wonder what it is to be moved by one body of work over another, when, all things being equal, they are the works of two masters, arguably at very kindred and unique stage of life, working out and coming to terms with who they are in very different ways, but still, through the one form they both know.  I can only say that for me, even in Living in the Material World’s weaker moments, I find Harrison to be meticulous in his craft, never feeling as though he is shortcutting anything or just tossing out work that is subpar for him (which he would do at times later in his career, for sure), and also this undercurrent of need and vulnerability in his voice, the searching and yearning that comes across through his performances. It makes me ache a little, listening to George on this record (especially the outtakes), and in a good way, as though despite his subject, he is giving voice to shared struggle and hopes of human existence.

SIDE ONE
Gimme Some Truth
Aisumasean
I’m the Greatest
Mind Games
Jealous Guy
You Can’t Catch me

SIDE TWO
Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)
Oh, My Love
Stand by Me
Out of the Blue
Number 9 Dream
Watching the Wheels

BONUS TRACK: Nobody Told Me

RM: You guys, owing to Adam’s remarks, and notwithstanding our subject, which was (initially) John Lennon, I have now been listening to Living in the Material World a lot, the reissue, more than I did with the Lennon album, I confess, and Adam reminds me of this as well. Really, the pattern with George Harrison, I find, is that the demos are astoundingly good. And the pattern holds here. The demos included with the reissue are just very, very good.

   I was in middle school when “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” was a single, and I heard it a lot, and I really liked it then, although I did, as a young person, find the slide guitar parts so weird, so out of my experience, as to be truly strange somehow. I guess I had an idea of what a guitar solo sounded like (I was probably somewhat listening to The Dark Side of the Moon in those days, because of my sister, and also to John Barleycorn Must Die and Eat a Peach, for similar reasons, and so I guess I thought a guitar solo sounded like David Gilmore, or Dickey Betts, or Steve Winwood), and it did not sound like George writing these weird, bendy guitar parts in thirds or fifths with himself that sounded both like Hawaiian slack key guitar and/or like sitar. I think a lot about encountering that guitar sound in middle school and trying to understand it somehow. That was my first thought about Material World.

   Later on, when I fully understood All Things Must Pass (this was in my thirties—I was not smart enough to get certain features thereof before that time, except for the hits), I sort of resisted some portion of Material World because it wasn’t as big a sound as All Things Must Pass. I have this same feeling about “Photograph” from the Ringo album. Really I would say, in some way, that “Photograph” is among my very favorite Beatles solo songs, and I kind of can’t believe that George (mostly) and Ringo could make a song that grandiose and then not feel like doing it ever again. I couldn’t quite believe that George could make an album as phenomenally gigantic as All Things Must Pass and then immediately head in the other direction.

   So how to think about Material World? For one, there is that one composition that is as big, which I think we have touched on in the past: “Try Some Buy Some.” (There is, you probably know, a David Bowie version of this song, which I think is really interesting, and really also slightly tamed, although I really trust him with the spirit of the song, which I think he totally understood. However, I did find this live version today, which shows him playing the song in a club gig, and it’s pretty great. There you can see entirely how much he loves the song, and there’s a moment when they head for the orchestral closing section (in the original its orchestral), and Bowie gets down near the audience, and the song rises up, like it does in the original. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svpv6UHA-dw.) It’s just so complex, this song, that it takes a very long time to understand it. Or at least it took me a very long time.

Here are the chords, in case you never looked: https://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/tab/george-harrison/try-some-buy-some-chords-1975305.

   Ridiculous! I don’t know how to play half of these chords on guitar. And then when it all gets fed through the Spectorian/Wagnerian pomp machine, especially at 3:16 on the single version, it’s just an unbelievable experience. As powerful as any orchestral arrangement of the Beatles, really. There’s a stripped down band arrangement included among the nuggets of the reissue, and it’s pretty surprising and delightful, because, yes, George wrote the string charts, or some portion of the string parts, as on the All Things Must Pass demos, where you can hear George, at one point, sing the string chart over his demo (on “Isn’t It a Pity?”)—meaning he had already figured that part out. On the “Try Some” rock band version he plays some of the string parts on slide guitar. They are really peculiar and dazzling, these arrangements, when played more minimally in such a context. But the song does want the huge Spector treatment for the end section, it seems to me.

   Why does it want the wall of sound? Because all of Material World is trying to demonstrate abstractly, in music, what transcendent spiritual experience feels like. And one way it does that is with this big string arrangement at the end of “Try Some Buy Some.” It’s a song, you know, about the music biz (another widespread theme on the record), and about how Harrison’s religious experience gave him another way to think about his predicament in the business. The best songs on the album confuse, or mix up, religious ecstasy and earthly love, and they then find really unsuspectable musical analogues for this sense of things. And so we have that here as well.

   That said, in the main, George just kind of took over the producer’s seat, because I think Spector proved unreliable, and then he sort of did everything else on the album himself. Did he do dozens of takes? I think one alternate take on the second disc of the reissue is marked take #93. He did many, many takes. And he played almost all the guitars, and removed Badfinger from the finished recording, even though they showed up and took their guitars out of the cases. That means that the thing that I didn’t like about the album at first (not as big), which I thought was owing to lack of budget, or some such, was fully intentional. And now, really, with these very slight different mixes, you can start to hear how and why. In these days of innumerable overdubs and loudness wars, the reductive nature of the production is very different, very compelling.

   That said, as shown with “Try Some Buy Some,” these songs are not as minimal as you might suspect.  Not as stripped down. This is sort of George’s most progressive moment. So he wrote these ridiculously complex songs, and then played them with a rock combo, not a Broadway pit orchestra. This is what’s sort of incredible about the album. A song like “Who Can See It,” the song that got 93 takes, is not entirely different from something that the Moody Blues might have recorded at the same time. It really goes to some weird spots, especially in the way the time signature swivels around. It’s sort of in fours, and then it’s in fives, and so on.

   From this vantage point, if we’re contrasting Material World with Mind Games there just isn’t really a comparison. George was proving himself musical, proving the depth of his wisdom and experience about songwriting. I think George sort of crashed and burned after “Dark Horse” and the American tour, and maybe drugs were really part of that. Or maybe it was after his separation from his first wife, Pattie. But the period of All Things Must Pass, Bangladesh, Living in the Material World, which was three or four years, is significantly monumental among solo Beatles. John was going in the opposite direction at the time. We struggled, as shown above, to get a decent record out of John by anthologizing many years of work. George’s problem was different—he stopped wanting to be the musician in the public eye, but he never entirely stopped wanting to be a musician.

   Adam has noted George’s mother having died not long before Material World, and I agree that this calamity may have caused some striking difference between the upbeat qualities of All Things Must Pass, and the occasionally more strident, desperate tunes here, but I also think that there’s a sort of fundamental distrust of the spiritual cast of some of the songs that persists even unto today. See, e.g., the Pitchfork review of the reissue: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/george-harrison-living-in-the-material-world-50th-anniversary/. This retrospective, in my view, rehashes the same tired arguments about George being too preachy on the album. Somehow I just don’t get this argument. Maybe I don’t get it because the spiritual aspect of the album seems very accessible to me. I’m right there with it. But I keep wanting to think something like: What if George is exactly telling the truth, his truth at the time? What if this ecstatic envisioning is exactly what he was experiencing? Even more so, this seems the case to me if grief of his mother’s death and the failure of his marriage were right at hand, and that is part of where he was. He was trying to love God, while being pulled back into the world. It was a struggle.

   In a way, Material World doesn’t read the room that way the Beatles used to do, pinpointing social movements just as they were unfurling. George is still back at Rishikesh, in a way, where the answer lies in still more spiritual development, and the cultural moment in 1973-1974 was turning more toward “self-actualization” than spiritual experience, toward EST, etc. The popular culture was getting a little suspicious of religious certainties.

   But to me Material World doesn’t sound as certain as it does sound wounded.

   Anyway, that’s a contrasting note with Mind Games. With the Lennon re-release, we have all these different mixes, four different versions of the album, including the “meditation mix,” which are all great feats of engineering, but they sort of remind me of those albums where Kraftwerk updated all the songs with a new drum machine, or where Sly Stone put a disco rhythm section on songs that were great in the first place. But with Material World, well, what’s new is just some really incredible demos.

   George was going to have a lost weekend too. But this album is from the span of years where he still could reach for the most exalted songs, and pluck some of them down.

MW: In the wake of your enthusiasm for All Things Must Pass, Rick, you describe how Living in the Material World seemed to you quixotic, even a bit off-putting, as it “wasn’t as big a sound as All Things Must Pass.” Reading that made me think of Dylan’s influence on Harrison and to make what now appears to me at best a tenuous connection with Dylan’s version of “Gotta Travel On” from Self-Portrait. That album came out in 1970 and Living In The Material World was released some three years later, but I can – or could in that moment – hear something of the loose, low-key—even tossed off—quality of “Gotta Travel On” in the opening of the song “Living in the Material World.” Maybe it’s the lope of the drum beat and the freedom of the piano playing, especially as they appear on the Take 31 version included on the anniversary release, that reminds me of the low-stakes and unselfconscious, even “unambitious” music-making of Dylan performances during the Self-Portrait / New Morning period.

   It’s tempting to say that Harrison learned something from the way Dylan moved from whatever height he’d ascended by 1966 to a much more grounded way of playing and thinking about songs during the recording of the Basement Tapes and what followed through 1970 (not counting Nashville Skyline which had ambitions of a different kind). When you write that Harrison “stopped wanting to be the musician in the public eye, but he never entirely stopped wanting to be a musician” you might be writing about Dylan in the period after ‘the motorcycle accident’ and his retreat to Woodstock, the period he and Harrison solidified their friendship and made music together. So it’s not such a stretch, after all, to link “Gotta Travel On” with Material World given that Dylan and Harrison wrote together in Woodstock in 1968—and of course George included the co-written “I’d Have You Anytime” along with Dylan’s “If Not For You” on All Things Must Pass, arguably two tracks that are even ‘smaller’ in terms of production and ambition than a good deal of what’s on Material World. But you rightly point to the complexity, orchestral density and big production of “Try Some Buy Some” with the result that it’s hard to hear Material World as uniformly ‘simpler’ or less ambitious than All Things Must Pass in any categorical way. But it is less grand, less self-consciously a post-Beatles solo statement record. Maybe it is informed, then, in some way by Dylan’s return to earth after his ascendance: not everything has to be vatic statement or auteur-quality refinement. Maybe there’s a lot less to prove. In fact, to shake some of that legacy, to return to music as music, putting out a record that’s lighter and looser might well be indicated.

   Though it doesn’t at all share the flavor of loose Americana we hear on Self-Portrait or “If Not For You,” “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” offers a return to mid-60s single simplicity—a perfect pop song, under 3:00 minutes. Listening to the stripped down vocal/guitar (and a little piano) Take 49 demo on the reissue, you could easily imagine what the Beatles would have done with it in 1965. The pop structure and unapologetically simple love lyrics provide pure pleasure even in the fully produced album version with Harrison’s post-Beatles signature slide-guitar work and the 70s production. I agree with you, Adam, that Harrison throughout Living in the Material World is “meticulous in his craft” and maybe nowhere more so than in this song. I take a lot of pleasure in “Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” in both the demo and final forms.

   If Dylan was coming back to songs as songs, to excise his presence as a super-musical legend from them, maybe George, too, is trying to remove himself both as a legendary former Beatle and even as the wise sage of All Things Must Pass in order to recover an earlier, purer relationship to music. If there’s a spiritual dimension to the stripping back, perhaps that’s more visibly George’s modus operandi given the distance between the material and spiritual worlds he’s explicitly negotiating. We can hear that in what you call, Adam, the “undercurrent of need and vulnerability in his voice, the searching and yearning that comes across through his performances.” If Dylan doesn’t reveal so much or let himself ask for love and peace in such a direct way, there’s still something decompressed and unassuming in a post-1966 Dylanesque way to the beauty of “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” that feels like a riposte to the high stakes of all that came before this album—and for that alone Living in the Material World sounds like a record of a soul’s progress and a human achievement worth celebrating.

AB: Earlier, Rick mentioned the Ringo album, in part because of it being released in the same years as the other two records we’ve been talking about (not to mention Band on the Run, which we’re not talking about here), but more in the context of George and his clear influence on that record, notably with the song “Photograph.” No doubt Ringo is the high-water mark of Ringo’s solo career, marked by a really great song collection (overall), and the inclusion of a stellar cast of guests that managed to contribute in their unique ways, bringing out the best in the performances and arrangements without ever overtaking the songs with their own distinct and personal musical personalities.

   But aside from thinking about all the people Ringo recruited for the album (a precursor to his later All-Star tours?), it also has got me thinking about Ringo as a solo Beatle with a long career, something we haven’t discussed much. True, he has had an up-and-down catalog, to say the least, and, as with the Beatles, he is overshadowed by the songwriting and musical force of the other three, often reduced to the perception of having been more of a personality within the group, as opposed to being an equal musical force. (Drumming conversation for someone else.) And I suppose it could be hard to qualify exactly what he brought to the quartet, even though we all know it was there. We feel it. Intuit it. Simply put, the Beatles would not have been the Beatles with just a “drummer.” No question that Ringo was an intangible and important ingredient to the whole concoction. But how? I recall a somewhat contemporary interview with McCartney, sizing up how this almost magical confluence of individuals seemed to miraculously find each other, as though unimaginable yet perfectly matched puzzle pieces. As Paul went down the list of what each person brought to complement the whole, he tripped a bit when it got to Ringo, stumbling a bit on specifics, clearly and sincerely trying to find the right words for conveying how essential he was to the ethos and sound of the group.

   When I think of the solo records, one thing that kind of interests me is that unlike the others, Ringo didn’t necessarily have a sound or stylistic marker that he either wanted to run from or to replicate in the way the other three wrestled with as ex-Beatles. Perhaps that is why he was more liberated to make an early solo venture like Beaucoups of Blues. The one constant to this listener is his voice, limited as it may be, which always has had a certain charm, one that is comforting and earnest, and, although always relegated to a single song per Beatles album (and quite often those with the most novelty sensibility), in his post-Beatles work, he still manages to take you back to the magic of the group, despite the style or even quality of the song. I might even say he was and remains the happiest to be an ex-Beatle, a joy and freedom that comes across on his records (the best and the worst), and in his public demeanor in interviews and performances.

   All of this is on my mind because as we have been delving into the reissues of John and George, Ringo has come out with a new “country” record called Look Up. “Country.” A strange and fashionable word in music these days, such as with Beyonce’s “country” record (her album, by the way, one that I found myself very taken with, but perhaps more as a concept or reflection of what it meant to be part of this country in all its multitudes and histories, as opposed to the conventional trappings of so-called country music, in terms of instrumentation and subject matter and requisite twang). I am hesitant to delve too deep into Ringo’s new album, as I don’t think I’ve listened to it enough for an honest, reflective appraisal. However, upon early listens, Look Up has invited me in, in ways I didn’t expect. To my ears, it really isn’t the “country” album that the pre-publicity prepared us for—especially in the promotion of its list of A-list young new-county musicians who serve as guests. Nor is it the gimmick I half-worried it might be. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, and mostly written by him, it is at best, if we have to find the appropriate genre marketing term, Americana. But even saying that, I think, undercuts that it is an incredibly warm album that in many respects doesn’t just resist the expectations of what a country album should be, but actually seems to have no concern with it. To my early listening, it is a remarkably honest and intimate album, and I think what I so greatly appreciate about it is how Ringo is just, well, Ringo.

   Perhaps what it comes down to, and maybe always has, is how Ringo, for better or worse, maintains an allegiance to the music he loves and wants to make (again: think Beaucoups of Blues), and not about capturing a so-called Beatles sound (nor a conscious rejection of it). Those he saves for his various reunions, retrospectives, and greatest hits segments of his live shows. Maybe that is the intangible he brought to the Beatles? A sense of joy about making music, like the person who loves the plain feeling of singing and expressing what’s inside without a care for the musicality, figuring that out of the raw emotion and honesty the rest will follow?

RM: Adam, thanks so much for these lines, which are astute and moving. I really agree. The thing about Look Up is that it is not markedly different from the best Ringo solo albums—it is markedly similar—but it’s also true that the wheel of history was bound to turn in a way where Ringo’s amiable essence as a performer was going to seem especially valuable again. The problem was that the critiques were really harsh in the eighties, let’s say, for no self-evident reason. People were interested in different things. But now the wheel of history has turned.

   I think Look Up is a rock album, really, at least the first few songs are demonstrably more like an Americana-inflected rock album than they are like a country album, whatever that means now. (My hunch is that in order to be “country” in any business-oriented way now you have to be, uh, a far-right Republican.) These songs are as much country as John Mellencamp is country, which is to say they occasionally feature a fiddle or, more frequently, pedal steel.

   The rock and roll vibe allows the album to profit from Ringo’s drum sound, which clearly T-Bone Burnett (the producer) knows how to prize and to record properly. The drums sound good. And: Burnett wrote most of the songs, and as a result they are pretty great, with, in many cases, more ambitious lyrics than Ringo has had in quite some time. Interestingly, there’s one moment with to evaluate this carefully because “I Live for Your Love” is very, very similar to “Grow Old with Me,” the John Lennon song that Ringo covered on his last album. Even the arrangements are not significantly different! And while I have elsewhere gone on and on about John’s late-life pro-domesticity songs, and my resistance thereto, I sort of go through periods of being especially moved by “Grow Old with Me,” and “I Live for Your Love” manages a similar feat, almost, a straightforward, humble, and very vulnerable love song. They are, actually, both pretty great.

   But the main thing is that Ringo’s solo career has not altered its basic premises since it began. The man has released 21 solo albums! And the first one was Sentimental Journey! Followed by Beaucoups of Blues! And if you mix those with Ringo, his masterpiece, which immediately followed, you sort of get exactly what Ringo has been doing on his recent songs: mid-tempo, classic, vulnerable, with a bit of Broadway just perceptible. That’s who the guy is. At 84 years old.

   Look Up, in this regard, is the work of a single-minded and effective entertainer, who has always done this same thing—make fun, light, moving songs that are both homely and artful—since 1962. Kind of sounds like Paul McCartney! (He’s only made five more studio albums than Ringo!) And: I like the title song best on Look Up. It has backwards guitar on it!

MW: We need a lot less MAGA and a lot more backwards guitar in ‘country’ music – I like that track a lot, too, Rick. Listening to “Look Up” it’s easy to fold into the comfort of Ringo’s welcoming and familiar voice which by now (if not by now, when?) is inextricable from our sense of him as an indefatigably up-beat and authentic music-maker and music-lover (pretty close to his true self, I suspect). What’s palpable, as Adam, writes, is his “sense of joy about making music, like the person who loves the plain feeling of singing and expressing what’s inside.” Though there is nothing ground-breaking about Look Up and its pleasures are low-key, I came away from listening to the record thinking about Ringo in a new way—or, rather, realizing without quite knowing why that I’d let myself slip unconsciously into the notion that the familiar public version of Ringo was a kind of curated cartoon, that this public Ringo, simple and good-hearted, flashing the peace sign and reciting ‘peace and love,’ was fronting for a more complicated being, maybe even someone more cynical or aloof. Or that he was in some way more like the ‘artists’ we’ve become used to, the ones who are more interested in building a brand than making music. But listening to Ringo sing good songs in his familiar voice reminded me that his love of a straight-forward subject for a lyric, his rich, grounded drumming, and his direct address as a singer—all these features—are part of his undeniable authenticity and good energy.

   If his message and even his love of music is simple, that simplicity, as it comes across on Look Up, only gives us reason to admire how he’s lived his life. Listening to the new record front to back only reinforces the idea with Ringo there’s a kind of stable, easy-going warmth he’s sustained all these years, all these decades. Like Paul, if with less pressure on him, Ringo seems to have figured out how to build a satisfying life still very much connected to his passion for music in the years after being part of the most lionized band in the world. The fact that he’s taking obvious pleasure in making a record of country music, one of his earliest musical passions, suggests there’s still a freshness in it for him and a continuing desire to present himself through songs. How much easier it would be not to record and release a new record at 84 given all he’s done. But his love of music, of making music, appears to be undiminished.

   It’s a grace to be reminded that there are still artists like Ringo and others of his generation for whom making music is the main thing—always has been; always will be. It’s easy enough to complicate your image of what-you-see-is-what-you-get Ringo, the easy-going Beatle, by revisiting the edgy intensity of the drumming on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the trippy precision of the fills on “Rain,” and the slinky round-the-kit runs of “Come Together.” There’s something appetitive and driven about drumming like that, a reminder that this isn’t the squeaky clean musicality of a saint. Ringo may be the preternaturally lovable and youthful octogenarian, but he’s something more than that, too. But during his recent Grand Old Opry debut, Ringo didn’t remind us of his avant-garde bonafides or his Reeperbahn grittiness. Instead he followed a compact and emotionally resonant reading of the new song “Time on My Hands” with “Act Naturally,” the Buck Owens hit he sang on Help! in 1965. The through-line from then to now is pretty direct, whatever complexities it avoids. When Ringo first hit the Grand Old Opry stage, he said: “I loved country music when I was growing up” and he still does.

   As we discuss John, Paul, George and Ringo post-Beatles, it strikes me that a lot of what I think about them now is extra-musical. It’s hard to know for certain if what values or ideas I attach to each one—sustaining virtues, spiritual inquiry, ongoing creativity, domesticity—is based on reality or not but their lives perhaps more than their solo music have become touchstones. The Beatles made the world in seven years but we’ve been riding in the wake behind the break-up for a lot longer than that. What’s bobbing in the distant aftermath these days, whether its Paul’s recent three-night stand at the Bowery Ballroom or a new record for Ringo, makes me feel lucky we’re still, in a manner of speaking, all keeping our heads above water.