Is it me, or is Mind Games Lennon's blandest album?

Honestly I just can listen a very few songs of Lennon's solo career

 

If Mind Games were food, this would be it:

 

One man's garbage is another man's gold. Mind Games is my top fave Lennon song.

Bern

 

If all your posts are as insightful as this one, I can’t wait to dig in!

 

With lyrics like 'We don't want no big brother scene' and 'now we are hipper, we've been through the trip' (not to mention every line of the title track) this album couldn't possibly be more 'hippy-dippy singer-songwriter early seventies'. The young teen version of myself that bought it in 1978 could not relate to the mostly mid tempo arrangements, middle aged musings and murky production.

The older current version of me freely admits it's a grower. I still chuckle at some of the dated lyrical cliches, but that hippie schtick is part of the album's charm. Ah, the Seventies!

Things that I truly enjoy on Mind Games:

Ken Ascher's piano solo on Out The Blue

Sneaky Pete's slide guitar on You Are Here

David Spinozza's lead guitar solo on Aisumasen

and most of all -

Gordon Edwards Bass playing over the entire album. He literally brought life to some of these songs. I prefer the remix of this album as his playing stands out more prominently.

Overall (to my ears) it's an interesting time-capsule of that hazy-crazy era where the sixties hadn't quite died out and the seventies were just starting to kick in. Good times!

 

I really like Mind Games - especially the 2002 remix. Yes, it's pretty easy listening compared to some of John's other stuff but music doesn't need to be epic or full of angst and introspective to be enjoyable. Sometimes I just want to relax in the warm glow of some tuneful "comfort" music. Much as I love the far superior Plastic Ono Band, I really need to be in the right mood order to listen to it.

I'm grateful that John, in common with most of my favourite artists, recorded a variety of different songs and albums for me to enjoy - as opposed to merely repeating the same basic ideas over and over.

For me, the bass playing throughout Mind Games is one of the highlights of John's solo career. (It's maybe a bit like how Paul might have played bass on the album.) It's light years ahead of that on most of his other albums - although the excellent Tony Levin makes some stellar contributions on Double Fantasy.

 

Yes. A soaring moment.

I prefer the original vinyl btw as the remix made some aesthetic choices I don't agree with, like moving Lennon's vocals farther forward. Completely ruined Meat City. (Which exists in its best form as the Mind Games 45 b-side)

 

i say his last album is hands down his blandest.

 

I've said it before, that this was the period where things got weird, and this album really sorta needed a real producer. What I feel that album really lacked, was someone in a trusted position to talk to John over the talkback or on the couch in the control room during breaks, and tell him that things weren't really working --hey, John, I know you can do better than this -- but nobody could actually DO that, because he was John Freaking Lennon, the ex-Beatle and Living Legend. I always felt like this period turned into a situation where the musicians were in the studio, all these session cats, arranged around the room, and they were saying to themselves, "oh my God, that's the great JOHN LENNON over there, and here I am in the studio with the great JOHN LENNON, we are CUTTING TRACKS! What a groove! This track is amazing! That's JOHN LENNON's voice in my headphone cans! I'm so incredible! Wow!" And for whatever reason, nobody in the room was able to say, "hey you know what, John, this is good but it's not great, we should try something else. Maybe these aren't the best songs, the best arrangements -- what else have you got laying around that we could work on?" That's just always been my impression of it. Whether it was George Martin, or Paul McCartney, or Phil Spector or Jack Douglas, Lennon sorta needed that producer or other person (strong father figure?) to help him bounce off of, and sort out what of his own stuff was good and what wasn't. That's my two cents on it.

 

My thoughts exactly. He needed someone like Paul to tell him things like "You know, that lead guitar line on the title track maybe shouldn't repeat endlessly." And so on.

Same went for Paul and George, though. They all needed each other's presence, if not their input. They needed someone they knew as teenagers to call out when something was wrong or add something unexpected. Respectful session cats don't work with people like the Beatles, who thrived on collaboration. They work with musicians like Becker and Fagen, who take control and use them like instruments.

 

It's just you

 

Don't want to stir the pot but IMO his debut album, Plastic Ono Band & his final two albums, Double Fantasy & Milk And Honey are his best works. Everything in-between is painfully average.

 

The remix really kick started my love for Mind Games - a big part of that was finally really hearing how great Gordon Edwards was. Little is written about his work on that record, but I think it was really neat to hear bass play such a prominent role on a Lennon record (with all due respect to Klaus).

 

And he took issue with Wings-era McCartney's music?

 

The dad had (and still has) the two first lennon albums on CD. I knew about the Rock'n'Roll album and the things with Yoko but all that stuff didn't seem very exciting. I didn't know about the existence of Mind Games and Walls & Bridges for a few years.

Later, when i was a teenage we spent a week in Paris in some friend's house while he wasn't there. The place was full of vinyls and CDs. I looked at the Lennon CDs and took Mind Games. The album cover was similar to Plastic Ono Band and Imagine (blue/green stuff), '1973' was written on the back cover. I was very suprised and intrigued (the guy had Walls & Bridges too but that strange glasses cover felt akward and unapealling). To this day, i still remember the excitement i felt when i heard the title track for the the first time in that little appartement, it's such a shiny, powerful song...

 

Lennon said Imagine was POB with more sugar. Mind Game is Imagine with even more sugar. Probably too much. The Lennon Anthology's versions of Lucie (used in that Children of Men movie) and One Day At The Time are much better than the album versions. That said, i've always liked the album very much, especially Aisumaisen, Out The Blue and (above all) the title-track.

 

Both very well said, applies to both John (after Imagine) and Paul (his whole solo career) in
my opinion

 

As much as I love John, he was usually only great for a third to a half of an album. Same for Paul - it was one of those magical things about their partnership, and they had George to fill up the slack.

 

Bland is a good description of it. It's okay, but he did much better before and after.

 

But is it blander than Jeremy Irons Cereal?

 

As a guy who fell in love with The Beatles at the age of 2, it wasn't until I was in my 30's (I'm 48 now) that I really dived into the solo material of all four. And yes, I find Mind Games to be very bland, as I do
most of John's solo material. And of the four Beatles, I find John's solo material to be the most disappointing.

 

Yes blandest - but better than STINYC or Rock & Roll.
He really had only 3.5 albums I see as unqualified successes. Could bump it up to 4 by including some non-LP singles.

 

Mind Games (the song) is in the upper echelon of solo Beatles tracks for me!

 

...And "Intuition" sounds like Lennon if he would have been alive in the late 1980s...

 

It was Lennon’s focus on songcraft after being critized for not making albums as commercial as Paul or even George. It’s certainly more polite sounding than other albums by Lennon and lacks the raw edge but it also seemed (sometime in NYC excepted) to be the direction John was headed with Imagine. Itabandoned s0me the production tricks that J0hn worked with on the previous three albums. There’s some good material there-Mind Games, Outof The Blue, Tight A$, meat City, You Are Here but there is some filler as well.