Acoustic

Even now, the insanely high quality of The Beatles' output from 1965 to 1968 is almost hard to believe. John Lennon and Paul McCartney generated timeless melodies at a tireless pace, with a fusion of pop sophistication and rock simplicity that made albums like Revolver and Rubber Soul sound dazzlingly eclectic yet seamless. Around the time of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Lennon and McCartney began to diverge, with the former increasingly pursuing avant-garde expression as a way of purging pain, and the latter getting poppier and poppier until his facility with hummable hooks became a sort of cheap party trick. Still, over time, McCartney's methods proved more productive. Lennon explored his dark places fruitfully on two stellar post-Beatles solo albums (Plastic Ono Band and Imagine), and then his edge dulled.

The demos on Acoustic caught some of Lennon's fire when it still burned dangerously hot. The first six tracks come from the preproduction of Plastic Ono Band, a record where Lennon worked through stripped-down, straightforward meditations on "Love" and "God," and took a knife to his own fears and pretensions on "Working Class Hero" and "Look At Me." The disc also includes a couple of early stabs at the late-period classics "Watching The Wheels" and "Dear Yoko," and live versions of Lennon's solo smash "Imagine" and his lesser-known political diatribes "The Luck Of The Irish" and "John Sinclair." Acoustic shows Lennon in the process of ripping off his rock-star clothes and scrambling for something plainer.

That process would eventually lead to the oft-maligned 1975 album Rock 'N' Roll, which emerged from abortive 1973 recording sessions with Phil Spector. At the time, Lennon was separated from Yoko Ono and spending his nights getting piss-drunk with Harry Nilsson, and his days trying to discern whether rock 'n' roll still had any viability. The rockabilly and R&B covers on Rock 'N' Roll leave the question open. Employing the same draggy beat and heavy echo that Lennon used while producing Nilsson's forgotten 1974 classic Pussy Cats—one of the wildest and "punkest" records of the pre-punk era—Rock 'N' Roll mostly displays the rock icon grunting "Be-Bop-A-Lula" and "Slippin' And Slidin'" in blank tones that make nonsense words sound creepily significant. As a complete listening experience, the album is hard to take, but as art, few songs in Lennon's catalog top his version of "Stand By Me," which is both lilting and cathartically screechy. It's "good-time oldies" after the good times have gone.