There was a spate of John Lennon anniversaries in 2020 – he would have turned 80 in October, 40 years since his death in December, and 50 years since the release of the most dramatic, explosive, raw, and confessional of all pop/rock music albums: Plastic Ono Band. In 1970, during the demise of the Beatles and a series of public (and private) ups and downs, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, were joined by ex-Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, old friend from the Hamburg club days, Klaus Voormann, and infamous producer, Phil Spector, to record the fallout. Lennon fans know all about the couple’s dalliance with Primal Scream Therapy and its effects on him, particularly the reliving of his childhood traumas and the angst he suddenly felt for his former band, which he duly unleashed on the world in a two-part Rolling Stone interview “Lennon Remembers.” This all feeds into the musical narrative of the album.
Author John Kruth covers the incidents and inspirations that led to Plastic Ono Band, as well as putting us in the studio and in the mindset of the participants. But what makes this a critical historical document of the sessions, is the attention paid to Ono’s mostly overlooked contribution. Many people are unaware that there were two Plastic Ono Band records with similar covers and photos of John and Yoko as children on the back. Using the same line-up as John’s stirringly stark renditions of his emotional songs, Ono essentially reinvents rock and jazz music, which later worked as a creative guidepost for the coming decade and beyond, especially with the advent of Kraut rock and punk.
Plastic Ono Band is my favorite ex-Beatle solo album; the context of its messages from the end of the 1960s dream to dealing with past tragedies, mining the deepest depths and heights of love and loss, and sharing the troubled mind of one of the greatest voices in the history of the genre. In its care for detail and sidelight, Hold On World delivers a similar telling and is more than worthy of its subject matter.