John Lennon – Imagine (Limited
Gold CD)
Sound: B Music:
A-
I was five years ago when it looked like the end for
Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, folding suddenly and shocking the industry. To the end, the most well-known audiophile
company ever was producing amazing vinyl and CD versions of key music. In the end of that incarnation, they issued
two Who albums (Who’s Next & Live At Leeds (catalog #s 754
& 755) and their first SACD, the underproduced Duke Ellington – Blues In
Orbit. Roy Orbison Sings Lonely
& Blues followed (catalog #s 757 & 758 respectively), each only
produced at 2,500 copies and that was it, or so it seemed.
Reborn now as a Super Audio CD company, Mobile Fidelity is
back and has decided to give the Gold CD-only series a new lease on life. Sporting catalog #759, John Lennon’s 1971
classic Imagine (1971) relaunches one of the most imitated series in
music history. The same lift-lock jewel
box is here, along with the same full liner notes and great graphics that made
their Ultradisc series legendary. They
will only issue discs in any of these series if they can use the original
master tapes.
This was his third post-Beatles album, continuing the
direction launched with his first studio album, the amazing Plastic Ono Band
album in 1970. Phil Spector co-produced
both, and this album was a #1 hit.
Heard today, everyone who only knows the title song and albums’ only
(remarkably) hit single expects the album to be a dozen tracks of the same
thing. Many with that expectation get
quickly disappointed. In real life,
there are ten tracks here and most of them are personal, powerful, and even
devastating.
“Crippled Inside” is done in an ironically
old-styled arrangement that is ironically playful, talking about the inability
to conceal hurt, pain, or long-term damage.
However, the only thing the song never considers is if everyone is savvy
enough to read such a thing form others.
Ultimately, it is a personal message with an undeniable point.
“Jealous Guy” is a famous album cut that is really
a love song. After thirty years, this
is still a remarkably bold, honest work that shows a man and his emotional
side. That was groundbreaking at the
time and still ahead of ours. “Oh My
Love” and “Oh Yoko” arc closer and closer to explicit autobiography
of his muse.
“It’s So Hard” is somewhat in a 1950s style: Blues,
Rock & even a touch of Country.
This is the album’s biggest change of pace and is not bad.
“I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier Mama” remains one of
Lennon’s greatest political songs and has a later corollary in Stevie Wonder’s
“Jesus Children of America” from his 1973 breakthrough album Innervisions,
if not quite as political. Of course,
this is one of the most blatant anti-Vietnam songs, bashing the now-defunct
military draft system. Many would argue
now that the decline in economic opportunity leaves few choices for many, so
the military suddenly becomes an option whether a war is going on or not, but
the song still applies. The lyrics may
be limited, but the impact is massive.
“Gimme Some Truth” is another one of the well-known
album cuts and of the five tracks George Harrison plays on, his unmistakable
sound is most blatant here and this is a blatantly political song against how
hypocrisy kills. Then-President Nixon
and his influence (pre-Watergate yet) is singled out and it rivals even the
title song of this album in its brilliance.
“How Do You Sleep?” has always been considered a song aimed at Paul McCartney by
Lennon, and it still sounds like it today.
Just because Harrison plays on it does not mean he was also joining in,
but then, The Beatles have had a long history of such public conflict since
they formed and long after they broke up so it’s hard to say to what degree of
conflict this escalated. We’ll leave
that to the historians.
“How?” is a fine piece about relationships that
remains another one of the album’s well-known cuts. The arrangement is not as paired down as many of the songs here
and is very effective because it is honest about the unknown of any
relationship.
Then there is the title song, which has a long-running
debate involving its meaning. One of
the more bizarre debates has been on Right-wing radio (usually AM) talk shows,
which try to determine the meaning of the words. Many of them go gunning for the song as “Communist/Socialist
propaganda”, but can never nail the song on that, idiotic as they may be and
idiotically as they may try. So lets
run down what the song asks us to pretend about.
Forget there is any afterlife, but we could have a
physical world where people live for the moment without any overly outrageous
exercises of the Reality Principle. The
basis of many a religion, the idea that you give (or keep giving) things for a
better future, or promised land, that you might make it to. Forget about countries, or civilizations,
and then he reiterates forgetting about religion. Forget about possessions, either because they have disappeared,
or their ownership has been eliminated (which would be possibly Communism),
then he anticipates the moment the listener might tune out when they would want
to most trash the song. This would
eliminate greed and hunger? Well,
failed Communism proved that wrong, but the point offered is more abstract, as
the whole song is abstract. It also is
not a tune-out song that says avoid religion and politics.
That is also among the things that makes it so subversive,
because it trashes the ugly ideologies of the time, especially those that tried
to say that Vietnam was a good thing (even read a “God” thing), a battle for a
supposedly Christian God (the only one?), that genocide was “OK”, that there
was something to win in East Asia, that one should never question your country
(especially the U.S., because they beat the Nazis after all) and just shut up
and put up with this. If the song had
put it like that, it would have never got its point across, and fans are bound
to find the last two paragraphs (at least somewhat) bad, because even this
thinking could limit the song’s intents.
However, Lennon was so forward-thinking that this is exactly the kind of
pettiness he expected and was strongly dealing with at the time. After he assassination (he was being
watched, but the watchers sure did not foil the “lone nut” who killed him, did
they? So why not call it that?), that
ideology came back with a vengeance, but Lennon gets the final laugh because
their very ideology is so hypocritical that its narrowness could not begin to
take on the song’s brilliance. That is
why the album and the song will never go away.
The PCM CD stereo tracks come directly from the original
master tapes and the CD is pressed in 24-karat Gold like its long line of
predecessor and imitators. It is listed
as an Ultradisc II using the Gain 2 system, which at first might indicate that
it is only the second highest level of this series. The top level was not with Super Audio CD tracks either, but was
CD tracks that used the DSD (Direct Stream Digital) system as a stage of
mastering for the best possible fidelity when brought back to CD-only
status. The result would still be
really good, but not like using DSD.
Despite that, it turns out DSD is being used, but not put on the label
so consumers do not confuse it with actual SACDs. With that said, all future Ultradiscs in this revival of the
series will use DSD. There is still
distortion that keeps the songs here from having more clarity, but it is
actually part of the music. That is due
to the producing of Phil Spector, who may have abandoned the “wall of sound”
mono techniques, but still has some unique harmonics that cause a distinctive
sound in conjunction with the kinds of equipment Lennon was working with at the
time.
On “Imagine”, the way you can tell how good this
transfer is comes from what you hear versus so many playbacks of the song in
inferior circumstances. Think analog
radio, commercials, older CDs, worn-out vinyl, later-generation copies,
etc. As compared to that, the playback
of the song here makes those sound sterilized and even “ethnically cleansed” if
we can apply that to technological character.
Certainly, there is an ethnic character to the work of any true artist
and when anything interferes with their autueristic mark that demeans the
intent. Mobile Fidelity is one of the
few companies that understands this and goes EXTREMELY out of their way to make
the playback as authentic as possible.
As for the album as a whole, it is one of the most vital
music works ever made, especially of the Rock genre. Lennon’s vocals are deeply heartfelt, not the kind of contrived
phoniness that is slaughtering the music industry today as severely as any
file-sharing technology. This is an
extremely personal work and was also a huge commercial success; laying low the
myth that developed in the 1980s that only heartless, soulless works could (or
should) be blockbuster financial successes.
The very existence of The Beatles is testament to that.
Though it is not the SACD everyone might be waiting for,
that looks to be a long time away and this is a one of the best editions of
this album yet, so I strongly recommend picking up the Mobile Fidelity Imagine
while it lasts. It is timelier than
ever!
- Nicholas Sheffo
