Plastic Ono Band (The Ultimate Collection Remastered) John Lennon

• Ultimate Mix:
• 1Mother (Ultimate Mix)05:36
• 2Hold On (Ultimate Mix)01:52
• 3I Found Out (Ultimate Mix)03:38
• 4Working Class Hero (Ultimate Mix)03:48
• 5Isolation (Ultimate Mix)02:52
• 6Remember (Ultimate Mix)04:32
• 7Love (Ultimate Mix)03:21
• 8Well Well Well (Ultimate Mix)05:56
• 9Look At Me (Ultimate Mix)02:54
• 10God (Ultimate Mix)04:13
• 11My Mummy's Dead (Ultimate Mix)00:48
• 12Give Peace A Chance (Ultimate Mix)04:49
• 13Cold Turkey (Ultimate Mix)05:00
• 14Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Ultimate Mix)03:19
• 15Mother (Take 61 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)04:18
• 16Hold On (Take 2 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)02:11
• 17I Found Out (Take 1 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)03:46
• 18Working Class Hero (Take 1 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)03:50
• 19Isolation (Take 23 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)02:51
• 20Remember (Rehearsal 1 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)03:11
• 21Love (Take 6 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)02:36
• 22Well Well Well (Take 2 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)03:35
• 23Look At Me (Take 2 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)02:50
• 24God (Take 27 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)04:06
• 25My Mummy's Dead (Take 2 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)01:15
• 26Give Peace A Chance (Take 2 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)06:01
• 27Cold Turkey (Take 1 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)05:24
• 28Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Take 1 / Out-take / Ultimate Mix)02:53
• Elements Mix:
• 29Mother (Elements Mix)05:00
• 30Hold On (Elements Mix)01:53
• 31I Found Out (Elements Mix)05:25
• 32Working Class Hero (Elements Mix)03:11
• 33Isolation (Elements Mix)02:44
• 34Remember (Elements Mix)08:38
• 35Love (Elements Mix)05:40
• 36Well Well Well (Elements Mix)05:57
• 37Look At Me (Elements Mix)02:56
• 38God (Elements Mix)04:09
• 39My Mummy's Dead (Elements Mix)00:53
• 40Give Peace A Chance (Elements Mix)04:54
• 41Cold Turkey (Elements Mix)05:03
• 42Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Elements Mix)03:21
• Raw Studio Mix:
• 43Mother (Take 64 / Raw Studio Mix)05:12
• 44Hold On (Take 32 / Raw Studio Mix)01:52
• 45I Found Out (Take 3 / Extended / Raw Studio Mix)05:34
• 46Working Class Hero (Take 9 / Raw Studio Mix)04:08
• 47Isolation (Take 29 / Raw Studio Mix)02:52
• 48Remember (Take 13 / Raw Studio Mix)04:59
• 49Love (Take 37 / Raw Studio Mix)04:27
• 50Well Well Well (Take 4 / Extended / Raw Studio Mix)06:47
• 51Look At Me (Take 9 / Raw Studio Mix)03:08
• 52God (Take 42 / Raw Studio Mix)04:27
• 53My Mummy's Dead (Take 1 / Raw Studio Mix)00:53
• 54Give Peace A Chance (Take 4 / Extended / Raw Studio Mix)06:35
• 55Cold Turkey (Take 2 / Raw Studio Mix)05:06
• 56Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Take 10 / Raw Studio Mix)03:32
• Evolution Documentary:
• 57Mother (Evolution Documentary)09:16
• 58Hold On (Evolution Documentary)08:46
• 59I Found Out (Evolution Documentary)06:01
• 60Working Class Hero (Evolution Documentary)03:34
• 61Isolation (Evolution Documentary)09:39
• 62Remember (Evolution Documentary)07:02
• 63Love (Evolution Documentary)07:37
• 64Well Well Well (Evolution Documentary)04:50
• 65Look At Me (Evolution Documentary)05:51
• 66God (Evolution Documentary)08:10
• 67My Mummy's Dead (Evolution Documentary)01:36
• 68Give Peace A Chance (Evolution Documentary)07:29
• 69Cold Turkey (Evolution Documentary)04:51
• 70Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Evolution Documentary)08:48
• Home Demo:
• 71Mother (Home Demo)05:00
• 72Hold On (Studio Demo)02:18
• 73I Found Out (Home Demo)04:09
• 74Working Class Hero (Studio Demo)03:50
• 75Isolation (Studio Demo)02:55
• 76Remember (Studio Demo)05:24
• 77Love (Home Demo)02:39
• 78Well Well Well (Home Demo)01:16
• 79Look At Me (Home Demo)02:49
• 80God (Home Demo)03:52
• 81My Mummy's Dead (Home Demo)01:18
• 82Give Peace A Chance (Home Demo)02:40
• 83Cold Turkey (Home Demo)03:34
• 84Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Studio Demo)03:33
• 85Johnny B. Goode (Jam)01:02
• 86Ain't That A Shame (Jam)01:54
• Jam:
• 87Hold On (Jam 1)02:22
• 88Hold On (Jam 2)01:37
• 89Glad All Over (Jam)01:12
• 90Be Faithful To Me (Jam)00:44
• 91Send Me Some Lovin' (Jam)01:06
• 92Get Back (Jam)01:05
• 93Lost John (Jam 1)01:56
• 94Goodnight Irene (Jam)01:51
• 95You'll Never Walk Alone (Jam)01:44
• 96I Don't Want To Be A Soldier Mama, I Don't Wanna Die (Jam 1)03:30
• 97It'll Be Me (Jam)01:07
• 98Honey, Don't! (Jam)01:39
• 99Elvis Parody (Don't Be Cruel, Hound Dog, When I'm Over You) (Jam)02:48
• 100Matchbox (Jam)01:57
• 101I've Got A Feeling (Jam)00:20
• 102Mystery Train (Jam)02:44
• 103(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care (Jam)00:29
• 104I Don't Want To Be A Soldier Mama, I Don't Wanna Die (Jam 2)01:46
• 105Lost John (Jam 2)00:48
• 106Don't Worry Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For A Hand In The Snow) (Jam)02:07
• Raw Studio Mix:
• 107Mother (Take 91 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)04:00
• 108Hold On (Take 18 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)02:07
• 109I Found Out (Take 7 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)07:51
• 110Working Class Hero (Take 10 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)03:44
• 111Isolation (Take 1 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)00:35
• 112Remember (Take 1 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)02:53
• 113Love (Take 9 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)02:34
• 114Well Well Well (Take 5 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)05:06
• 115Look At Me (Take 3 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)03:12
• 116God (Take 1 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)02:28
• 117My Mummy's Dead (Take 2 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)01:19
• 118Give Peace A Chance (Take 4 / Stripped Down / Extended / Raw Studio Mix)06:33
• 119Cold Turkey (Take 2 / Stripped Down / Raw Studio Mix)05:01
• 120Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) (Take 5 / Out-take / Raw Studio Mix)03:11
• Total Runtime07:25:50

Info for Plastic Ono Band (The Ultimate Collection Remastered)

50th Anniversary Reissue of John Lennon's iconic debut solo album.

John Lennon's classic debut solo album, featuring John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Klaus Voormann, Billy Preston and Phil Spector. Completely remixed from the original multi-tracks at Abbey Road Studios by triple GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Paul Hicks, overseen by producer Yoko Ono Lennon.

From the haunting, funereal bells and emotional wails of opening track "Mother", it was immediate - John Lennon's first solo studio album was unlike anything he had made before. Recorded in 1970, shortly after the demise of The Beatles, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band saw John stripping away the artifice and ornamentation for a visceral artistic exorcism that was confessional, raw, painfully honest, and revelatory. Inspired by the primal scream psychotherapy he and wife Yoko Ono had been practicing with Dr. Arthur Janov, John, joined by the minimalist Plastic Ono Band - Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voorman on bass, and producer Phil Spector - confronted his demons, professed his love for his wife, railed against false idols and declared the dream was over on his most personal album. Today it stands as the towering achievement of his solo career - the moment the biggest rock star in the world bared his soul for all to hear - as real as it was revolutionary.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was John's first post-Beatles solo album so interest was high to see what he would do with his newfound creative freedom. The answer shocked the world. Gone was any florid instrumentation or psychedelia as on Sgt. Pepper's or the kind of jaunty rock and abstract poetry of the band's final album, Let It Be, and in its place were deeply emotional, profound, autobiographical songs about being abandoned by his mother and father, the loneliness of stardom, his dear Yoko and the end of the cultural revolution. Soundtracked by simple and sparse instrumentation and minimal yet majestic production, John's voice pierced listener's hearts like never before as he revealed his true self. It marked his true birth as a solo artist. The album reached the top 10 in both the US and UK, despite the absence of a major hit single.

Fifty years on, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is widely considered one of the best albums ever made. Most recently Rolling Stone, who also dubbed it #4 on their list of Best Albums of 1967-87, ranked the album #85 in their 2020 reassessment of The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time, hailing it ahead of its time: "a pure, raw core of confession that, in its echo-drenched, garage-rock crudity, is years ahead of punk."

"It was a revolutionary record - never before had a record been so explicitly introspective, and very few records made absolutely no concession to the audience's expectations, daring the listeners to meet all the artist's demands. Which isn't to say that the record is unlistenable. Lennon's songs range from tough rock & rollers to piano-based ballads and spare folk songs, and his melodies remain strong and memorable, which actually intensifies the pain and rage of the songs... It's an unflinching document of bare-bones despair and pain, but for all its nihilism, it is ultimately life-affirming; it is unique not only in Lennon's catalog, but in all of popular music. Few albums are ever as harrowing, difficult, and rewarding as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band." (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG)

Pitchfork awarded it #60 in their Top 100 Albums of the 1970s list and it was selected by Time as one of the 100 Best Albums of All Time, declaring: "Lennon's writing was never sharper, and his still-underrated singing stands with rock's finest."

As Rolling Stone's retrospective review remarked, "left out in the open, without protective harmonies or racket, Lennon's singing takes on an expressive specificity that anyone in search of the century's great vocal performances would be foolish to overlook."

John Lennon, vocals, acoustic guitar (4, 7, 9, 11), electric guitar (2, 3, 8), piano (1, 5, 6), organ (5), tack piano (10)
Ringo Starr, drums (1–3, 5, 6, 8, 10)
Klaus Voormann, bass (1–3, 5, 6, 8, 10)
Phil Spector, piano (7)
Billy Preston, grand piano (10)

Digitally remastered - Half-Speed Mastered

John Lennon
If John Lennon had only been one of the four members of the Beatles, his artistic immortality would already have been assured. The so-called “smart Beatle,” he brought a penetrating intelligence and a stinging wit both to the band’s music and its self-presentation. But in such songs as “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “Rain” and “In My Life,” he also marshaled gorgeous melodies to evoke a sophisticated, dreamlike world-weariness well beyond his years. Such work suggested not merely a profound musical and literary sensibility – a genius, in short — but a vision of life that was simultaneously reflective, utopian and poignantly realistic.

While in the Beatles, Lennon displayed an outspokenness that immersed the band in controversy and helped redefine the rules of acceptable behavior for rock stars. He famously remarked in 1965 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” – a statement that was more an observation than a boast, but that resulted in the band’s records being burned and removed from radio station playlists in the U.S. He criticized America’s involvement in Vietnam, and, as the Sixties progressed, he became an increasingly important symbol of the burgeoning counterculture.

But it was only after the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 that the figure the world now recognizes as “John Lennon” truly came into being. Whether he was engaging in social activism; giving long, passionate interviews that, once again, broadened the nature of public discourse for artists; defining a new life as a self-described “househusband;” or writing and recording songs, Lennon came to view his life as a work of art in which every act shimmered with potential meaning for the world at large. It was a Messianic attitude, to be sure, but one that was tempered by an innate inclusiveness and generosity. If he saw himself as larger than life, he also yearned for a world in which his ego managed at once to absorb everyone else and dissolve all differences among people, leaving a Zen-like tranquility and calm. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” he sang in “Imagine,” which has become his best-known song and an international anthem of peace. “I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.”

Such imagery, coupled with the tragedy of his murder in 1980, has often led to Lennon’s being sentimentalized as a gentle prince of peace gazing off into the distance at an Eden only he could see. In fact, he was a far more complex and difficult person, which, in part, accounts for the world’s endless fascination with him. Plastic Ono Band (1970), the first solo album he made after leaving the Beatles, alternates songs that are so emotionally raw that to this day they are difficult to listen to with songs of extraordinary beauty and simplicity. Gripped by his immersion in primal-scream therapy, which encouraged its practitioners to re-experience their most profound psychic injuries, Lennon sought in such songs as “Mother” and “God” to confront and strip away the traumas that had afflicted his life since childhood.

And those traumas were considerable. Lennon’s mother, Julia, drifted in and out of his life during his childhood in Liverpool – he was raised by Julia’s sister Mimi and Mimi’s husband, George – and then died in a car accident when Lennon was seventeen. His father was similarly absent, essentially walking out on the family when John was an infant. He disappeared for good when Lennon was five, only to return after his son had become famous as a member of the Beatles. Consequently, Lennon struggled with fears of abandonment his entire life. When he repeatedly cries, “Mama, don’t go/Daddy come home,” in “Mother,” it’s less a performance than a scarifying brand of therapeutic performance art. And in that regard, as well as many others, it revealed the influence of Yoko Ono, whom Lennon had married in 1969, leaving his first wife, Cynthia, and their son Julian in order to do so.

The minimalist sound of Plastic Ono Band was significant too. Lennon had come to associate the elaborate musical arrangements of much of the Beatles’ later work with Paul McCartney and George Martin, and he consciously set out to purge those elements from his own work. Co-producing with Ono and the legendary Phil Spector, he built a sonic environment that could not have been more basic – guitar, bass, drums, the occasional piano — whatever was essential and absolutely nothing more. Lyrically, he turned away from the psychedelic flights and Joycean wordplay of such songs as “I Am the Walrus” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” – as well as his books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works — and toward a style in which unadorned, elemental speech gathered poetic force through its very directness.

On his next album, Imagine (1971), Lennon felt confident enough to reintroduce some melodic elements reminiscent of the Beatles into his songs. Working again with Ono and Spector, he retains the eloquent plainspokenness of Plastic Ono Band, but allows textural elements such as strings, to create more of a sense of beauty. The album’s title track alone ensured its historical importance; it is a call to idealism that has provided solace and inspiration at every moment of social and humanitarian crisis since it was written.

From there Lennon turned to a style that was a sort of journalistic agit-prop. Sometime In New York City (1972) is as outward-looking and blunt as Imagine was, for the most part, soft-focused and otherworldly. As its title suggests, the album reflects Lennon’s immersion in the drama and noise of the city to which he had moved with Yoko Ono. And as its cover art suggests, the album is something like a newspaper – a report from the radical frontlines on the political upheavals of the day. His activism would create enormous problems for Lennon, however. The Nixon administration, paranoid about the possibility that a former Beatle might become a potent leader and recruiting tool of the anti-war movement, attempted to have Lennon deported. Years of legal battles ensued before Lennon finally was awarded his green card in 1976.

Lennon’s political struggles unfortunately found their match in his personal life. He and Ono split up in the fall of 1973, shortly before the release of his album, Mind Games. He moved to Los Angeles and later described the eighteen months he spent separated from Ono as his “lost weekend,” a period of wild indulgence and artistic drift. Like Mind Games, the albums he made during this period, Walls and Bridges (1974) and Rock N Roll (1975), are the expressions of a major artist seeking, with mixed results, to recover his voice. None of them lack charm, and their high points include the lovely title track of Mind Games; Walls and Bridges’ “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” a rollicking duet with Elton John that gave Lennon his first number-one single as a solo artist; and the sweet nostalgia of Rock N Roll, a covers album that was Lennon’s tribute to the musical pioneers of his youth. But none of those albums rank among his greatest work.

In 1975, Lennon reunited with Ono, and their son Sean was born later that year. For the next five years, Lennon withdrew from public life, and his family became his focus. Then, in 1980, he and Ono returned to the studio to work on Double Fantasy, a hymn to their life together with Sean. The couple was plotting a full-fledged comeback – doing major interviews to support the album’s release, recording new songs for a follow-up, planning a tour. Then, shockingly, Lennon was shot to death outside the apartment building where he and Ono lived on the night of December 8, 1980. (Anthony DeCurtis). Source: www.johnlennon.com

This album contains no booklet.