John Lennon – ‘Imagine’

Writer: John Lennon
Producers: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Phil Spector
Recorded: June/July 1971 in Tittenhurst, England, and at The Record Plant, New York
Released: September 9th, 1971 (album); October 11th, 1971 (single)
Players:
John Lennon — vocals, piano
Klaus Voorman — bass
Alan White — drums
Flux Fiddlers — strings (arrangement by Torrie Zito)
Album: Imagine (Apple/Capitol, 1971)
Also On:
Shaved Fish (Apple/Capitol, 1975)
Live In New York City (Capitol, 1986)
Imagine: John Lennon (soundtrack) (Capitol, 1988)
The John Lennon Collection (Capitol, 1989)
Lennon (Capitol, 1991)
Lennon Anthology (Capitol, 1998)
Wonsaponatime (Capitol, 1998)
The recording sessions for the Imagine album were filmed at John Lennon‘s home studio in the huge Tittenhurst mansion he shared with his wife Yoko Ono. Around 36 hours of footage were the basis for the 1988 biographical film Imagine: John Lennon by documentarians David Wolper and Andrew Solt.
In the U.S., “Imagine” peaked at Number Three and spent nine weeks in the Top 40. The album, which came out a month earlier, reached Number One in both the U.S. and Great Britain.
At first, “Imagine” was released as a single only in the U.S. When finally released as a single in the U.K. in November 1975, it only made it to Number Six, logging seven weeks in the top 20. It didn’t make it to Number One in the U.K. until it was reissued in December 1980, following Lennon’s death.
Lennon first performed “Imagine” in the U.S. at the One To One benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City on August 30th, 1972, where the Elephant’s Memory band and Yoko Ono backed him. This concert, including “Imagine,” is preserved on the posthumously issued Live In New York City album (which is not the same album as the notorious 1971 concert issued as Some Time In New York City).
Lennon said of the song, “‘Imagine’ was a sincere statement. It was ‘Working Class Hero’ with chocolate on. I was trying to think of it in terms of children.”
Speaking in more radical terms, Lennon also said the song “is virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement. You see, ‘Imagine’ was exactly the same message, but sugar-coated… ‘Imagine’ is a big hit almost everywhere — anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it is sugar-coated, it is accepted.”
Years later, in 1980, Lennon said, “That should be credited as a Lennon/Ono song, a lot of it — the lyric and the concept — came from Yoko, but those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution, but it was right out of Grapefruit, her book, there’s a whole pile of pieces about ‘imagine this and imagine that.’”
When “Imagine” was released, Lennon’s music remained banned by the South African Broadcasting Company, even after they had rescinded the 1966 ban of the Beatles‘ music in 1971.

FAST FORWARD:

After a period during which he was separated from his wife, Lennon reunited with Ono and temporarily retired from music in the late 1970s to be a “house husband” and help raise their son Sean.
In 1987, Lennon and his Beatles mate Paul McCartney became the first non-American composers inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame.
Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Beatles in 1988, and again as a solo act in 1994.
Both of Lennon’s sons, Julian and Sean, have been recording artists, and his widow Yoko Ono has sporadically continued her recording career.
A musical based on his life, called Lennon, opened and quickly closed on Broadway in 2005.
Dance artist Sir Ivan went to Number One on the Billboard Hot Dance Music Club Play chart with a remake of “Imagine.”

Twenty-seven years ago today (December 8th, 1980), John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York City apartment building by deranged fan Mark David Chapman. He and Ono had just released what became his comeback album, Double Fantasy.