The 50th anniversary of John Lennon‘s first post-Beatles solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band will be commemorated by a new book set for publication on October 8th — one day before what would’ve been Lennon’s 80th birthday.
The new tome, published by Thames and Hudson Ltd, is titled John & Yoko Plastic Ono Band, and will set you back about €45.
Not much is known about the 288-page officially sanctioned book, but its table of contents were posted on Amazon’s UK site, reading, “Preface by Yoko Ono; I Sat Belonely; Who are the Plastic Ono Band?; Mother; Collaboration; Hold On; Live Performance; I Found Out; Working Class Hero; Catharsis; Isolation; Remember; Love; Well Well Well; Recording; Album Artwork; Look At Me; God; My Mummy’s Dead; and Emancipation.”
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was an admittedly heavy listen, having been composed after Lennon underwent Primal Scream therapy with Dr. Arthur Janov as a way to exorcize his childhood demons.
The album was released on December 11th, 1970 and peaked at Number Six on the Billboard 200 albums chart, spending only four weeks in the Top 10. The album fared better on the Cashbox chart, hitting Number Four — and peaking at Number Two in Record World.
The set, which marked John Lennon‘s first album of original songs since the Beatles‘ split earlier that year, and included such classics as “Working Class Hero,” “Love,” “Mother,” “Isolation,” and “God.”
The album was promoted by Lennon on December 8th, 1970 — 10 years to the day before his murder — when he sat down with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner for the legendary “Lennon Remembers” interview, which was designed by Lennon to demolish the Beatles myth.
During the interviews John Lennon was unsure how the public at large would accept the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album: “I don’t really know where it’ll sink in, where it’ll lie, y’know, in the spectrum of rock n’ roll, and the generation and all the rest of it. In one way, it’s terribly uncommercial. Y’know, it’s so miserable in a way and heavy, y’know? But it’s reality. And I’m not going to veer away from it for anything.”
