An underrated John Lennon album finally gets its due

“Mind Games, to me, was like an interim record between being a manic political lunatic to back to being a musician again,” John Lennon told Crawdaddy magazine in March 1974 about his fourth solo album. “I was really playing mind games—mind games is what it was. I had had enough of this trying to be deep and thought, ‘Why can’t I have some fun?’ And my idea of fun was music to sing.”

By 1973, Lennon was on the comedown from months of deep political activism, landing on the radar of a newly re-elected President Nixon, who put the Feds on his tail for speaking out against the White House and Tricky Dick’s continuation of the Vietnam War. The surveillance was compounded by a Nixon-spurred immigration case to deport him from the U.S. based on a 1968 pot charge in London. And if the stigma of being a national threat wasn’t enough, he was also experiencing marital strain with his beloved wife, Yoko Ono, which would eventually result in an extended separation by the year’s end.

So the former Beatle took exile in the only aspect of his life that never failed him —music. Looking to move away from the sociopolitical commentary that tanked 1972's double LP Some Time In New York City, John looked inward from the solitude of his Greenwich Village apartment and wrote all the songs for the album within a week.

He also chose to produce Mind Games himself (with some help from Yoko), wisely leaving Phil Spector and his insufferable “Wall of Sound” in the dust. These were songs of a personal nature that no doubt reflected the sadness and worry of his rocky romance. It’s evidenced on songs like “Aisumasen (I’m Sorry),” “One Day (At A Time)” and “Out The Blue,” each of which channels the feelings of devotion and remorse he felt towards his wife, even as he was about to embark on a Yoko-endorsed love affair with the couple’s production coordinator May Pang shortly after the album hit stores on October 29, 1973.

In fact, it was Pang who helped put together the phenomenal group of musicians originally assembled for Yoko’s own fourth album, Feeling The Space. Lennon cheekily dubbed them “the Plastic U.F.Ono Band,” consisting of legendary session drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist David Spinozza, “Sneaky” Pete Klienow on pedal steel, bassist Gordon Edwards, percussionist Arthur Jenkins, saxophone great Michael Brecker, Ken Ascher on keys and the singing group Something Different on background vocals.

“John was very open,” reveals second drummer Rick Marotta in the comprehensive liner notes to the brand new deluxe edition of Mind Games, which takes the listener inside the matrix of the LP in a six-disc box set authorized by Yoko Ono and produced by their son, Sean. “As you can imagine, it was hard to be John Lennon, and it was hard to be Yoko Ono but they were always inclusive with us. There was never a ‘you’re you and we’re us,’ it was always ‘we’re all one.’”

Released as part of The Ultimate Collection series that previously saw similar treatments to 1970's Plastic Ono Band and 1971’s Imagine, Mind Games is by far the most revelatory of the boxes yet, if only because it succeeds in shining a new light onto an album that wasn’t exactly praised in the press upon its original release.

“A step in the right direction—much, much better than Some Time In New York City—but only one step,” famed music critic Robert Christgau wrote in the March 1974 issue of CREEM. “It sounds like out-takes from Imagine, which may not seem so bad but means that Lennon is falling back on ideas (intellectual and musical) that have lost their freshness for him: Still, the single works, and let’s hope he keeps right on stepping.” In Rolling Stone, Bruce Springsteen’s future manager Jon Landau was less generous in his judgment, citing the album as “his worst writing yet” while casting off the project as Lennon “helplessly trying to impose his own gargantuan ego upon an audience.”

Revisiting the record over 50 years later in the forensic detail provided by this new deluxe edition, an aural trip into the nuts and bolts of Mind Games reveals a grossly misunderstood work of art whose songs offer fans the opportunity to hear Lennon recalibrate his emotions with the assistance of an ace studio ensemble. Each disc on this expanded album provides its own unique listening experience, thanks to the care and attention to detail given by Sean working in collaboration with engineers Paul Hicks, Rob Stevens, and Sam Gannon. There are six different “versions” of the album in the set: The Ultimate Mixes, the Elements Mixes, the Elemental Mixes, the Evolution Documentary, the Raw Studio Mixes, and the Out-Takes.

Upon opening the box, you gotta listen to the updated version of the original 12-track LP right out of the gate (the Ultimate Mixes, in the box set’s parlance). It utilizes high-definition audio transfers of the first generation multitracks, allowing such key cuts as “Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)” and “You Are Here” to really blossom in your headphones with a fidelity that only becomes further enhanced when you get to the 5.1 and Dolby Atmos versions found on the set’s pair of Blu-ray discs.

Mixed by Gannon, the Elements edition of Mind Games focuses on individual instrumentation, reducing the hurly of the proper album to one to three instruments per track. For instance, “One Day At A Time” fixates on Lennon’s plaintive electric piano lull. “Lucie” is pared down to bass, percussion, and the soaring vocals of Something Different singers Jocelyn Brown, Christine Wiltshire, Angel Coakley, and Kathy Mull. Meanwhile, Sneaky Pete’s isolated pedal steel on “Tight A$” and “You Are Here” uncovers a country constituent imbued in the album’s sound.

Hicks’ Elemental mixes exist in the ether between the Ultimate and Elements discs as it delivers largely acoustic, drumless arrangements that bring John’s voice closer to the fore. Perhaps the most revelatory of these performances stems from the hit title track which, once stripped away from its orchestral fanfare, unlocks a secret reggae groove that will bug you out.

For those into hearing how these songs were built from Lennon’s home demos into their full-flight renditions on the final mix, the Evolution Documentary disc provides a dozen tracks that seamlessly edit together the progression of each song in the studio. The coolest part is hearing how a song like “Intuition” grew from a somber piano ballad into the swinging, upbeat ditty we get on the final product.

Helmed by Stevens, the Raw Studio Mixes are the cream of this box set if you are really keen on diving into the feel of these sessions inside the Record Plant without any kind of overdubs or edits. These unvarnished versions capture the chemistry that existed between Lennon and the band in the immediacy of the moment. The way these cats come together here on rocking fare like “Tight A$,” “Only People” and the ferocious closing number “Meat City” makes you wish he toured this band while they were white hot.

The “Out-Takes” disc that closes out this deluxe edition cherry-picks the very best alternate takes from the sessions to deliver a wholly new version of Mind Games. Here we are treated to fuller renditions of “Out The Blue” and “I Know (I Know)” that benefit from the extra bottom end. There’s also a wildly different take on the album’s spiritual centerpiece “Nutopian National Anthem,” a reference to the imaginary country conjured by John and Yoko in 1973 as a response to Lennon’s immigration woes. Across the first five discs, the track is three seconds of silence. The “Out-Takes” variant, however, is expanded to 1:47 to include the complete snippet of Lennon reading the “Declaration of Nutopia” during a press conference held by the couple on April Fools Day in ‘73.

“It’s rock at different speeds,” Lennon explained of Mind Games to Melody Maker back in ’73. “It’s not a political album or an introspective album. Someone told me it was like Imagine with balls, which I liked a lot.”

Mind Games (The Ultimate Collection) releases on July 12.