- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Shaved Fish is the only retrospective album of John Lennon’s solo years that was released while he was still alive.
John Lennon – Shaved Fish (1975): Shaved Fish is the only retrospective album of John Lennon’s solo years that was released while he was still alive. While the album label shows only John Lennon’s name, Yoko Ono appears on some of the recordings (the B-sides of Lennon’s singles were typically Yoko Ono songs in this period); and some are also credited to the Plastic Ono Band, a rotating group of backing musicians for their albums and concerts. Many of these songs I first purchased as 45’s while I was still in college; I probably hurt my street cred as a conservative Republican activist while I was playing records like “Power to the People” and “Give Peace a Chance”!
More than most other solo recordings by the former Beatles, these songs by John Lennon still sound like Beatles songs to me; and some are just as good or even better than many of the later songs by the actual band, such as “Imagine”, “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)”, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night”, “#9 Dream”, and “Mind Games”. “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” is an anti-war protest song that quickly became a favorite Christmas song anyway. I remember taking to heart the philosophical underpinnings of “Instant Karma”; as expressed in Wikipedia: “The lyrics focus on a concept in which the causality of one’s actions is immediate rather than borne out over a lifetime.” Some of the songs are easier to listen to than others. “Cold Turkey” is about John Lennon’s multiple attempts to kick his heroin habit over the years. The first time I heard “Cold Turkey” was on a jukebox on one of our beach trips; and ironically, it was probably the poor sound quality that seared the song into my memory banks so chillingly. I have hunted around, and I have never found a recording of this song that is as harsh as I remember its being the first several times I heard it. No one would release a song with a title like “Woman is the N—-r of the World” anymore, and the title was controversial even at the time. John Lennon comes from a working-class background, and Yoko Ono was trying to school him on feminism; this song is his less than fully successful attempt to show that he got it. “Mother” is one of several songs that John Lennon has written about his parents; another is “My Mummy’s Dead” that was on the same album as “Mother”, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970). The simply lovely “Julia” (1968) – the name of Lennon’s mother – was the last song recorded for The Beatles (the White Album) and is actually a solo recording with Lennon accompanying himself on acoustic guitar with no other musicians. John Lennon’s father left the family when he was an infant, and Lennon lived with his aunt rather than his mother for most of his childhood, though he and his mother had a reasonably good relationship. Julia Lennon was struck and killed by an automobile when John Lennon was 17; his first son Julian Lennon is named for her. The tolling church bells at the beginning of “Mother” remind me of the beginning of the AC/DC album Back in Black (1980); those bells were played in honor of their original lead singer Bon Scott who had just passed. Amazingly, Back in Black is the second biggest selling album in history, exceeded only by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Excerpts from two versions of “Give Peace a Chance” are given at the beginning and at the end of the album; the full song is not provided, but there is enough to get the idea. There are some clever bits on the album cover. The tin of fish has a line at the bottom, “Net Wt. 1 LP” (rather than the common abbreviation for a pound, lb). There is also a quotation by Dr. Winston O’Boogie: “A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words”. “Winston” is John Lennon’s original middle name; after he and Yoko Ono got together, he legally changed his middle name to Ono in April 1969 so that their names would match after their marriage.