How? and Oh Yoko!

This is Day Twelve of being confined to my Brooklyn apartment following foot surgery, having not left except once to see my doctor, and once to retrieve my mail from the downstairs lobby. Both occasions were so traumatic for my recently sliced-open and stitched-shut foot that I decided self-imposed imprisonment to be the best course of action, until I'm required to see my doctor again.

I have been, as one might guess, wigging out.

But I'll skip through the usual tales of wigging out and crutch acrobatics found in previous posts, and skip to discussing the last two tracks on John Lennon's album "Imagine."

This may or may not be the start to a series of musings on various recorded sounds and images that make up most of my company while here in Brooklyn, bed-bound.

Or this could just be a way to drown out the voice in my head that's begging me to consider hiring a prostitute for Valentine's Day.

Now I'm not one of those purists who listens to records (mainly because I don't have any speakers for my record player) but I am one of those nerds who divides all of his iTunes albums into Side A and Side B, if those albums were originally released on vinyl. I look up the track listing on the internet and then divide up the mp3's accordingly. Does anyone else do this? I know this puts me into a very special category of music obsessive, but honestly I find it is the only way I can understand these albums. Digitally halving my mp3's is the only way I have of connecting to the eras I missed, and which I wished I'd been around to enjoy. The sixties, the seventies, and to a lesser extent the eighties.

In that light, I've recently found myself humbled by the precision with which John Lennon devised the ending to "Imagine," his second solo album, released in 1971. He placed a track called "How?" next to a track called "Oh Yoko!" before concluding in silence. I'm sure my being flat on my back with a foot injury (one that's been given a 50% shot at recovery) is indirectly responsible for my finding new meaning in the order and content of these two songs.

First of all, these are two tracks on which Lennon uses his kid voice to its utmost effect. It's the voice that makes him sound like a five-year-old singing to himself in the sandbox. Lennon was an incredibly sophisticated if not "great" rock singer. He was never a star vocalist of the Robert Plant or Roger Daltrey or even Paul McCartney variety. But he knew a thing or two about singing, and honed his ability to downshift into a childlike whispering voice without ever sounding false or cloying. People are still learning from it today.

"How?" is written as a series of questions pointing to a man in so much pain he can barely move. (a feeling I've come to know literally)

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

How can I have feelings when my feelings have always been denied?

How can I give love when I just don't know how to give?

How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?

Lennon is at once admitting being scarred and being selfish. He rails against those who squelched his feelings as a child, while decrying the way he's held on to his own survivalist instincts at the expense of all others around him. "How can I give love when I just don't know how to give?" - it's a line you don't hear expressed in too many other pop songs of the time. And there is no doubting the sincerity in Lennon's voice. Even for the insular kingdom of two he formed with Yoko Ono - a love forged in the public eye, and out of necessity publicized by Ono and Lennon as the love to end all loves - he freely expresses his petulance, his despair, and his doubts about the very existence of love.

This is also a subject lately on my mind, having seen another year go by and still having no idea if I could love someone, and if someone could love me, and if that love could sustain itself for more than a few seconds. It seems a matter of impossible mathematics, made all the more intimidating by this overused word - a word everyone seems to have remarkably easy access to.

Lennon sings "How?" just as I would imagine a very grownup five-year-old sitting in his sandbox might, hopelessly brushing sand into the same reforming hole. The only conclusions he comes to are that "Life can be long, and you've got to be so strong. The world is so tough. Sometimes I feel I've had enough." There is no affirmation contained in these statements. There is no "chin up" implied, merely the resignation we all feel when it seems as though life is nothing but a series of trials, heaped on top of each other in quick succession. This feels especially true when you can't imagine walking from the bedroom to the kitchen without pain, when once you used to run, jump, occasionally have sex standing up, and play squash. You look back over the last two years and see nothing but illness, death, bereavement, loneliness and financial distress. It seems the bad has far outweighed the good, and carrying on seems just an absurd act of self-destruction when you don't even know which way you're facing.

At which point the song ends with a string section rising in a five-note progression. It's just slightly overproduced and too sweet. The violins resolve to a high note more akin to the end of a Doris Day ballad than a John Lennon number, and with this Lennon indulges his deepest desire to escape into fantasy, running toward an impossible image of love known only to Hollywood endings.

With two hard snare hits Lennon takes us out of this world of head-in-the-sand nihilism and into "Oh Yoko!"- a jangly masterpiece of adoration. "In the middle of the night, in the middle of a bath, in the middle of a shave, in the middle of a dream... I call your name. Oh, Yoko! My love will turn you on." The song bounces beautifully along. It encapsulates the feeling of uncontrollable pleasure at the thought of someone's name. The fact that Lennon uses his real wife's name makes it all the more powerful. "Whoa, wait a minute. This rock star's singing about his wife? AND using her real name??" This had rarely been done, and to my knowledge is still rarely done. "Seriously, the lady he actually lives with? He calls her name while shaving?" It shouldn't be thrilling, but it is. Especially when you know that the woman whose name he's calling is in the next room, or at best down in the basement or something. What's so great about a love song in which the guy has already got the girl?

And yet there is a yearning for something gone missing, and the plea contained in the song is electrifying: "My love ... will ... turn ... you on!" I honestly don't know what this means, but I like it. "Turning on" in the late sixties/early seventies had all kinds of connotations - from drug use, to sexual arousal, to general excitement, to the opening of the mind. And, honestly, I'm only basing that on myriad context clues - I can't claim those definitions to be 100% correct. I'm sure there are one or two other meanings I'd have to go to a first-generation hippie to get the real deal on.

But to my mind "my love will turn you on," the way Lennon sings it, is as innocent as a kid at a pinball machine. My excitement for your very name will make you really really really happy, my ability to shout your real name on record to the rest of the world will get you to come back up from the basement and quit being mad at me. Your name overtakes me at the least expected moments, and the passion I'm giving to you is nothing to the awakening you brought to me back in '68 when I decided I had to divorce my first wife, drop all this Beatle bullshit, and start afresh. I couldn't have done that for anyone else with any other name! (I'm sure one could fill in plenty of other backstories to make the song more relatable, but to me this is the beauty of Lennon. His life was an open book.)

And it's the placement of these two tracks that reminds me why Lennon was Lennon. He puts "How?" and "Oh Yoko!" back to back. At one moment saying, "Life is one long horrible suckfest and you're completely on your own and love is just an illusion," and the next saying, "Love is real and it's freaking awesome!!! I love my woman so much and I want you to remember her name!!" We are infinitely erratic. We are one person one moment and another person the next. We despair one minute and rejoice the minute after. We lose our shit, and we get it back. We are children 'til we die, knowing just as much about the universe at our last breath as we do when we are born. Despair is infinitely powerful, and will come up again and again - but adolescent silly love is the note to go out on.

Oh, to have that to joy to give to someone.... and not worry that it won't be rejected or mocked. It does leave me wondering, do you need a Yoko to sing your "Oh Yoko!"?

It's just so hard to do on your own. I'm slowly creeping toward early middle age and I still haven't found a Yoko who makes me sing. But the recordings left behind by John Lennon make love feel abundantly possible, no matter how long you've been missing it.

And that's what makes him the greatest track orderer who ever lived.

Better rest up. Seeing my doctor tomorrow.