Not everyone can claim to have the best time every minute they are in the studio. If the sessions are going well, nothing can get you down, but the minute there’s a stumbling block, most artists would rather put out their own hair one follicle at a time than have to decide where the bridge of their song is supposed to go. And not even musical gods are immune to this problem, considering what John Lennon went through looking back on the album Walls and Bridges.
But to understand Lennon’s mindset during this time, it’s important to know where he had been for the past few years. Despite being joined at the hip with Yoko Ono for what seemed like the last decade, Some Time in New York City was the first major stumbling block they encountered. Suddenly, it felt like they were becoming destructive to their own work, and Yoko had the perfect solution: taking a break.
So for the next few years, Yoko appointed May Pang to be Lennon’s girlfriend as he ventured out to California to work on projects like Walls and Bridges and his ill-fated Rock ‘n’ Roll sessions with Phil Spector. But outside of the happy feeling of ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’, there’s a lot of darkness surrounding this album.
He may have had pals like Harry Nilsson working with him on ‘Old Dirt Road’, but Lennon sounds far more downtrodden than he’s ever been since Plastic Ono Band. Mind Games was the first acknowledgement of something being wrong, but since he evokes The Beatles classic ‘Help!’ in the very first song ‘Going Down on Love’, it’s clear that no amount of booze was going to help him get any stronger.
By the time Lennon finally got back together with Ono in the late 1970s, he seemed to look back on the album as a little bit tortured behind the scenes, saying, “At first, it was very hard. But musically my mind was just a clutter. It was apparent in Walls And Bridges, which was the work of a semisick craftsman. There was no inspiration, and it gave off an aura of misery. I couldn’t hear the music for the noise in my own head.”
Even though the album is far from his best, it is one of the most personal albums that he had ever made. No matter how many times people insisted on talking about the escapades he was getting into with fellow Hollywood Vampires like Alice Cooper and Keith Moon, a song like ‘Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)’ is just overwhelming sad, as if we’re seeing a man who’s hard living ways are catching up with him in real-time.
Not many cries for help like this could also be responsible for putting the pieces back together. Despite being separated from Yoko, ‘Whatever Gets You Thru The Night’ would prove to be the moment when Lennon finally mended the fences with his wife, eventually reuniting with her after a pop-out show with Elton John playing his latest number-one single.
There are still many great moments on Walls and Bridges, but it’s easy to understand why Lennon wouldn’t have wanted to return to it after all these years. He was a completely new man by the start of the 1980s, and while those times weren’t meant to last for much longer, it’s easy to see him finally finding some sense of peace as he got older.