After the Beatles, John Lennon set out on a creative crusade filled with beauty, emotion and absolute weirdness — undoubtedly fed by a desire to transcend the Fab myth, tighten an alliance with Yoko Ono, be taken seriously, and push the conventions of celebrity. This, of course, frustrated millions of his fans. Then he recorded “Imagine,” and all was forgiven and overlooked. Here was a Beatle proffering an optimistic, utopian vision of what the world and mankind could be. The song and album were the peak of Lennon’s post-Beatles career. In 2018, around the singer’s 78th birthday, the keepers of the flame have decided it’s time to reshare the vision and the message that comes with it. Imagine – The Ultimate Collection celebrates the sonic power of the music; the Imagine and Gimme Some Truth films take it further, offering not only an intimate stroll through the making of Imagine, but a glimpse into the fairy-tale life of John and Yoko in the early 1970s when all the world was their stage.
Imagine and Gimme Some Truth, complete and in bits and pieces, have been circulating for years. Now, both films have been hand-restored from the original film reels, remastered in HD, and brought together on DVD, Blu-ray, and various digital platforms. Naturally, there’s loads of extras, some footage never released before. Everything looks better, sounds better, flows much easier. Viewing both, you’ll see a lot of the same footage and still get two different perspectives. Imagine, originally filmed for TV, pulls in all the songs from the album, plus a few from Yoko Ono’s Fly album, recorded around the same time. Indeed, Ono’s “Mrs. Lennon” and “Mind Train” figure in squarely with Lennon’s more accessible, melodic tracks, creating a series of music videos, promos, vignettes, fantasy skits and sequences, mostly shot at Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park estate in Ascot, England, as well as parts of New York City.
While Imagine features a wild selection of famous faces like Miles Davis, Andy Warhol, Fred Astaire, Jack Palance, and Dick Cavett, Gimme Some Truth narrows the focus on the Imagine sessions with George Harrison, Klaus Voorman, Nicky Hopkins, Alan White and Phil Spector. Watching Lennon track vocals for “Jealous Guy” and “How?”, or seeing him play “How Do You Sleep,” the “nasty” song he wrote about Paul McCartney, for George Harrison on piano, then latter with a full band “live” in the studio — this is the kind of insider’s look into the process Beatles and John Lennon fanatics dream about. You may grimace when Yoko Ono steps in and tries to direct the sessions, or roll your eyes and get choked up at the number of cigarettes Lennon, Ono and virtually everyone around them puff away on. You’ll laugh at the absurdity, marvel at the audacity. And you’ll recognize that Imagine and Gimme Some Truth are snapshots, for better or worse, of another era when pure artistry and commercial appeal intersected. Nearly 50 years later, it only gets better.
~ Shawn Perry
