Mind Games to the bottom of the rabbit hole

After a wild decade in the biggest pop music group ever, John Lennon's post-Beatles years were spent in protest, in various kinds of therapy, in immigration court, and in search of a new musical identity.

- TOM FINE

He had been a musician since age 16 and a superstar since his early 20s. He was only in his 30s.

By summer 1973, when Lennon's fourth album, Mind Games, was recorded at New York's Record Plant Studios, the turbulence of Lennon's life seas was at gale force. He was separating from Yoko Ono and starting a 16-month relationship (consummated at Ono's suggestion) with their shared administrative assistant, May Pang. The Nixon Administration was targeting Lennon and Ono for deportation because of their left-wing political activities, mostly focused on the Vietnam War.

The world of pop music had changed. His former bandmates were thriving to varying degrees. Lennon had some hit singles, and his first two solo albums had charted relatively well, but then he and Ono made the stridently political Some Time in New York City, a bust that cemented a stereotype of Lennon as angry radical protester rather than lovable ex-Beatle and as less commercially successful than the others.

"I woke up and a year had gone by with no album," Lennon told an interviewer in mid-1973. Ono was finishing her fourth, Feeling the Space.' Lennon was impressed with the studio musicians she had gathered.

He recruited the same band, more or less, for an album of his own. He decided to ditch overt protest material-to transition, in his words, from "being a manic political lunatic... back to being a musician again." In a few weeks, Lennon pulled together the 12 songs that would become Mind Games. Jim Keltner did most of the drumming, with Rick Marotta on two tunes.