Imagine

Analyzing "Imagine" as poetry, composition and position paper is a tricky business because it is a compact work of the vernacular — a pop song, a compression of complex ideas into three verses and a chorus, dictated by the 4/4 arithmetic of a slow but steady rock & roll rhythm. "What the song says about religion resonates with me," says Henley. "All religions start out with good intent and eventually become perverted by fanaticism and zealotry. And I think Lennon was a spiritual man; he was not denigrating spirituality. But 'imagine no organized religion' — you can't say that. That's the paradox of songwriting. You have to condense. You have to work within defined parameters."

The poet Michael McClure, a charter member of the Beat movement in San Francisco in the 1950s, describes the actual metric structure of "Imagine" as a combination of "white soul and American, black Southern heart. It would have been a pretty good blues song — it has that kind of cadence. But it also echoes, in a subtle way, the English tradition of William Blake, saying, 'How sweet I roamed from field to field' — the classic English ballad structure.

"It's a great poem," McClure says. "It's a great song. But I think that's minor to the fact that it's really a wisdom work. The essentials of life are all in this poem, all in this anthem. And we're so lucky to have it in Lennon's voice. We don't have the voice of the writer of the Book of Job or the Tao Te Ching. But we have the voice of Lennon."

In the studio, Lennon tended to favor impulse over craft, sometimes with mixed results. Bassist Voormann remembers doing a harmony vocal on "Bring It On Home to Me" for Lennon's 1975 Rock 'n' Roll album: "I was just trying it out — I didn't even know the words. But then he was, 'OK, thank you!' It was already on tape." Voormann also notes that Bobby Keys' exuberant sax solo on Lennon's 1974 hit "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" is actually in the wrong key.

But Lennon clearly cared for "Imagine." After cutting the basic track at Ascot, he experimented with tonal color. On an outtake included on the 1998 box set The John Lennon Anthology, an extra churchy organ sugars the homespun feel of the trio's performance. But that part was scrapped and, during a day of overdubbing in New York in July of '71, Spector supervised the addition of a lush but discreet bed of strings, arranged by veteran Broadway orchestrator Torrie Zito. "The strings don't draw any attention to themselves," says composer and arranger Michael Kamen, who has worked with Pink Floyd and Metallica. "All great arrangements have that common-sense approach."

The practically weightless clarity of Lennon's recording of "Imagine" is one of Phil Spector's great triumphs as a producer. Best known for his explosive Wall of Sound on 1960s hits by the Ronettes and the Crystals, Spector emphasized message and purity in his work with Lennon. "I was determined to make a Number One album with him," Spector says of Imagine, which topped the Billboard album chart in October 1971. "I believed he was that good and deserved it that much — and yet could say things in that album that would be controversial and political. I made that album like each cut was a single."

In his performance of "Imagine" on A Tribute to Heroes, Neil Young replicated Spector's touch to the letter. But Young took one critical liberty with the song. In the third verse — "Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can" — Young sang, "I wonder if I can," an explicit gesture of inclusion and personal challenge that Lennon, one of the richest pop stars in the world, only implied. It was a minor but essential adjustment for a world that, on September 11th, had suddenly been made smaller and more fragile by anxiety and envy.

"Sometimes we use the word you to mean 'all of us,' " says Henley. "Lennon might have been better off singing 'we' at that point: 'I wonder if we can.' I would like to think his 'you' was all-encompassing, that his 'you' meant 'one' — 'I wonder if one can.' "

Years after he'd written "Imagine," Lennon explained himself more clearly: "The Buddhist says, 'Get rid of the possessions of the mind.' Walking away from all the money would not accomplish that. It's like the Beatles. I couldn't walk away from the Beatles. That's one possession that's still tagging along."

Ironically, for a song planted so deep in our collective memory, "Imagine" has rarely been attempted on record by other stars. Covers of Paul McCartney's most famous ballad, "Yesterday," number more than a thousand. But few major artists have dared to put their own stamp on Lennon's best-known prayer. Folk singer and veteran peace activist Joan Baez cut it a year after Lennon for her 1972 album Come From the Shadows; Diana Ross had a stab at it in 1973 and Blues Traveler contributed a version to a 1995 benefit album of Lennon songs, Working Class Hero.

Dave Matthews has played the song onstage with Blues Traveler but admits, "I'm not inspired to perform it. It's hard, when something so important has been said so clearly. The power of that song, the sincerity, is in that one performance by Lennon. Why mess with it?"

It may be, too, that "Imagine" simply belongs to all of us, not merely professional voices. Lennon wrote the song and made the definitive recording, but that's as far as he could take it. "That's what artists do," says Ono. "We create something, an inspired idea, that we want to communicate to other people. And when it comes out, it has an independent life. Sometimes you live and the work doesn't survive. Or," she adds quickly, "vice versa."

She talks of once hearing "Give Peace a Chance" in Bali, sung by someone passing her on the street, and of a 1985 visit to Russia where everyone she met knew every single line of "Imagine." Baez recalls a concert she gave in Romania eight years ago. A group of students in the audience suddenly started singing "Imagine" and would not stop until she joined in. "It's like 'We Shall Overcome' to me," she says of the song. "It has tremendous meaning in places that are in the throes of social change. And it has meaning now, in this country, because of this event in our identity" — September 11th. "This is a reaching out that we've never done before."

For all of his faith in the power of imagination, Lennon could never have pictured the enormity of the horror that has brought his song back to life. But he was not writing about what had happened. "Imagine" was about what can happen. "It's step one in an ambitious program," Bono says of Lennon's song. "We have been overpowered by the pragmatic. The overwhelming mood at the moment is that the world is what it is. And I don't accept that. I love the 'Imagine' billboard in Times Square. It's telling people: 'Imagine that things don't have to be the way they are.' "

[From Issue 885/886 — January 1, 2002]