Clips & Pix: John Lennon/Gimme Some Truth

I’m sick and tired of hearing things from
Uptight short sided narrow minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic psychotic pigheaded politicians
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth…

Yesterday, on what would have been John Lennon’s 80th birthday, I found myself listening to the just-released new solo collection Gimme Some Truth. After six previous box collections one might ask did we really need yet another collection and is this simply an attempt to cash in on the occasion?

While I’m sure Capitol/UMe won’t mind making a buck or two out of the release, I want to believe making money wasn’t the real motivation for Yoko Ono Lennon and Sean Ono Lennon, who picked the tunes and executive-produced the collection. Perhaps I’m a bit naive here.

All 36 tracks were completely remixed and engineered by Paul Hicks who was assisted by Sam Gannon. Both also worked together on the previous Lennon solo collection Imagine – The Ultimate Collection, which came out in October 2018.

According to a previous announcement, the songs were completely remixed from scratch, using brand new transfers of the original multi-tracks, cleaned up to the highest possible sonic quality. After weeks of painstaking preparation, the final mixes and effects were completed using only vintage analog equipment and effects at Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles, and then mastered in analog at Abbey Road Studios by Alex Wharton in order to ensure the most beautiful and authentic sound quality possible.

Currently, I don’t have a great music setup at my house, so I cannot really verify the improvements of these remixes. Based on reviews I’ve seen, apparently, the sound quality is very good.

While I’m not going to review the new collection, I decided to call out the title track. Gimme Some Truth was written by John Lennon and first recorded for his second solo album Imagine from September 1971. It features a slide guitar solo played by George Harrison.

Lennon wrote the tune during a time when he was being investigated by the FBI as an inconvenient political rabble-rouser over concerns by the Nixon Administration he would disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention. He expressed his frustration over “short sided narrow minded hypocritics”, “neurotic psychotic pigheaded politicians” and “schizophrenic egocentric paranoiac primadonnas.”

I was really struck by how well the lyrics fit our current situation where we find ourselves being lied to by Tricky Dickies on television. Every day. One wonders how John Lennon would have reacted to the current state of affairs, if he still would have been around today.

Sources: Wikipedia; Capitol/UMe press release; Songfacts; YouTube