All musicians can be completely different creatures when they get onstage. Their name is in lights, and they might seem like gods when they pick up the microphone, but what separates artists from amateurs is being able to deliver.
But just because John Lennon could entertain a crowd didn’t mean he had to enjoy it every time he went out onstage.
Then again, it would be commendable if any of The Beatles managed to have the drive to play music onstage again after the influx of Beatlemania. The whole process of having girls chasing after you every single day and wanting to be involved with you somehow is bound to wear on even the sanest mind, and Lennon wasn’t prepared to jump back into that life during his solo career.
If anything, he was scaling back even more. He knew that he wasn’t the god that people made him out to be, and Plastic Ono Band was a case of him airing his dirty laundry and telling everyone that he was a real person underneath it all. But even during his solo career, he knew that he would go back to the live stage if it was for a good reason.
Throughout the early 1970s, the option was on the table for him to play at the Concert for Bangladesh with George Harrison, but after being told that Yoko was not welcome, he figured that he would stay at home and take his chances putting together the kind of shows that he wanted to see. He was happy to bring his political ideologies into his music, and when listening to the concert that he put on at Madison Square Garden in 1972, he was still the charming musician that everyone grew up with.
Sure, the style had changed with him rocking a military jacket and his classic glasses, but this was the first time people heard him sing some of his greatest solo material live. It was a welcome surprise to listen to tunes like ‘Come Together’ again, but the raw intensity of ‘Cold Turkey’ and the throat-shredding on ‘Mother’ sounded like he was finally able to inhabit his solo career like his fellow Fabs.
When looking back on it, though, Lennon was comfortable leaving the whole thing behind if he could, saying, “When I did the Madison Square Gardens show, I had a sort of deja-vu feeling that I’d done it all before and this was no better or no worse than it had ever been before. It felt strange, and I felt like a robot doing the same thing over and over again.”
It also doesn’t help that a lot of Lennon’s songs don’t translate well to the stadium crowd. Wings lends itself to a massive production with their amazing light show and kicking off a set with tracks like ‘Rock Show’, but Lennon’s music was supposed to be a lot more intimate. Listening to his records is like getting a peek into his psyche rather than a soundtrack to one of the biggest stadium experiences ever.
Because by that time, Lennon was more comfortable appreciating the little things about being a performer. He could easily make sure that every fan was happy by simply walking out onstage, but he would have been much more satisfied if he could have found his way back to the Cavern days when he was playing in a tight-knit room.