John Lennon Imagine...All the Outtakes Vigotone 1994 slipcase box set booklet

Description

If you want outtakes from John Lennon’s Imagine album, it's hard to, um, "imagine" a more comprehensive listen than this three-CD, three-hour-plus set. On the positive side, the sound is largely excellent, as is the packaging, complete with liner notes that are probably more insightful and well written than anything Apple would be likely to offer. To its credit, Vigotone also tried to sequence the tracks to improve listenability somewhat, constructing one disc as an "alternate album" of sorts with just one outtake of each tune, and grouping a handful of lower-fi home tape/demos near the end of disc three. Generally, the principal differences between these outtakes and the final studio versions are the absence of strings and echo that were eventually overdubbed, with many of the takes also lasting longer than the pruned-down tracks heard on the final album; one of the "How Do You Sleep?"s, for instance, lasts a little over eight minutes. There's also some more spontaneous vocalizing at times, sometimes memorably so, as when he sings "how do you sleep, you c*nt," and ends an unedited version of the final take of "Gimme Some Truth" with the spoken aside, "this is the truth." As for songs that didn't make it onto the album, there are very few, though there's a passable slow, bluesy cover of "Well (Baby Please Don't Go)," a brief, informal acoustic busk through "San Francisco Bay Blues," and, most interestingly, a fairly spare demo of "I'm the Greatest," which John would end up giving to Ringo Starr. While home tapes of work-in-progress versions of a few songs (including "Oh My Love," "Oh Yoko!," and "How?") from 1968-1970 are of considerably lower audio quality and more sloppily performed (and incompletely composed), these do provide interesting looks at the tunes in their early stages. It's a comprehensive listen by its end (its historic value is undeniable) and it supplies rich source material should anyone ever decide to do a whole book on the Imagine album.
Officially released as CD-Rs