McCartney Times

John Lennon‘s Menlove Ave., though probably most famous now for its Andy Warhol-produced cover, actually represents some of the best of what the former Beatles star produced between Imagine and Double Fantasy. You just had to skip ahead to side two of this collection of mid-’70s-era odds and ends.A real labor of love for Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, Menlove Ave. arrived in early November 1986 as the third posthumous album she’d overseen – following 1984’s Milk and Honey and the concert disc Live in New York City, from earlier in ’86. Unlike those two previous projects, however, she’d had nothing to do with these sessions – which took place during Lennon’s infamous Lost Weekend apart from Ono.Her care in constructing Menlove Ave. went beyond that iconic album image. The name itself recalled Lennon’s childhood home at 251 Menlove Ave. in Liverpool, a ’30s-era duplex called “Mendips” where the Beatles first rehearsed. “Mendips always meant a great deal to John,” Ono said in 2012, “and it was where his childhood dreams came true for himself and for the world.”Yet the genesis of these songs was, more often than not, an alcohol-fueled nightmare that found Lennon battling his producer Phil Spector and his own demons during a particularly dark period. Rock ‘n’ Roll, an lumbering, ill-fated attempt to reconnect with Lennon’s roots issued in 1975, went awry when he and Spector clashed. The often-claustrophobic Walls and Bridges was nearly relegated to curio status in 1974 because of similarly Spector-esque studio missteps.

Source: 30 Years Ago: John Lennon’s ‘Menlove Ave.’ Takes Revealing Look at a Troubled Period