10 Classic Albums That Artists Hated Recording

1970 wasn’t necessarily the best year to be John Lennon. After breaking up the Beatles and going down his own creative direction with Yoko Ono, John started to get involved with heroin and went through some pretty messy primal scream therapy sessions, all of which were documented on his first solo album Plastic Ono Band. When he came up for air though, he also had a lawsuit breathing down his neck.

Since he legally lifted a piece of Chuck Berry’s classic You Can’t Catch Me for Come Together, John was commissioned to record an album of rock and roll standards, with the proceeds going to Berry’s estate. While the idea of John Lennon making a covers album sounds great on paper, the actual sessions for this album were some of the most debaucherous the ex-Beatle ever got into. Recorded during what he called his lost weekend, most of Rock n Roll is some of the most disheveled sounding sessions that John ever made.

That’s not to say that it’s bad by any stretch though, bringing more life to classics like Slippin and Slidin, even if he had to deal with notorious producer Phil Spector’s iron hand, including an episode where Phil fired a gun in the studio which really hurt John’s ears. That rough and tumble Teddy Boy persona that John had was still in him somewhere, but you can also hear his lost weekend start to catch up with him in between some of the grooves here.