Beatles solo albums - the best ones and your favorites | Page 9 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

mja6758 said
George’s solo career, after its magnificent start with All Things Must Pass , rapidly passed into mediocrity. Sadly, the majority of George’s best songs were written while he was a Beatle, or in the immediate aftermath. There is a reason ATMP is such a strong album, it’s because George had a backlog of songs that John and Paul didn’t give serious enough consideration to for Beatles albums.

In that way George maybe lost the most with the group’s split, however happy he was to see it. In some ways it seems George was at his best when he was striving to impress brothers John and Paul. When left to his own devices, too often he really wasn’t that interested. As he often said himself, he’d lost interest in being famous, and successful albums involved drawing attention to himself. Maybe that is why the albums he wanted to make, like Cloud 9 and the first Wilburys, worked so much better than the ones where he felt like he was on the treadmill.

George, like John in his last years, was happy Watching The Wheels go ’round and ’round, while pottering around the garden in Henley.

By the same token, I’d argue that John was at his best when striving to compete directly with Paul within the confines of the group… and thus absorbing a fair amount of inspiration from him. 

meanmistermustard said George suffered the same problem as John, releasing music for the sake of releasing music as thats what he felt he was meant to do. And it produced the same results, half decent albums that sound like they were filled for the sake of it, making up the numbers. I rarely play a George album thru aside from All Things Must Past and Cloud Nine , the rest are selections or whatever comes up on random. The same can be said for John tho Plastic Ono Band is the only one i ever play thru there, i suppose DF and Milk And Honey  could be included if it wasnt for the Yoko stuff.

 

I agree George sort of blew his load, so to speak, with All Things Must Pass .  But at the same time, I still consider it the best album any of them released outside of the group (the first 2 discs are strong enough for me to ignore the Apple Jam disc)… and one of the only ones that sounded as though it could’ve easily been put out by the group themselves (granted, many of its songs were written while the group was still together  ).  Most of his other solo albums are hit-and-miss, but he definitely carved out a distinct sound for himself (though I think he overdid it on the slide guitar at times  ), and Cloud Nine and Brainwashed are both solid albums (as is the first Wilburys album), and good ways to go out in terms of both career AND life.  I still need to familiarize myself more with his albums from Extra Texture (Read All About It) through Gone Troppo , but based on the strength of ATMP alone, I think his solo career just edges out John’s.  I still often find myself frustrating underwhelmed with John’s overly simple arrangements and rather same-y production values for each of his albums.  And I still think John Lennon /Plastic Ono Band is the most overrated solo Beatles work [runs away].

I’m rather surprised no one’s mentioned any of Paul’s more recent albums, as I think he’s REALLY stepped up his game again over the last 15-20 years, and putting considerably fewer throwaway tunes on his albums than in the ’70s and ’80s.  I’d honestly rank Memory Almost Full right up there with Band On The Run .  I personally can’t wait for his next album… and hope it’s out before year’s end (though that’s starting to not look very likely  ).

So, the albums from each I’d most immediately recommend:

Paul: Ram , Band On The Run , Tug Of War , Flaming Pie , Chaos And Creation In The Backyard , Memory Almost Full , Electric Arguments

George: All Things Must Pass ; to a lesser extent, Cloud Nine and Brainwashed

John: Imagine , I guess, and perhaps Walls And Bridges (“Going Down on Love” remains one of my favorite solo tunes of his) and “Double Milk And Honey Fantasy” (a compilation of ONLY the John songs from those 2 albums  )

Ringo: Ringo and Goodnight Vienna are his only 2 albums worth owning in their entirety; the rest you can simply cherry-pick the singles/highlights from them.