God, Love, Pain & Identity: How Three Relationships Forged the Three Most Human Albums of 1970

Fifty years ago, John Lennon sat in a beige, sedated room, stroking the hand of his new wife, Yoko Ono. The blandness of their setting was new for the couple — the past few years had seen them traverse the world urging mankind to “Give peace a chance,” a recommendation not yet heeded by the Vietnam-coveting US government. As Lennon sat in Arthur Janov’s drab office, screaming his lungs out to purge his anguish — the doctor’s orders — a thought began to trickle into his mind: “The dream is over.”

The late ’60s saw that dream die. That is, the dream of the Summer of Love, of Haight-Ashbury, of Woodstock. Kennedy optimism could only last until the decade’s final year, when Manson’s cronies fulfilled Beatle gospel with egregious slayings. A few months later, the Rolling Stones’ attempt to elevate humanity’s shared consciousness culminated in bloody homicide at Altamont Speedway. Murder, indeed, was just a shot away.

1970 presented no other option but reincarnation. No longer was there any utility in adorning a “hippie” mask for the pursuit of some unattainable liberty. Our cultural leaders — three musicians in particular — shed these veils and created their most authentic masterworks.

For these three rockers, their rebirth was not borne solely of cultural currents; rather, their relationships with each other drove their new-found purity. Each relationship represented a core tenet of the artists’ renewed lust for individual flourishing. These relationships manifested in three essential albums: John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass and Eric Clapton’s Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Between the three inextricable albums, the artists’ emotion-soaked music spans the core foundations of humanity: from love to pain, from God to identify itself.

Wondering How I Lost Your Friendship: The Intertwined Trio

Each artist faced a turning point in 1970. Lennon had become the voice of the ’60s by bringing personal songwriting to the pop realm with songs like “In My Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But the young man sketching such plaintive melodies was one abandoned by his father, left to grow up under the watchful eye of his Aunt Mimi, only to see his mother killed when he was 17. Superstardom left this broken icon unsatisfied; as he stated in his 1966 Maureen Cleave interview at the height of the Beatles’ fame, “There’s something else I’m going to do…all I know is, this isn’t it for me.”

Lennon strove to find that “something else” through self-destructive obsession. First came his obscene abuse of LSD in the mid-60s; then, a flirting with meditation and the Maharishi in ’68; finally, the strongest drug he would ever take materialized in Yoko Ono. Ono introduced yet another intoxicant — heroin — and the two quickly distanced themselves from the Beatles as a singular Johnandyoko entity. Lennon saw himself — and his newfound soulmate — as greater than Beatles, and he was now compelled to bleed out his pent-up insecurities with his solo artistic vision. That compulsion manifested in his first “real” solo LP, Plastic Ono Band.

Lennon and Paul McCartney had long thought of Harrison, the youngest Beatle, as the “little brother” of the group. Cut out of the lucrative “Lennon-McCartney” songwriting partnership, Harrison’s compositions were only allowed to appear once or twice per album, despite authoring many of the group’s best tracks. Lennon flat-out refused to work on Harrison’s songs in the later Beatle years. Yes, the man who composed “Something” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was regarded as a shmuck, a tag-along blessed to be in the presence of the twin gods, Lennon & McCartney.

Like John, George had been searching for something more significant than Beatles for years. But what passed as fads for Lennon became lifelong pursuits for Harrison: namely, transcendental meditation and Indian spirituality. By 1970, George had embraced holiness over Beatledom, and he’d had enough of his talent being squandered by the oppressors in his band. While McCartney sued Apple Records for release from the group, Harrison rejoiced. He could finally shed the limitations of Beatles and create his grand artistic statement — the double album fittingly titled All Things Must Pass. His prison now past, George was free, at last.

Many twenty-somethings — even non-Beatles — see themselves as immortal, even godlike, but only rarely is one labelled as such by millions. Eric Clapton was such an individual. Clapton had invented the “guitar hero” persona through his work with the Yardbirds and Cream, groups that laid in pieces by 1970. Yet the sky seemed the limit for Clapton — everyone still worshipped the saint who made shredding a divine endeavor.

But privately, Clapton was as broken as Lennon. He was possessed by a love forbidden — a love for the wife of his dear friend, George Harrison. Tormented by his unrequited devotion and the death of his chief virtuoso rival, Jimi Hendrix, Clapton developed a habit of binging every drug he could get his hands on, reportedly including alcohol, heroin, cocaine and PCP.

The fucked-up Clapton had become disenchanted with the allure he now held in rock. He no longer wished to be Eric Clapton, Guitar God. Therefore, he adopted a new, anonymous alter ego: Derek, leader of the Dominos. The new group, which included Bobby Whitlock and Duane Allman, set out on an inebriated, chaotic bender of a recording surge. Clapton’s answer to his own question, “What’ll you do when you get lonely?” turned out to be Layla, the greatest album of his career.

So therein lies the story — three albums, borne of three relationships:

- Lennon & Harrison, the two most eager Beatles to abandon the group — though for quite different reasons. To John, George was the little brother that wouldn’t let him grow up and move out of the house. For George, John was the overshadowing oppressor, blocking any chance of full recognition of Harrison’s talents.

- Lennon & Clapton, frequent collaborators in the late ’60s. Whenever John wanted to emerge from the Beatles’ cocoon, Clapton was his first call. Clapton enabled John to shape his individualistic artistry, while Eric leapt at the chance to abandon the spotlight and be a mere sideman guitarist once more.

- And Clapton & Harrison, purportedly “best friends” by this time. Clapton, plagued with guilt for coveting the wife of his dear friend, saw George as the embodiment of his unrequited love, his roadblock to ecstasy. The unaware Harrison saw only a companion who would encourage his newfound independence — a companion he would invite to open his own debut solo LP with a startling guitar solo.

Two of the albums, Lennon’s and Harrison’s, shared the same producer, and all three shared similar musicians — Clapton himself performed on two of them. These three relationships are inseparable from the trio’s 1970 albums, and they shaped the best music the three men would ever make again.

Got to Keep on Growing: The Sounds

The themes of these three works are profoundly universal: they take on dualities of love vs. pain and identity vs. spirituality in unique, personal fashion. But those lyrical themes are compounded by the works’ musical essence. As with all great albums, the music embodies the lyrics’ sentiments.

Take Plastic Ono Band, for starters. John may have been the “rawest” of the Beatles, but for every grungy “Yer Blues” he penned a half-dozen gorgeous numbers like “Across the Universe.” In 1970, Lennon embraced a stark, harrowing sound — one track’s whispering acoustic plucking being consumed by the next tune’s gnawing guitars. But it’s Lennon’s voice that truly stabs the hearts of listeners. Under Janov, Lennon had been practicing “primal scream” therapy — expelling his inner pain with excruciating vocal energy. This technique worked its way into Plastic Ono Band, which sees John alternating wretched screams of rage with gasps of fragility.

Clapton, too, strips himself bare vocally on Layla. But while Lennon’s are akin to a trembling ghost, Clapton’s vocals embody a wild, wounded animal. Lennon’s trauma has shattered him to the mere wisps of humanity. Clapton’s anguish is fresh; he’s left with the instinctual compulsion to howl at the world for his own misery. Underlying this fiendish barking is bluesy instrumentation, full of extended jams and Clapton’s signature guitar solos. Layla has an inescapable “live” feel, as if the Dominos tumbled into a room one day and let this music pour out of their orifices. The result is a chaotic record where shrieking guitars are only overcome by the auditory agony of a man pushed to his limits by unrequited love.

With all this gloom and doom in the air, what’s got the notoriously grumpy Harrison all worked up this time? In a word, nothing. Harrison revels in his newfound freedom, singing with reckless abandon over a multitude of musical styles. George takes the ethereal bliss of his Beatle magnum opus, “Something,” and jacks it up to eleven. Listeners to All Things Must Pass are sent galloping over green hills & majestic meadows or gazing out from a jet plane streaking through the clouds at sunset. Throughout each of its 18 tracks (not counting the “Apple Jam” disc), the lush, celebratory album is an exultation of the greatest joys in life: freedom, love and the divine.

Those three subjects are present throughout Lennon’s and Clapton’s works, too. But just as each album’s sound portrays an entirely unique perspective on the rock sound, their lyrics portray vastly disparate perspectives on our race’s largest predicaments.

Love is Needing to be Loved: Love & Pain

Lennon/Ono and Clapton/Boyd are perhaps the two most iconic love stories in rock history. Yet it’s Harrison — the man who once sang “leave me alone, don’t bother me” to a female suitor — who was most unflinching in his rejoice of love in 1970. After all, he had long been the successful beau of pin-up worthy Boyd (for now). On All Things Must Pass, Harrison’s thesis is simple: “I dig love.” When Harrison asks, “What is my life without your love?” in “What is Life,” he’s really answering his own question. Life without the emotional extremes of love will always have an unquenchable emptiness. Harrison’s, though, is full — and he digs it.

All Things is packed with romantic croons, from “I’d Have You Anytime” to the sneakily breathtaking “Let It Down” (“I see your eyes are busy kissing mine”). But the strongest love on the album is heard in George’s adoration for the universe and life itself. Listeners hear this from Harrison’s appeals for arm-in-arm unity on “Isn’t it a Pity” to the bouncing, wide-open beauty of “Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp.” Whether it’s for Patti or for newfound freedom, there’s no confusing the vibrant sonic palette of All Things Must Pass.

Of course, for every Harrison that seals a date with the prom queen, there’s a Clapton who sits behind her in algebra class, cemented in the friend zone, fuming over her lack of reciprocity. Clapton, too, ponders what his life is without Boyd’s love. But unlike George, Eric doesn’t have it. That very emptiness that Harrison lacks is Clapton’s reality, and he can’t take it.

The apex of Layla’s first half, “Bell Bottom Blues,” depicts a pathetic figure. One minute, Eric’s “crawl[ing] across the floor,” only to be begging on his knees in the next. He insinuates he’d rather die than not be with his would-be lover, and aptly refers to himself as a “loser.” Each chorus serves as a two-way mirror, as we bear witness to this pitiful display. This convulsing creature is illuminated through the accompanying growls of Womack and slicing lead guitars from Allman. Romantic love is a bag of extremes, and Clapton here is on the absolute low end of that spectrum. Why does love got to be so sad?

The casual observer may draw a straight line between Clapton’s heartbroken cries and Lennon’s. In a way, they are both conveying sorrow at a love unfulfilled. In the succinctly-titled “Love,” John professes that “love is wanting to be loved.” To both, loving is not enough; it must be received in return.

But John — however twisted the relationship may have been in reality — had found a mutual romantic partner in Yoko Ono. If anything, he was at the peak of his life in this regard. Instead, John’s deficiency of this emotion was one he’d felt over a lifetime: a deficiency caused by the absence of his mother, Julia.

It’s no coincidence that Plastic Ono Band is bookended by two shattering laments for Julia, kicking off with “Mother” and closing with “My Mummy’s Dead.” Her presence — or lack thereof — bleeds into almost every nook and cranny of the album. “Mother” is a jaw-dropping display of a 30-year-old man attempting to come to terms with a lifetime of abandonment. John wrote some incredible lyrics with the Beatles — including on his first ode to his mother, “Julia” — but never before or since did he strip himself so bare: “Mother, you had me / But I never had you / I wanted you / You didn’t want me.” The brutal vulnerability hits us like a cinderblock to the chest. And that’s before he unleashes a series of ear-splitting screams in the song’s coda. Frankly, listening to “Mother” is a disturbing experience. This is no love; it’s pure pain.

Pain is the overarching theme of Plastic Ono Band, just as love is the foundation of All Things Must Pass and, indirectly, Layla. These emotions are two sides of the same coin, but Lennon has allowed pain to take over after constricting himself to love for the last eight years. After ten tracks of agony, we’re hit with the stark, lo-fi “My Mummy’s Dead,” featuring a solo Lennon mumbling into a fuzzy microphone. We can’t see fun Beatle John the same again after hearing “I can’t explain so much pain / I could never show it.” There’s no resolution here; no hope for acceptance. It’s the harrowing period mark on the album’s apocalyptic sentence.

Harrison’s strongest statement on pain in All Things is its absence from his material. Every song is upbeat, and while he acknowledges he has room to improve, he’s still got his lover by his side. Lennon, too, has a partner — but she’s not enough to help him escape. There’s scarcely sentiments of John and Yoko taking on the world, surging into the new decade. Rather, Lennon only pleads for the couple to “hold on” against the broken shell that he’s admitted is his life. But Lennon’s shuddering sobs are feeble prey next to the rage, the sheer possessiveness, of Clapton’s screeching wails to Layla — the wife of his friend who’s got him on his knees. Plastic Ono Band shows us what a lifetime of pain sounds like. The third chorus to “Layla,” shows us the worst visceral moment of pain we’ll ever know.

A Concept by Which We Measure Our Pain: God & Identity

One of the striking aspects of All Things Must Pass is that, though Harrison has never been as self-indulgent or expressive, not a single minute comes off as showboating or arrogant. This is because for George, exploring himself and giving oneself up to a higher power were one and the same. Through finding his own identity, he found God.

Of course, Harrison had been religious for years, but he had never professed his praise to anywhere approaching this degree. Some of the most endearing lyrics on the album — “I really want to see you, really want to be with you” — are dedicated not to a woman of earthly pleasures but to a divine entity. Harrison is devout and uncompromising in his faith, rejoicing in front of our eyes in songs from “Awaiting You All” to the pensive closer “Hear Me Lord.”

To be clear, Harrison still reveled in shedding his Beatle skin, from the subtle dig at McCartney’s “Hey Jude” in “Isn’t It A Pity” to his ultimate declaration of renewed purpose in “Wah-Wah:” “And I know how sweet life can be / If I keep myself free.” But to Harrison, all this freedom is just a means to an end. For him, identity is knowing you are part of something greater than yourself. The same cannot remotely be said for his inward-focused peers, at least in 1970.

Clapton had seen his identity taken from him by the public. Even Lennon, maybe the most famous person in the world in the late ’60s, had such a domineering personality (and self-promotional skill) that he controlled the narrative over his own image. Clapton, in contrast, was much more of an enigma. This allowed the public to mold whatever identity they desired out of him. The identity they chose was summed up in a phrase graffitied all over London in the ’60s — “Clapton is God.”

Clapton never had a superstar mentality — he was more than content to spend his post-Cream days as a mere studio guitarist for records like, of all things, All Things Must Pass. At the peak of his powers, Clapton responded by disassociating through drug abuse before carving his long-sought anonymity in stone with the Dominos. Eric became Derek. The being completely overtaken by a married woman we witness on Layla may have been many things, but he was no God. Clapton even doubled down with his awesome tribute to the other exalted axeman of the era, one who had quite recently become immortalized as a rock martyr, on his pleading cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”

Rather than outward expression, Clapton’s reflection on spirituality was to shed his own divinity. While All Things Must Pass is a paean of belief in something greater, Layla is grounded in mortal humanity unlike any other.

And then there’s Lennon, who of course had had his share of God-infused controversy by ’70. For some strange reason, hearing the phrase “[Christianity] will vanish and shrink” out of context in 1966 caused quite a stir among Bible Belt Americans. Lennon’s adult life presents a constant yin-and-yang of unyielding belief in some cure-all ideology followed by an equally forceful shunning of that same ideology — from the Maharishi to Janov to, reportedly, Christianity itself.

Plastic Ono Band finds Lennon in one of his strongest periods of disillusionment with just about everything in his world (Yoko alone emerges unscathed). “Working Class Hero” depicts a life of exploitation and ruthlessness, while “I Found Out” slices through spiritual devotees with each cutting line. While uttering phrases previously unthinkable from the mouth of a Beatle — “Sitting there with your cock in your hand” — Lennon paints a grim portrait of the prison he sees so many trapped in for their entire lives.

The most famous expression of disillusionment on Plastic Ono Band comes from Lennon’s litany of disbelief in “God,” and not without merit. Coming at the end of an agonizing odyssey of heartbreak and nihilism, it’s impossible not to be moved as Lennon disavows one failed salvation after another, from Jesus to Kennedy to Elvis to, the inevitable, Beatles.

But while the litany gets the headlines, it’s the stranded, confessional coda that steals the show. A quavering Lennon admits how lost and alone he is without all these anchors: “I was the Walrus, but now I’m John.”

Even more than “God is a concept by which we measure our pain” epitomized Plastic Ono Band’s stance on spirituality, this simple line reveals the heart of John’s identity in 1970. All of the distractions Lennon piled on top of his identity in the ’60s, from acerbic comedy to acid to stardom, were gone, leaving him with only himself: John. The John who was forced to choose which of his divorcing parents to live with at age 5. The John whose mother left an unfixable hole in his life since birth. The John who neglected his own son, repeating the vicious cycle of his own life. The John who screamed out for “Help!” in 1965, only to have his cries contorted into a pleasant pop hit.

In Plastic Ono Band, there is no mistaking his cries for help. Lennon’s identity is little more than that scared little kid in the divorce courtroom, the steadying force in his life since his teenage days — the Beatles — now absolved into thin air. That outside world has finally been shut out, leaving Lennon to softly question, “Who am I supposed to be?” Plastic Ono Band shows us a long-suffering, lonely man grasping to make a life for himself now that he has finally pulled back to reckon with his unrelenting past.

The Sun Will Never Disappear: How 1970 Lives On

Plastic Ono Band, Layla and All Things Must Pass have easily stood the test of time. Fifty years later, Gen Z-ers like myself are still discovering these works and writing armchair-psychology essays about them. But it’s the themes of these albums, as much as the music, that resonate with us today.

One is the utter diversity of emotional expression throughout the trilogy. All three deal with love, pain, God and identity, but these tones are painted with a full spectrum of brushes that are relatable to all of us. We will all be the tormented Clapton of “Layla,” the broken Lennon of “Isolation,” and the cautious Harrison of “Beware of Darkness,” just as we will all be the optimistic Eric of “Keep on Growing,” the perseverant John of “Hold On,” and the playful George of “I Dig Love.”

The most fascinating legacy and lesson of this intertwined trio is the power their relationships had over their lives. Each man represented a symbol in the others’ lives of something they were striving for or running from. One’s oppressor was another’s ticket to freedom. One’s reminder of what they could not attain was another’s weight they dreamed of casting off.

Again, we all have people in our lives that embody these archetypes, and some can be burdensome in the short term. However, if these albums teach us anything, it’s that only through each other will we create the most beautiful music of our own lives — just as George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and John Lennon did in 1970.