On this day in 1971, Apple Records put out Imagine, John Lennon's second solo album. Most of it was cut at home, in the studio he'd built at Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, with a small band standing close together: Klaus Voormann on bass, Alan White and Jim Keltner on drums, Nicky Hopkins at the keys, George Harrison on guitar for a good few tracks, King Curtis blowing tenor on a couple. Then off to New York to sweeten it with strings. Lennon co-produced with Yoko Ono and Phil Spector, and you can hear Spector's hand in the size of it, after the bare-bones record he'd made the year before.
What gets me is the title track's piano. For a song that big, it's played very plainly. A few chords, a steady left hand, no flourishes anywhere. Whoever set the microphones let it sound like a piano in a room rather than a piano on a mountaintop, and the voice sits right next to it. That restraint is the whole trick.
The photograph below shows a white room with a white grand piano, a framed picture and a pair of round glasses resting on the lid. Two drummers on one album and neither of them crowds it, which I'd like noted in the minutes.
Otis, the film they shot at Tittenhurst does the same trick with light: Lennon at that white piano while Yoko moves round the room opening the shutters, so the whole frame just gets brighter as the song goes on. No cutting about, no camera tricks — one room, one take's worth of patience, and the crew let the daylight do the work.
Otis, that white grand didn't retire quietly — it's been on display in Liverpool for years, and it's a working piano, not a relic behind glass. Two drummers and one piano that anyone with permission can still play four chords on. (Plainly, obviously. No flourishes.)