I hope Lennon's killer rots in jail for the rest of his life. Thanks, I wanted to get that out of the way.
In the late 80's, after going through all the Beatles CDs, my sis and I listened to Lennon's material, but in reverse, going from the posthumous
Milk & Honey back to his 70's stuff. But we never got to
Plastic Ono Band. "Nobody Told Me" was already a part of my memories of '83, due to its music video. That and the song's catchiness. It might be my favorite solo Lennon song.
With the exception of individual song favorites, John's 70's albums didn't do much for me, I'm afraid - again, without having heard
Plastic Ono Band, which is often cited as his best solo work.
I just finished reading Tim Riley's book,
Tell Me Why (first published in 1988), which scrutinizes the Beatles' music rather than their personal lives - as well as it is possible to. It's an excellent analysis of every one of their songs. But Riley goes further and examines their solo work as well. Anyway, after reading his take on Lennon's material, I think it's fair to say that John was working his way through his own cynicism in the 70's. By the time of his comeback in 1980, there was an optimism in his songs, which made his murder that much more tragic.
As a kid in the late 70's I loved Wings, mostly due to their Greatest Hits LP, which I played endlessly. If I had heard John's stark, confessional songs at the time, I'm not sure how well my 8-year old mind would have comprehended them. Meanwhile, Paul's lyrics may have been maudlin, childish or just plain gibberish, but the guy knew how to write a hook. After finally hearing John's music on CD, I did appreciate the more personal nature of his songs compared to Paul's.
Tim Riley does try to offer a balanced view of McCartney and Lennon, although he generally prefers John's raw emotion to Paul's polished craft.
Without McCartney, Lennon's sense of proportion sometimes falters. If Paul rarely sounds risky after the Beatles, John can sound all too risky, in unattractive ways. He can't seem to adopt any pose without taking it to extremes...
...Like McCartney's, Lennon's singles tend to work better than his albums as totalities (except for Plastic Ono Band), but for different reasons. To begin with, he put out fewer of them (McCartney has released over thirty, Lennon has exactly fourteen), and except for the first four ("Give Peace a Chance," "Cold Turkey," "Instant Karma" - his best - and "Power to the People"), he lifted them all from albums instead of making them separate pieces. (McCartney is the only Beatle who continues making singles as separate entities well into the era of the mega-platinum multisingle albums in the eighties). Lennon's growth wasn't as much musical as it was personal, for although he wrote his version of "Hey Jude" in "Instant Karma," he never penned another song that will be as remembered as well as "Imagine"; and even though he got better at expressing his manic mood swings (his last hits, "Woman" and "Nobody Told Me," rank among his best), his partnership with MCartney seems to have provided him with a musical reckoning, the same way he intimidated Paul lyrically.
Riley sums up Lennon's last recordings this way:
These last two records overcome the midlife crisis of Lennon's solo career (Mind Games and Walls and Bridges) - a new partnership is finding its way in the music, sharing experience and a common purpose. The hopeful direction they were pointed in made his death impossibly cruel and canonized him as the kind of pop martyr he never wanted to be. It's clear that by the end he had made a certain peace with himself and his family, and if his mid-seventies efforts sound strained and deliberate, his final recordings return to the uncalculated sense of expression he found so easily with the Beatles. He wasn't creating for other people (the way McCartney can still seem to); he was reclaiming his personal musical language as an artist.
Between Plastic Ono Band's barren and scathing deliverance and Double Fantasy's gentle acceptance, there's an undeniable personal growth that defines Lennon's songwriting. Where Paul conceived his music more and more as craft, and eventually as product, John used his skill to make sense of his feelings. Paul deliberately set out to write hits ("Junior's Farm," "Girls' School," "Goodnight Tonight"); John's commercial success was more a consequence of his musical intuition ("Instant Karma," "Imagine," "Woman"). The distance measures the difference between the ways Paul and John worked and helps explain what they discovered as partners: even at their most incompatible ("A Day in the Life"), they completed one another.
I listened to the remastered version of it not long ago: sorry, but its big singles (Jet, Band on the Run) were the only memorable tunes on the album. The rest of the material was filler to my ears. So I honestly don't understand the praise for this album (well, as far as McCartney albums go).
I like ELO myself, but only for a few big songs. I don't lose sleep over not having heard all their stuff. Don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that Lynne basically got the idea for ELO after listening to "I Am The Walrus." 
Secondly, the bridge was