FEATURE:
John Lennon at Eighty-Five
IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Iain MacMillan
Exploring Five of His Masterpieces
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LOOKING ahead to…
IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting next to George Adamy’s artwork Month of June 1970, in New York on 4th September, 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Iain MacMillan/Yoko Ono Lennon
9th October, that is when we remember John Lennon on his eighty-fifth birthday. It is sad that we lost the legend almost forty-five years ago now. However, rather than make this morbid or tragic, I want to use this birthday feature to spotlight and explore five of his songwriting masterpieces. Three of them were with The Beatles and two of them are solo songs. Demonstrating his songwriting genius and versatility. I am going to go inside In My Life, I Am the Walrus, Strawberry Fields Forever, Imagine and Jealous Guy. Some would include others or remove one or two, but I think we get a good representation of his brilliance. One Beatles song from 1965’s Rubber Soul (In My Life), and two from 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour E.P./album (I Am the Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever; the latter of which was a double A-side with Penny Lane). Imagine was from the 1971 album of the same name. Jealous Guy is taken from Imagine too. I am going to start out with the standout track from The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. Even if Paul McCartney might claim he wrote some of In My Life, it is a John Lennon song. One of his most personal and tender. Maybe not renowned for that beforehand, it showed a new side to his songwriting. It is a beautiful song that so many people can relate to. A piece of work that Lennon referred to as his first major work as it was one he wrote about his own life. There are claims that Paul McCarney wrote the melody. However, the majority of In My Life is from John Lennon. Thanks to The Beatles Bible for some background to the song and some interesting interview archive:
“Lennon regarded ‘In My Life’ particularly highly, citing it – along with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘I Am The Walrus’, and ‘Help!’ – as among his best.
For ‘In My Life’, I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic vision of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight. It became ‘In My Life’, which is a remembrance of friends and lovers of the past. Paul helped with the middle eight musically. But all lyrics written, signed, sealed, and delivered. And it was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then it had all been sort of glib and throwaway. And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric. Inspired by Kenneth Allsop, the British journalist, and Bob Dylan.
One of the first songs to be recorded for Rubber Soul, The Beatles recorded the rhythm track of ‘In My Life’ on 18 October 1965. This they did in three takes, after a period of rehearsal.
The instrumental break was left without a solo, as the group was undecided as to how it should sound. This dilemma was solved on 22 October by George Martin.
‘In My Life’ is one of my favourite songs because it is so much John. A super track and such a simple song. There’s a bit where John couldn’t decide what to do in the middle and, while they were having their tea break, I put down a baroque piano solo which John didn’t hear until he came back. What I wanted was too intricate for me to do live, so I did it with a half-speed piano, then sped it up, and he liked it.
George Martin
Anthology”.
IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon in Austria in 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: Roger Fritz
The Pop History Dig provide some wonderful details about In My Life. What they write and have collated about the song’s legacy. How it affected John Lennon’s songwriting. How it has affected other people. It is without doubt one of the greatest songs from The Beatles. You cannot hear anything but John Lennon’s voice in the song:
“However, what is most notable about “In My Life,” in addition to its role in the evolution of the Beatles’ and Lennon’s music, is the song’s usage and popularity since 1965.
Among Beatles fans, and even non-fans, “In My Life” has become a favored piece of music. It is heard frequently at weddings, anniversaries, funerals and other occasions, whether family celebrations or more somber public occasions where nostalgia and reflection are called for. Some who have grown up with the song, have requested in advance that it be played at their funerals as a remembrance and farewell song.
According to SongFacts.com, “In My Life” was played at Kurt Cobain’s funeral in 1994. Cobain was the frontman for the rock group Nirvana. The Beatles were an early and important music influence on him. Cobain had cited Lennon as his “idol” in journals he kept during his time with Nirvana. At the 2010 Oscars ceremony, James Taylor performed “In My Life”during the “In Memoriam” segment, honoring film stars and entertainers who died the previous year. And among everyday people, too, the song has resonance in a variety of ways. “Charles” of Bronxville, New York, for example, adding a comment at SongFacts.com, noted:
…When my daughter was born, she was delivered by C-Section. I was in the delivery room and got to hold her. Once she was bundled up, the Dr. said I should take her out to the waiting area while they closed the incision. I took her out and held her. I sat there with tears rolling down my face and sang this song to her. I thought it should be the first. I still do.
“Mister P” of Magnolia, Texas, also writing on SongFacts.com, noted: “As fine a song as ever penned. It took several decades of maturing for its lyrics to finally hit me. I don’t know how such a young man could create such mature lyrics.” Lennon was 25 years old when he wrote “In My Life”.
Let’s move to two epic and beautifully unusual songs from Magical Mystery Tour. I Am the Walrus only appeared on the Magical Mystery Tour E.P. and album and was never released as a single. I am going to return to The Beatles Bible, because there are some crucial and revealing interview archive material. It is criminal that I Am the Walrus was never released as a single:
“Lennon had wanted ‘I Am The Walrus’ to be The Beatles’ next single after ‘All You Need Is Love’, but Paul McCartney and George Martin felt that ‘Hello, Goodbye’ was the more commercial song. The decision led to resentment from Lennon, who complained after the group’s split that “I got sick and tired of being Paul’s backup band”.
The song was written in August 1967, at the peak of the Summer of Love and shortly after the release of Sgt Pepper. Lennon later claimed to have written the opening lines under the influence of LSD.
The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend, the second line on another acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko.
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff
‘I Am The Walrus’ was a composite of three song fragments. The first part was inspired by a two-note police siren Lennon heard while at home in Weybridge. This became “Mr city policeman sitting pretty…”
Hunter Davies recounted the beginnings of the second part in his authorised 1968 biography of The Beatles:
He’d written down down another few words that day, just daft words, to put to another bit of rhythm. ‘Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come.’ I thought he said ‘van to come’, which he hadn’t, but he liked it better and said he’d use it instead.
The third part of ‘I Am The Walrus’ started from the phrase “sitting in an English country garden” which, as Davies noted, Lennon was fond of doing for hours at a time. Lennon repeated the phrase to himself until a melody came.
I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song – sitting in an English garden, waiting for the van to come. I don’t know.
John Lennon
The Beatles, Hunter Davies”.
In 2017, The Atlantic analysed I Am the Walrus fifty years after its release. A song that could mean nothing or everything, it is an undoubted John Lennon masterpiece. One that has not been matched by anyone. Again, this is one of the greatest Beatles songs. Completely different to In My Life, it shows that there were no limits to Lennon’s songwriting imagination and depth:
“Nonsense comes in many shapes and sizes. You can use relatively plain language to conjure absurd or incongruous images, like the act of sitting on a cornflake. You can juxtapose words that don’t seem like they belong together, like semolina and pilchard (coarse wheat and sardines, an odd mix—though Hunter Davies says they were both “foods from the ’50s that we all hated”). You can make new, silly-sounding words by playing with preexisting words, like rhyming expert with texpert, or melding crab and locker into crabalocker. Or you can make goo-goo noises.
Lennon fills out the chorus with the purest of nonsense. In the lyrics printed in the Magical Mystery Tour gatefold, it says GOO GOO GOO JOOB, but most prefer to transcribe it as goo goo ga joob or goo goo g’joob. The third syllable is unstressed, both in terms of the syncopated meter and the phonology of the nonsense words, so it’s not a full-fledged goo.
It’s unforgettable gibberish, though it often gets mixed up in people’s memories with coo coo ca-choo from Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” as the two songs came out around the same time. “I Am the Walrus” was recorded in September 1967 and released on record that November. The Graduate hit movie theaters in December, featuring an early partial rendition of “Mrs. Robinson,” but the complete version with coo coo ca-choo in it didn’t come out until April of the following year, on the album Bookends. So Paul Simon might have been nodding at Lennon, but not vice versa.
Some Beatle-ologists claim that goo goo ga joob is taken from James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness epic, Finnegans Wake. It certainly sounds Joycean, and it would be nice to think of “I Am the Walrus,” Finnegans Wake, and Carroll’s Alice stories forming a kind of wordplay-laden intertextual triangle. Finnegans Wake, after all, has many echoes of Carroll, and the eggman Humpty Dumpty figures in it as well, with his great fall paralleling the Fall of Man. One would-be expert-texpert on the “Turn Me On, Dead Man” website wrote that goo goo ga joob are “the last words uttered by Humpty Dumpty before his fall”.
I will move to a couple of John Lennon solo songs in a minute. However, before moving on, it is worth noting another 1967 classic. Maybe there was lysergic influence that helped shape I Am the Walrus and Strawberry Fields Forever. Strawberry Fields Forever is often voted as the greatest Beatles track ever. Further proof of John Lennon’s brilliance. The Beatles Bible is once again at hand to provide some interview archive about a song that formed part of the double A-side alongside Paul McCartney’s Penny Lane:
“Like ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was a nostalgic look back at The Beatles’ past in Liverpool. Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army children’s home near John Lennon’s childhood home in Woolton.
I’ve seen Strawberry Field described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn’t dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden. John’s memory of it wasn’t to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house. There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.
Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles
With his childhood friends Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan, Lennon would roam the grounds of Strawberry Field. Additionally, each summer there would be a garden party held in the grounds, which he especially looked forward to.
As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late.’
Mimi Smith
The Beatles, Hunter Davies
Through the lens of LSD, however, the song turned from simple nostalgia into inward reflection. Lennon’s self doubt came to the fore, at times clouded by inarticulacy and hallucinogenic sensations.
He later described ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, along with ‘Help!’, as “one of the few true songs I ever wrote… They were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it.”
The second line [sic] goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree.’ Well, what I was trying to say in that line is ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius.’ It’s the same problem as I had when I was five: ‘There is something wrong with me because I seem to see things other people don’t see. Am I crazy, or am I a genius?’ … What I’m saying, in my insecure way, is ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from. I seem to see things in a different way from most people.’
John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff”.
Earlier this year, Music Radar wrote about Strawberry Fields Forever. A song that Lennon claimed was the best that he wrote for The Beatles, Lennon claimed it was “psychoanalysis set to music”. It was so far ahead of its time. I don’t think we have heard a song like it. Artists might try and channel the spirit of Strawberry Fields Forever. However, it is distinctly the work of John Lennon and cannot be equalled:
“On 13 February 1967, Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A-side with Penny Lane.
In line with the band’s usual practice of not including tracks released as singles on albums, Strawberry Fields Forever was omitted from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a decision which George Martin later acknowledged was a “dreadful mistake”.
Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane was the first Beatles single since Please Please Me in 1963 not to reach No. 1.
The song reached No. 2 in the UK, kept from the top slot by Englebert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me.
Music writer Peter Doggett noted that the failure of Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane to reach the top slot was “arguably the most disgraceful statistic in chart history”.
Doggett described Strawberry Fields Forever as "the greatest pop record ever made" adding that it is “a record that never dates, because it lives outside time”.
The stunning inventiveness of Strawberry Fields Forever left both fans and critics bewildered and breathless.
It was the sound of The Beatles taking a huge creative stride forward.
In the States, the song marked the point at which writers sought for the first time to elevate pop to a higher cultural plain. A 1967 feature in Time magazine led the way:
“[The] Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of.
“They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music”.
There are many masterpieces Lennon wrote as a solo artist. Whether on his solo albums or with Yoko Ono, I could have included so many other. Working Class Hero (from 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band) or #9 Dream (from 1974’s Walls and Bridges). However, I want to feature two from 1971’s Imagine. I shall start with the title track. In 2018, the BBC ran a feature that coincided with the release of the book, Imagine John Yoko. Ono was finally credited as a co-writer of Imagine in 2017. Although it is a co-write, it is still John Lennon at the core. Him driving the song. Therefore, I can consider it his masterpiece and Yoko Ono’s:
“It is the ultimate peace anthem; an ode to idealism. But Imagine is also a song about love. When it was composed, in 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono had been together for three years. She was lambasted by some as the ‘dragon lady’ who had broken up Lennon's marriage to Cynthia – and, in the process, The Beatles. Yet, as a new book from Thames & Hudson suggests, Ono was misrepresented – even when it came to being credited for a song’s creation. In a 1980 interview reprinted in Imagine John Yoko, Lennon admits that Ono was equally responsible for Imagine; in 2017, Ono was formally recognised as co-writer of the iconic song.
As the book shows, through a collection of rarely seen photos and archive interviews along with insider accounts detailing the making of the album, Lennon and Ono inspired each other from their first meeting.
I always had this dream of meeting an artist woman I would fall in love with – John Lennon
In 1966, Lennon went to a preview of Ono’s show at the Indica gallery in London, and wanted to contribute to a piece called Hammer a Nail in. But Ono was reluctant to let him, as she recalls in an archive interview in the book. “I said, ‘All right, if he pays five shillings, it’s okay,’ because I decided that my painting will never sell anyway.”
IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Yoko Ono at a roadside telephone booth in New York, June 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Yoko Ono Lennon
Lennon had another idea, adding in the interview: “I said, ‘Listen I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in, is that okay?’ And her whole trip is this: ‘Imagine this, imagine that.’”
Ono replies: “Imagine, imagine. So I was thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a guy who’s playing the same game I’m playing.’ And I was really shocked you know, I thought, ‘Who is it?’”.
The song, in a way, deals with imagining another world on the level of two people – as well as in a larger sense. “George Orwell and all these guys have projected very negative views of the future. And imagining a projection is a very strong magic power,” said Ono. “I mean that. That’s the way society was created. And so, because they’re setting up all these negative images, that’s gonna create the society. So we were trying to create a more positive image, which is, of course, gonna set up another kind of society.”
Lennon referenced humans’ desire to fly – “which might’ve taken us a long time, but it took somebody to imagine it first”. He explained his reasoning. “People said, ‘You’re naive, you’re dumb, you’re stupid.’ It might have hurt us on a personal level to be called names, but what we were doing – you can call it magic, meditation, projection of goal – which business people do, they have courses on it. The footballers do it. They pray, they meditate before the game… People project their own future. So, what we wanted to do was to say, ‘Let’s imagine a nice future.’”
Ono describes how they felt about Imagine at the time: “We both liked the song a lot but we honestly didn’t realise it would turn into the powerful song it has, all over the world… We just did it because we believed in the words and it just reflected how we were feeling”.
I will end with a song that is distinctly John Lennon. Completely his D.N.A. Jealous Guy is also from 1971’s Imagine. Like In My Life six years earlier, Jealous Guy is hugely honest and open. John Lennon opening his heart and soul. A song about the possessive nature of love and devotion, it was this apology and decleration to Yoko Ono. Udiscovermusic took us inside the song for their feature of 2024:
“One of John Lennon’s best-known and most-loved songs, “Jealous Guy” first saw the light of day on his 1971 Imagine album, before Roxy Music had a No.1 hit with their version, released in February 1981 as a tribute to the then recently murdered ex-Beatle. Even by the time John finished his version, however, the song had already been through a number of incarnations.
‘I was dreaming more or less’
“Jealous Guy” began life during The Beatles’ time studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India, in spring 1968. Both Lennon and McCartney composed songs inspired by a lecture given by the Maharishi about humans’ position as the sons of mother nature. Paul’s “Mother Nature’s Son” is one of “The White Album”’s more gentle moments, while John wrote “Child Of Nature,” a song that began “On the road to Rishikesh, I was dreaming more or less,” sung to the melody that would become familiar to millions as “Jealous Guy.”
The Beatles recorded a demo of the song in May 1968 in preparation for inclusion on “The White Album.” That Esher demo is a tender performance, with mandolin adding a Mediterranean flavor to the piece. For whatever reason, however, the song didn’t make the album; Lennon reintroduced it during the Get Back sessions of January 1969.
‘I was a very jealous, possessive guy’
By the time the song reappeared in 1971, only the melody remained. Encouraged by Yoko Ono to “think about something more sensitive,” John penned a new set of lyrics that seemed to address his changing attitude towards women. Talking to journalist David Sheff in 1980, he revealed: “The lyrics explain themselves clearly: I was a very jealous, possessive guy. Toward everything. A very insecure male. A guy who wants to put his woman in a little box, lock her up, and just bring her out when he feels like playing with her. She’s not allowed to communicate with the outside world – outside of me – because it makes me feel insecure.”
This certainly ties in with a subject John spoke about at the time of recording the Imagine album. In an interview with the BBC’s Woman’s Hour radio show, conducted at his Tittenhurst home, where the album was recorded, he talked about his changing view of relationships: “When you actually are in love with somebody you tend to be jealous, and want to own them and possess them one hundred percent, which I do… I love Yoko, I want to possess her completely. I don’t want to stifle her, you know? That’s the danger, that you want to possess them to death.”
‘So flabbergasted I can’t play’
The song was recorded at the eight-track studio that John had built at Tittenhurst Park, near Ascot, on May 24, 1971. A number of notable musicians contributed to the recording, among them in-demand session musician Nicky Hopkins, whose distinctive, gospel-tinged piano makes the song instantly familiar from the off. As Yoko later put it: “Nicky Hopkins’ playing on ‘Jealous Guy’ is so melodic and beautiful that it still makes everyone cry, even now.”
Drummer Jim Keltner described the session as “like being in a dream,” noting, “Nobody in the world ever played piano like Nicky Hopkins, and Klaus [Voorman] has such a tremendous deep feel on the bass. Having John’s voice in your headphones, glancing up and seeing him at the microphone – 1971 – fresh from The Beatles and such a tremendous musician and songwriter – singing this beautiful, haunting little song. You only have a few moments of those in your life as a musician and that was one of them.”
Also present at the session were Joey Molland and Tom Evans from Badfinger. Molland later wrote of the session: “In walks John Lennon and he’s really bug-eyed, really gone – ‘Hello everybody!’ He was shouting. It was 11 o’clock at night and he’d just gotten out of bed… I was just in awe, just ga-ga. Then he sits down on the stool and starts playing ‘Jealous Guy’ and I’m so flabbergasted I can’t play”.
Five songs that showcase the songwriting genius of John Lennon! Whilst Paul McCartney might have assisted with In My Life and Yoko Ono co-wrote Imagine, they are still very much his work. I am glad that Yoko Ono was finally credited for Imagine. On 8th October, the world will remember John Lennon on what would have been his eighty-fifth birthday. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr no doubt will share some words and love. One of the greatest songwriters the world will ever see, no doubt people will have views as to which other songs can be considered John Lennon masterpiece – there are dozens when you think about it! These are five that are particularly important to me. Songs from a phenomenal artistic voice that…
WE all dearly miss.