London, November 4, 1963: In the
wake of the number one UK hits “Please Please Me” and “From Me to You,”
teenage hysteria greets the Beatles just about everywhere they go. But not
tonight at the Prince of Wales Theatre, where the band performs for a tony
audience that includes the Queen Mother herself. In keeping with the venue,
Paul McCartney sings the genteel “Till There Was You,” from
The Music Man, and George Harrison adds a tidy guitar solo. Then John
Lennon steps up to the mic. “For our last number, I’d like to ask your
help,” he says with a smirk. “Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your
hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry.” With a
satisfied “Yeah!” Lennon kicks off “Twist and Shout,” leading the call and
response with a rocker’s rasp.
So much about John Lennon is captured in these onstage moments: his rebel
streak, his cutting sense of humor, his love of straight-up rock ’n’ roll,
and the way all these attributes were complemented so beautifully by
McCartney and the other Beatles. “They’re like a four-color separation
photo,” says English songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, who was ten years old when
Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr bought estates near his home in the
posh suburbs of Weybridge. “If you take a color photo down to its
components, there’s a blue and it’s too much blue and a red and it’s too
much red . . . The solo albums were sort of doomed because you get too much
of one flavor.”
Thirty-five years have passed since the Beatles disbanded, and it’s been
almost 25 years since an unhinged fan deprived us of the chance to see what
sort of music and mischief John Lennon would have made in middle age and
beyond. Yet Lennon’s voice still seems eerily present today, on the ageless
Beatles and solo records as well as new releases like Acoustic, a set
of Lennon demos and concert tapes. Considering the brevity of his life, the
scope of Lennon’s music is breathtaking: from the bubblegum bounce of
“Please Please Me” to the orchestral sweep of “Strawberry Fields Forever”
(only four years later), the sentimental “In My Life” to the existential
“Nowhere Man,” the cathartic screams of “Mother” to the utopian visions of
“Imagine.” What gives this music such vitality and allure, even for those
who didn’t grow up with Beatlemania in the ’60s? Here are some thoughts from
contemporary songwriters, as well as firsthand observations from the woman
who was at Lennon’s side for much of his musical life.The Power
of Two
John Lennon’s emergence as a defining voice of rock was inextricably tied to
his partnership with Paul McCartney, something Brian Ritchie of the acoustic
rock trio Violent Femmes calls “one of the great flukes of 20th-century
music. Most of the other great composers of that period—John Cage, Sun Ra,
Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Wilson, Nick Drake—were unstoppable as
individuals. I get the impression that neither Lennon nor McCartney would
have succeeded without the other.”
As Lennon and McCartney found their songwriting groove in early Beatles
tracks like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” they co-wrote
songs “playing into each other’s noses,” as Lennon put it in the Playboy
interview he gave shortly before his death. Over the course of time, they
worked more and more independently, adding a lyric or bridge to each other’s
nearly complete songs, or simply acting as editors and sounding boards. By
the time Yoko Ono met Lennon in 1966, she recalls, “John finished most of
the songs and went to Paul’s place and said, ‘Well, this is what I wanted.
What do you think?’ And vice versa: Paul had songs finished too, and I don’t
think there was much to add. I think that Paul respected John and John
respected Paul’s space.”
The essential feature of the Lennon/ McCartney partnership is contrast:
Lennon’s rock primitivism (“Revolution,” “Come Together”) versus McCartney’s
instrumental sophistication (“Blackbird”) and fluency with Tin Pan Alley
song forms (“Yesterday”); Lennon’s acerbic wit (“I Am the Walrus”) versus
McCartney’s gentle optimism (“Let It Be”); Lennon’s personal outcries
(“Don’t Let Me Down”) versus McCartney’s third-person storytelling (“Rocky
Raccoon”). Roots rocker Chris Whitley describes a “wonderfully weird”
tension between what he calls Lennon’s agitation and McCartney’s empathy. To
singer-songwriter/producer Joe Henry, “Paul’s contribution seems to be more
deliberately intellectual, as far as songcraft goes, and John’s thing seems
to be so much more visceral and emotional, which is probably why they were
such a beautiful team.”
Many co-written Beatles songs, once we tease apart Lennon and McCartney’s
individual contributions, provide telling studies in contrast. Inside
McCartney’s jaunty “We Can Work It Out,” we find Lennon’s minor-key bridge,
“Life is very short . . .” Similarly, Lennon replies sardonically to
McCartney’s “Getting Better”: “Can’t get no worse.” And on the magnum opus
“A Day in the Life,” Lennon’s “I read the news today” verse travels into
McCartney’s “I’d love to turn you on” and “Woke up, fell out of bed”
sections and back into Lennon’s plaintive melody. “On any given tune they
co-wrote,” notes Kenny Siegal, of the adventuresome pop/rock band Johnny
Society, “it seemed that what one didn’t bring to the table the other one
provided.”
Lennon himself told Playboy that McCartney “provided a lightness, an
optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy
notes.” But their roles don’t always fit so neatly into these boxes. On the
White Album, for instance, McCartney wrote the raging “Helter Skelter,” and
Lennon contributed the Bing Crosby–esque lullaby “Good Night.” Their
relationship, McCartney reflects in the authorized biography Paul McCartney:
Many Years from Now, was “a four-cornered thing rather than two-cornered, it
had diagonals, and my hard side could talk to John’s hard side when it was
necessary, and our soft edges talked to each other.”
Striking a Chord
For songwriters, the deceptively simple, devastatingly effective chord moves
in Lennon and McCartney songs are an
endless source of wonder. Consider “Strawberry Fields Forever”: The verse
concludes with a classic I–vi–IV–V progression (think “Stand by Me”), then
the chorus jumps off a harmonic cliff, plunging to the v (minor) and VI7
(now major) as we arrive at the place where “nothing is real.” We can
analyze all this with Roman numerals, but we feel the trippiness right in
the gut.
Scores of Lennon songs feature these moments of harmonic vertigo, using
nothing fancier than chords that flip between major and minor, modulations
into unexpected keys, the occasional augmented or ninth chord. Hitchcock
cites “Real Love,” the Lennon-written Beatles track on the posthumous
Anthology 2. Hitchcock sings the falsetto lines that lead into the
chorus, “Why must we be alone? / Why must we be alone?” which are
accompanied by an uncommon move from D (I) to C9 (bVII9) and back again.
“Absolutely chilling,” says Hitchcock. “It makes me cry.”
Lennon, Hitchcock adds, “would have these odd chords on both guitar and
piano, while ostensibly being simple workingman’s John, banging them out.
You can see why people from as diverse ends as Brian Wilson and Bob Dylan
marveled at it.”
Henry hears a “sense of discovery” in the way Lennon strings together chords
in “Across the Universe.” “That sounds like a backwards melody to me,” he
says. “It’s like he set up a situation to make a song create itself, as
opposed to him orchestrating and driv-ing it.” Another example is the
gorgeously off-the-chart “Julia,” which Lennon wrote at the Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi’s compound in India, after learning fingerstyle technique from Donovan.
“It’s like somebody playing an instrument they don’t play very well,” says
Henry. “Even though John was a really good guitar player, he tricked himself
into playing in a much more naive fashion.”
The Acoustic collection provides an intimate snapshot of Lennon the
guitarist, laying down songs in unplugged/unproduced form. Highlights
include “Watching the Wheels,” which sounds downright folky compared to the
version on Double Fantasy, and “Real Love” (a different demo than the
one used by the other Beatles on Anthology 2). When reviewing
Lennon’s homemade tapes for a possible Japanese release, Ono discovered that
his voice was irreparably drowned out on the piano tracks but the
guitar-based demos had a special appeal. She decided to package the CD as a
mini guitar songbook, with chord symbols above the lyrics in the liner
notes. “When John was playing at home,” Ono recalls, “it was a normal thing
for me, so I wasn’t that impressed. I was a very lucky girl, you know. But
after 20 years or so, looking back and listening to it, I thought, my God,
he was brilliant. If I can make this into a good-quality thing, it might
inspire the professionals. It might even inspire kids who are just wanting
to learn how to play guitar.”
In the Beatles, Lennon mostly provided the rhythmic bedrock, punching out
those singular changes (often using full barre chords) and freeing Harrison
to add ornamentation and texture. On rare occasions Lennon stepped out on
lead—notably in “Get Back”—and from the White Album onward, he recorded some
beautiful stand-alone accompaniment parts, as on the dreamy fingerstyle
“Dear Prudence.”
“Lennon was not a flashy guitarist,” says Ritchie, “but he got the job done,
and his tone is better than 99 percent of guitarists.” Hitchcock notes that
“Paul could play lead as well as George, which was a constant source of
irritation to both of them. John wasn’t technically up there doing the
squiggly bits with Paul and George, but he could come up with a melody line
on the guitar. I love that harsh stuff on ‘Well Well Well’ [from Plastic
Ono Band]. He certainly played for his needs.”
In a 1970 conversation with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, Lennon
called himself a “cinema verité guitarist” who had no interest in technical
perfection. “I’m really very embarrassed about my guitar playing in one way
because it’s very poor,” he said. “I can never move, but I can make a guitar
speak, you know.”
Look at Me
Just as Lennon’s harmonic sense continually evolved, so did his lyric
writing. “He enjoyed words,” says Hitchcock. “He was a fan of Lewis Carroll,
and he was obviously a big Dylan fan. Dylan liberated him to start putting
different lyrics in songs rather than, you know, ‘diamond ring,’ ‘my
friend,’ ‘I love you.’ The early Beatles had a vocabulary of about 15 words,
but that helped them get going. If they’d come out with ‘Strawberry Fields’
and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to start, they wouldn’t have got anywhere.”
Looking back at his contributions to the Beatles catalog, Lennon pointed to
his most personal writing as his best work: songs like “Help!” “Strawberry
Fields,” and “In My Life,” which Ritchie calls “one of the loveliest songs
in rock.” (“In My Life” is a rare example of contradiction between Lennon’s
and McCartney’s memories of writing Beatles songs: both took credit for the
music but agreed the words are Lennon’s.)
In his solo years, Lennon aimed to further strip away craft and pretense.
Plastic Ono Band, released in 1970 after the implosion of the Beatles
and a trip through Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Center, still sounds
shockingly raw even after de-cades of singer-songwriters baring their souls
for therapy and art.
Lennon’s writing on Plastic Ono Band and its tamer follow-up,
Imagine, “had more to do with his own self-discovery than expressing a
very smart idea,” says Henry. “It’s not clever wordplay. It’s more like
biting into an idea and spitting it out.” In those songs, he adds, Lennon
“starts to sound like he’s not conscious of influence. They’re not genre
pieces, like some of the early Beatles pieces—here’s our western song,
here’s our take on the blues.”
Six songs from Plastic Ono Band appear on Acoustic, including
the little gem “Love” and the melancholy “Look at Me.” Ono has a particular
fondness for “Working Class Hero,” in which Lennon addresses would-be
followers with a characteristic mix of sympathy, mockery, and cynicism. Ono
says, “I just love that idea, and I think that song really typifies what the
Beatles did, which was to create a revolution in the hierarchy of, OK, first
the queen and then the aristocrats and all that. They toppled it, you know?”
At times he resented the lofty pedestal on which the Beatles were placed (to
the point of declaring “I don’t believe in Beatles,” in the song “God”), but
Lennon also recognized that he stood in a unique position to broadcast
messages to the world. He had a knack for distilling an idea down to a
catchphrase or slo-gan, and he was ready to step up to the mic and just say
it: “All you need is love.” “Power to the people.” “Give peace a chance.”
Studio Surrealism
Lennon and the Beatles straddled tectonic shifts in how rock bands make
music in yet another realm: the recording studio. In the early days, they
knocked out studio tracks like the bar band they were, but in the mid-’60s
on Rubber Soul and Revolver, a new universe of recording
possibilities began to emerge.
The band took a radical step into alternate-reality recording with Lennon’s
one-chord incantation “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which Ritchie calls “one of
the first pop songs which used sounds and noise, rather than chords and
notes, as the main building blocks.” Lennon’s voice warbled through a Leslie
speaker, and engineers faded McCartney’s tape loops in and out on five
different machines. “Some of my favorite songs in the world aren’t songs at
all,” Whitley says of “Tomorrow.” “It’s like [Jimi Hendrix’s] Are You
Experienced?—totally funda-mental groove-blues-rock-psychedelic
surrealism.”
Then came “Strawberry Fields Forever,” recorded in late 1966, shortly after
the band quit touring. Lennon wrote the song on guitar (as documented in a
fascinating demo sequence on Anthology 2), but it became something
entirely new in the Abbey Road studio, with touches of Mellotron (a
tape-replay keyboard), surmandal (Indian harp), and strings, and producer
George Martin’s deft editing together of two takes with different tempos and
keys. The psychedelic extravaganza “A Day in the Life” followed just a few
months later.
Joe Henry, who coproduced Ani DiFranco’s newest CD, Knuckle Down,
contrasts the baroque constructions of Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical
Mystery Tour with the bare-bones approach of Lennon’s early solo albums.
With those Beatles albums, he says, “It’s hard to separate the recordings
from the songs themselves, because it’s almost like the studio helped create
the songs. Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, those records sound more like
you get some good musicians in a room and everybody has to hang on, because
John is taking the song down the field and you get a couple takes to get
onboard or else you’ve missed it.”
For Lennon, the studio was a place for experimentation but not for
songwriting, says Ono. “I’ve heard from some producers, ‘That band, they
just come in and they only have one [vocal] line and say, “What are we going
to do about this?’” John was never like that. He might change a few words or
something, but he had the whole song finished before he went into the
studio.”
Come Together
Ono’s voice softens when she’s asked about musical ambitions that Lennon
never had a chance to realize. “We were going to go on doing all sorts of
things,” she reflects. “That’s all lost, you know. It’s neither here nor
there.” And what sort of music does she imagine he might be making today? “I
think he would have gone into more complex music that’s more avant-garde.
I’m sure that he would have been very interested in computers, the Internet,
and all that—he would have jumped on it. New expression, new communication.”
As we approach what would have been John Lennon’s 65th birthday, a steady
stream of new releases and events preserves the illusion that Lennon and the
Beatles play on. In 2004 came The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1, a
collection of the US versions of early Beatles albums (in both mono and
stereo); Lennon’s Acoustic and the remastered/remixed Rock ’n’
Roll; Ringo Starr’s coffee-table book Postcards from the Boys; a
Lennon art exhibit titled “When I’m Sixty-Four”; and more. A tribute
musical, Lennon, debuts this spring on Broadway. There’s enough music
and memorabilia to occupy the most obsessed fans, but the songwriters I
spoke with find something less tangible—and more powerful—in Lennon’s
legacy.
“I feel his spirit,” says Hitchcock. “A corny thing to say, but I draw a lot
of strength from him.” Whitley takes inspiration as much from Lennon’s
audacity as from his songs. “His creativity is so let loose,” says Whitley,
“like he’s not scared of being trite.” To Henry, Lennon’s music is a lesson
in “being liberated from the constraints of a preconceived idea.”
Kenny Siegal, who was in elementary school when Lennon died, reflects, “I’m
not the kind of guy who knows how to play their tunes around the fire—too
busy writing my own, which those guys would probably applaud.” He still sees
John Lennon as a hero, but adds, “You know . . . I don’t think he would have
wanted people to carry his voice more than their own.”
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