John Lennon was usually the first person to think that one of The Beatles’ greatest songs was a piece of trash.
There was no reason for him to look back fondly on his old records right after leaving the Fab Four, and given how revolutionary he became directly after leaving the band, his life as a pop star would have practically felt like a stain on his catalogue rather than a strength. He definitely sold the band short a few times, but he knew that he could sleep easy at night knowing that he didn’t have certain songs to his name.
It’s not like he was exactly off the hook whenever he talked about his own material. You couldn’t have found someone that was more honest about their music back in the day, and while any other PR rep would have told Lennon to keep his mouth shut about some of his tunes, it’s interesting to hear him be one of the first artists to completely disown tunes like ‘Little Child’ and ‘Run For Your Life’ only a few years after laying them down in the studio.
Then again, most artists are usually over the honeymoon period with their tunes after they record them. Playing a song over and over again is enough for anyone to not want to listen to it for the rest of their lives, so when there were a few songs that weren’t that great to begin with, it wasn’t exactly the most fun that anyone’s ever had in the studio. And when it came to songs Lennon didn’t like, don’t even get him started on Paul McCartney’s ‘granny shit’ music.
For someone who had been brought up in rock and roll, though, you can see why Lennon would be angry. He wanted to have a reputation as being badass in the same way that his idols were, so now that he had a songwriting partner wanting to write fruity songs like ‘Honey Pie’ by their final days, he wasn’t going to be excited about working on a track like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.
That’s not to say that there weren’t a few ballads that he actually liked. Everything from ‘Hey Jude’ to ‘Here There and Everywhere’ to ‘Yesterday’ was enough for Lennon to give the green light, but when working on The White Album, it seemed like anything that sounded halfway coherent had potential to get on the record. ‘Revolution 9’ may have been too different for most people, but hearing Macca sing a song like ‘Rocky Raccoon’ was enough for him to want out of the studio.
The whole album might be a cornucopia of different sounds, but Lennon was grateful that he didn’t have his name on it, saying, “I thanked God it wasn’t one of mine. Couldn’t you guess? Would I go to all that trouble about Gideon’s Bible and all that stuff?” Even if a lot of the pieces were made up, though, it’s not like that was ever a problem when it came to the band’s earlier tunes.
A lot of the puppy-love songs that Lennon and McCartney made back in the day may as well have been fairy tales to some degree, but McCartney actually proved himself to be a brilliant novelist within the space of a few minutes. Not everyone needed to care about the old man looking for some help in ‘When I’m 64’ or the miserable uncle in ‘Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey’, but it did help bring some levity to the situation every single time.
And during the period of The White Album, the band could have definitely afforded some of that levity every now and again. No one was having a good time, but sometimes the only way to pass the time without killing each other is breaking out the acoustics and kicking back with a nice country tune.
