Paul reconquered America in 1976 ten years after the Beatles’ last tour with the help of this classic single.
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Lennon’s Accidental Farewell, “Nobody Told Me”
Lennon began the song in 1976 with the title “Everybody’s Talkin’, Nobody’s Talkin’,” a nod to his friend Harry Nilsson, who had covered Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” to indelible effect in the classic film MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
Lennon figured he would give it to Starr for his next album. As he had always done for his friend, Lennon did a guide version in the studio. During the DOUBLE FANTASY sessions, Lennon did 10 takes, with live vocals each time.
The sardonic lyrics reflect a ’60s fighter resigned to the apathy of the disco era, where everyone’s making a lot of noise but not really saying or doing anything. People smoke but don’t get high, and Nazis lurk under the stairs, perhaps an exaggerated reference to the rightward turn old radical Lennon sensed his two countries were about the take under Reagan and Thatcher. Their conservatism would make Nixon seem like a liberal centrist by comparison.
One of the Beatles favorite girl groups, the Shirelles, had a hit called “Mama Said (There’d Be Days Like This),” but Lennon didn’t really have a mother so nobody told him. But it doesn’t stress him out, because he’s hip to the statues of Katmandu – i.e., he’s incorporated a detached Buddhist perspective. (The lyric is a quote from the poem “The Green Eye of the Yellow God” by J. Milton Hayes.)
Lyrics aside, it’s one of his happiest sounding songs, more so for being laidback, as opposed to the “we’re gonna be happy if it kills us” euphoria of “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.” Since he was just recording a demo for his pal, there was no pressure as he sang. He sounds refreshed and eager to be back in the studio, still musing over a U.F.O. he might’ve seen with May Pang back in 1974. (He wrote in the WALLS AND BRIDGES liner notes, “On the 23rd August 1974 at 9 o’clock I saw a U.F.O. – J.L.” The night it actually happened, he thought about calling the police but knew what kind of response he’d get if he called the station and said, “I’m John Lennon and I just saw a UFO.”)
Lennon was also going to give Starr another slogan song he’d written for the Baby Boomers, a country tune called “Life Begins at 40,” as both he and Starr hit that milestone in 1980. (Lennon’s demo can be heard on the JOHN LENNON ANTHOLOGY.) But after Lennon’s murder by Chapman, the irony of the songs was too depressing for Starr and he didn’t record them. So a few years later Yoko Ono polished Lennon’s best take of “Nobody Told Me,” with jaunty bass to the fore and rippling arpeggios recalling the fade out of “A Hard Day’s Night.”
When the song came across the airwaves in 1984, it was as if Lennon’s ghost had risen up from the sidewalk where he’d been shot, cracking as only he could, “Nobody told me there’d be days like this.” The band captured the bustle of the city he loved as he turned in his surprise final anthem for all the hippies-turned-yuppies, looking around both amused and alarmed by all the changes that kept coming. And like the best of his work it spoke for everyone else, as well, from kids to senior citizens; a last goodbye as buoyant as his first hello.
Ringo Sings One of John’s Most Strangely Confessional Songs, “Goodnight Vienna”
1973’s RINGO album was a smash, so the idea was — in the time-honored pop tradition — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, make a RINGO 2. But unlike the previous album, two of the Beatles didn’t pitch in. Harrison wasn’t around, presumably because earlier in the year he had confessed to his affair with Ringo’s wife Maureen. And McCartney wasn’t around because he was taking it easy after the success of BAND ON THE RUN. But Lennon contributed “(It’s All Down to) Goodnight Vienna,” which became the title track, and he and Starr followed McCartney’s practice of reprising it at the end of the record (which also, incidentally, filled up space).
“Goodnight Vienna” is another revelatory Lennon self-portrait, though cloaked in the grotesque gobbledygook of his 1960s books IN HIS OWN WRITE and A SPANIARD IN THE WORKS. (The demo version with Lennon singing can be heard on the LENNON ANTHOLOGY.) For some reason, “Goodnight Vienna” was Liverpool slang for “It’s all over/ time to get out of this place,” and the song is about how Lennon was realizing it was time to get out of Hollywood, where he had been partying to excess since Yoko Ono kicked him out in 1973.
Starr/ Lennon sings about how he can’t relax with his girlfriend because she’s so pretty, something that had been an issue in the past for Lennon. He had encouraged first wife Cynthia to model herself after Brigitte Bardot, but when Bardot actually invited Lennon over once in the late ’60s, he took so much acid he was reduced to a introverted mess and could barely communicate with her.
He had some heavy moments of insecurity with his “Lost Weekend” girlfriend May Pang, as well. At one point, she and Lennon went to lunch with David Cassidy of The Partridge Family. Lennon was disturbed to be face-to-face with the new generation’s heartthrob while his own career had hit a rough patch and he was in the throes of an early mid-life crisis. The paranoid Lennon became convinced Pang was flirting with Cassidy.
In the song, the singer devolves into a jealous frog who doesn’t believe his woman when she tells him she loves him. In Lennon’s mind, how could Pang love him when he was no young pretty boy – and could be abusive when he got wasted?
After the lunch when Lennon and Pang were alone, he ripped the glasses off her face and stomped on them, hissing that Ono “had been right about her.” He dragged her back to New York on a plane, vowing that they were through … then changed his mind a few days later and took her back to L.A.
Throughout Starr’s version of the song, Lennon as backing vocalist yells to get it up and keep it up. Back in the Beatlemania days, Lennon relished being a rock star stud, but ten years on it was getting more and more difficult to care about validating himself.
So, in the song, when “the butcher” arrives with his needles, it is tempting for Lennon to turn back to hard drugs to deal with his anxieties — especially as the booze turns him into a maniac who makes headlines by getting thrown out of the Troubadour club. Thus Lennon knew it was time to say “Goodnight Vienna” — get out of tinsel town and put his life back together, away from the Lost Weekend cronies like Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon with whom he’d been drinking himself to death.
And back in New York he did get it together, by focusing on his music, getting a number one single, then reuniting with Yoko and becoming a father.
The lively production made good use of horns and even an accordion, but only reached No. 29 – Starr’s last Top 30 hit. Earlier singles from the album did well, though: “No No Song”/”Snookeroo” (with Elton John) made No. 3 in the US and “Only You” made No. 6. But it would be the last album in which Starr was a Top 40 force to be reckoned with.
For the memorable marketing campaign, Starr recreated a famous scene from the sci-fi flick THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, wearing the space suit of the alien Klaatu. (Thus a Canadian band named Klaatu got some mileage in the beginning of their career with the hoax that they were actually the reformed Beatles with tunes like “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.”) The deliberately cheesy TV commercial for GOODNIGHT VIENNA had goofy Lennon and Starr banter over images of Starr getting into an Ed Wood-looking Grade Z sci-fi spaceship outside the Capital Records building in L.A. and flying around L.A.
Lennon would write three other songs for Starr’s solo albums: “Cookin’ (In the Kitchen of Love),” and two that Starr never recorded: “Nobody Told Me,” and with terrible irony, “Life Begins at 40.”
McCartney Revisits the Heady ’60s Nights in “The Song We Were Singing”
In 1997, two years after the Beatles Anthology documentary was released, McCartney released an autobiography covering his youth and the Beatles era called Many Years From Now, co-written with longtime friend Barry Miles. No doubt the Anthology process produced surplus memories that couldn’t fit in the group version of the story. Some critics of the memoir complained McCartney was obsessed with correcting the image that Lennon was the avant-garde Beatle by portraying himself as the group’s original radical artist who created the tape loops in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” among other experiments. But regardless the book is a terrific account of what it was like to live such a charmed life. Some of the most compelling passages come when he describes his life in mid-‘60s Swinging London. On a day off, he’d make a bunch of wild tape loops, then go over to a friend’s place, light a joint, have a glass of wine, listen to all the fantastic music everyone was discovering, old and new, and talk into the night.
McCartney released Flaming Pie the same year as his memoir, and its opening track, “The Song We Were Singing,” is the aural equivalent of such reminiscences. McCartney and disciple Jeff Lynne play all the instruments, including — for that “We Can Work It Out” touch — a harmonium, capturing the intimacy of Rubber Soul songs like “Norwegian Wood.” McCartney and friends talk about composers, the cosmos, and how to fix the world, but always come back to playing the guitar and singing more songs. It captures those heady nights when anything seemed possible and the hip young actually changed the trajectory of the world.
One almost craves more lyrics, but looking back over the classic early Beatles songs (and even the late), they’re often made up of only a few lines (see “I’ll Follow the Sun”). Thus in its structure it further fits its subject matter.
“Beautiful Boy” and Lennon’s Journey as a Father
Lennon resented the fact that his girlfriend Cynthia Powell got pregnant right as Beatlemania was exploding in 1962, but he appreciated how she had always been there for him so he married her (though he took off to Spain with manager Brian Epstein the week Julian was born). He spent a few years with Cyn and Julian when he wasn’t on tour, and wrote Julian the lullaby “Good Night” on The White Album. But soon it became more fun to try to save the world than to be a good parent.
In “Beautiful Boy,” he assures his second son Sean (born 1975) that the monster is gone, replaced by a good father. Reflecting Sean’s half-Asian heritage, Lennon hired a Jamaican steel drummer to play an archetypal Asian melody. The steel drum also spoke of Bermuda, where Lennon had written the song, as do the sound effects of waves that open the track along with a Tibetan wishing bell.
As Lennon tucks Sean in to bed, he reminds him to say a little prayer that every day is getting better. He’d come a long way from 1967, when he sneered in McCartney’s “Getting Better” that it couldn’t get any worse. (Still, even that year his son inspired his art, as Julian’s drawing provided the inspiration for “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”)
The journey between the two “getting betters” is the cornerstone of the Lennon myth, in which the anti-hero artist triumphed over his demons to become the healthy father he never had.
In philosopher/historian Joseph Campbell’s theory of myth, the hero journeys into the darkness and brings back a new discovery to benefit society. Elvis reminded repressed white people of the healing power of sexual ecstasy. Brando acted like a realistic slob, thus casting a spotlight on the phony theatricality of the movies and leading the way to greater realism in all the arts.
But while famous artists are given the keys to the culture, many still can’t find the light. Elvis died from drugs on the toilet. Brando seemed lost in his girth and his own family’s psychodramas.
Like his iconic predecessors, Lennon pushed back the boundaries of conformism and free speech, then found himself equally adrift for years.
But like McCartney, Harrison, and Dylan, Lennon ultimately found the Grail to be the basic thing humans have been trying to do since time immemorial: to be a good husband and father, and in so doing remaking their own painful childhood into their child’s carefree youth.
McCartney later counted “Beautiful Boy” as one of his favorite songs by Lennon.
Lennon’s Funkiest Rocker: 1974’s “What You Got”
Spurred on by McCartney’s Band on the Run comeback, Lennon produced one of his finest albums with 1974’s Walls and Bridges. The record was infused with the pain of Lennon’s separation from Yoko Ono, in the same way that Dylan’s crumbling marriage fueled his mid-’70s masterpiece Blood on the Tracks. Lennon’s growth as a producer was also apparent between this album and 1973’s Mind Games, with Walls and Bridges being his most sophisticated production achievement. Double Fantasy (co-produced with Jack Douglas and Ono) was perhaps a tad too slick and soft.
Originally inspired by The O’Jays’ “Money Money Money,” “What You Got” was Lennon’s funkiest rocker, complete with R&B horns. His savage howling was in the vein of the White Album’s “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey,” with a voice six years older and more ragged for wear.
Singing how he didn’t value what he had till after he blew it, he could be referring to Ono, his musical reputation (after the poorly received album Some Time in New York City), or the respect of the public (after being thrown out of L.A.’s Troubadour club twice for drunken boorishness). Back when the Beatles were kings of the jungle, Lennon could be a lout in the nightclubs and no one dared say boo. The Made-for-VH1 film My Dinner with Jimi recounts how he rudely put down the Turtles when they visited London. He was so cruel that one of them quit the music business forever. But as Lennon’s hits dried up, do did people’s patience for him heckling people and getting into bar fights. In “What You Got” he concedes he’s like the naked clown in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and begs for one more chance.
Lennon did all he could to promote Walls and Bridges, creating an ad campaign called “Listen to This,” with buttons, photos, stickers, T-shirts, and posters on the back of 2,000 buses. Starr did the voiceover for TV and radio ads just as Lennon narrated ads for Starr’s 1974 album Goodnight Vienna. Lennon got his second chance, with both Ono and the public.
McCartney Cherishes His Last Years with Linda in “Beautiful Night”
McCartney originally attempted “Beautiful Night” with producer Phil Ramone in 1986. Musically it is reminiscent of their big song together, “Once Upon a Long Ago,” and lyrically it has the same fairy tale feel with visions of castles in the sky and missions to Lorelei. But while McCartney liked the song, he felt it hadn’t really come off.
A decade later, dark clouds gathered on the horizon. Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995 and it spread to her liver. When Starr’s first wife Maureen died of leukemia, McCartney recorded the gentle elegy “Little Willow” for her kids. Perhaps he was having a premonition of the rough times ahead for his own family. After writing “Little Willow” in February 1996, he took a break from recording the Flaming Pie album.
He had almost completed the album by February 1997, but wanted to work with Starr again after the Beatles Anthology project. Thus Starr finally appeared on a McCartney solo album, even though McCartney had appeared on Starr’s many times. Before bringing Starr into the studio, McCartney went back to “Beautiful Night” and revised the lyrics.
Starr accompanies McCartney on drums as McCartney sings at the piano. With the knowledge that he might not have much time left with Linda, McCartney sings that nothing feels as good as being with her, even being knighted. He feels helpless in the face of Linda’s worsening condition and can’t understand why such horrible things happen. But he resolves to make their last nights together beautiful and just celebrate being with her, and not think about the whys.
The song takes a tense turn as he confronts the fact that things can go wrong in life – but, he quickly adds, things can go right (the cancer could go into remission). In the middle of the night, death looms, but McCartney vows to always be at her side for all the time they have left.
Then Starr and the band kick up the tempo, determined to make it the best night possible, with Starr taking a turn singing “Beautiful night!” as George Martin leads a 38-piece orchestra of strings, flutes, trumpets, and horns, ringing the halls of Abbey Road like 1967.
The song was released as the third single from Flaming Pie in December 1997, accompanied by a classy video directed by Julian Temple, featuring Starr and Linda in her last video appearance.
Lennon Fights to Transcend the Past in “Remember”
Hammering the piano like a ticking bomb, Lennon recalls how when he was young it seemed the outlaw heroes always escaped. But now it’s different; he’s been busted for pot, the stress of which contributed to his wife Yoko’s miscarriage, and more battles with the Establishment (such as President Nixon) loom. It all reminds him of the earliest authorities in his life: narcissistic parents who forced him to do whatever suited them and still abandoned him.
The beat cuts to half time as Lennon’s vocal soars, exhorting himself not to regret the path he has chosen. Perhaps he’s reflecting on all the bridges he’d burned in the last two years (1969-1970): to his band, to his first wife, to the cultural mainstream. Thinking clearly thanks to the Primal Scream psychotherapy he had just undergone with Dr. Arthur Janov, he tells himself to remember this moment of self-assurance in the future, when life will no doubt threaten to drive him crazy again. Then the relentless pounding resumes, in a stunning display of how Lennon could milk power out of the most minimal accompaniment, until he screams to remember November 5th and an explosion ends the song.
On November 5th the English commemorate the death of Guy Fawkes. In 1605, Catholics realized King James was not going to grant them religious tolerance, so Fawkes joined a movement called The Gunpowder Plot to kill the king. Fawkes was put in charge of blowing up Parliament, but was captured. Before the authorities could hang him, he leaped to his death.
Lennon said he just ad libbed the “Remember the 5th of November” line. Afterwards, the take degenerated into him goofing around and became unusable, so “I cut it there and just exploded, it was a good joke … I thought it was just poignant that we should blow up the Houses of Parliament.” That fall Lennon would blow up the House of Beatles with a legendary Rolling Stone interview that pulled back the curtain for the first time on all the backbiting and resentment that had cast a pall over the group’s final two years — not to mention all the decadence that went on during the Beatlemania tours. In an era of innocence before Watergate and revelations of JFK’S philandering, Lennon’s candor was unprecedented.
“Remember” carries all the fear and conviction of a man setting fire to the gilded cage of being “Moptop John” and heading out for an uncertain but exhilarating future.
As for Guy Fawkes, his image would be popularized as a mask in the film V for Vendetta, and later adopted by the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Last Unfinished Beatle Song
In the early ‘90s, Harrison and Apple Records manager Neil Aspinall asked Yoko Ono if she had any unreleased Lennon demos the other Beatles could use as the basis for possible new Beatle songs. When McCartney came to New York to induct Lennon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Ono gave him two cassette tapes that featured demos of “Free as a Bird,” “Real Love,” “Now and Then,” and “Grow Old With Me.”
The reunited Beatles did not gravitate towards “Grow Old With Me,” perhaps because it was strongly linked to Ono, and had already been prominently released on 1984’s Milk and Honey. The group tackled “Free as a Bird,” then “Real Love,” and McCartney was keen to tackle the final and most incomplete of all the Lennon demos, “Now and Then.” However, Harrison didn’t like that one. He and McCartney tried to write a song together called “All for Love” in the spring of 1995, but the session ended in fierce argument. “It’s just like being back in the Beatles,” Harrison cracked dourly, and the threesome never recorded together again.
McCartney loved harmonizing with Lennon on “Now and Then,” and has since expressed a desire to do a version with Starr. While he has never formally attempted to do a version himself, he may have also borrowed a moment of drama from Lennon’s performance for the final song of his 2005 album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, “Anyway.” The pregnant pause of “Anyway” at 1:40 sounds vaguely reminiscent of the haunting piano passage Lennon plays 4:30 into “Now and Then” …
Yes? No? Not buying it? Well, anyway, when arranging “Anyway,” McCartney pretended he was a Southern Randy Newman, with a little Curtis Mayfield thrown in. From the earliest days McCartney would imagine himself to be the artists he loved when writing a new song, like when he pretended to be Ray Charles and Little Richard while composing “She’s a Woman” on the way in to Abbey Road Studios. Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich gave McCartney a pure, classy piano sound, then upped the emotion even further at the bridge with the addition of the Millenia Ensemble strings, a Moog synth, and harmonium mixed just right.
John and Paul Mirror Each Other With First Solo Releases
1970: Not the happiest year for either of them.
Even though they had just split up as a band, Lennon and McCartney’s debuts were very similar — dark, stripped down albums. They were both extensions of what the Beatles had tried to achieve with the Get Back/Let It Be sessions, which had been inspired by Bob Dylan. In 1967 the orchestral grandeur of Sgt. Pepper had stunned the public, and most of the rock community slavishly attempted to imitate it. Dylan, however, went in an entirely different direction with John Wesley Harding, a rustic, folksy album that featured just him, a bassist, and a drummer. The Beatles realized they had lost connection with the raw power of their roots and made their own back-to-basics album with Let It Be. Both Plastic Ono Band and McCartney continued this approach. Plastic Ono Band featured just Lennon, Starr, and Klaus Voormann on bass. McCartney went one better by playing every instrument on his album. Along with the minimalist sound, both albums share a theme of isolation.
Lennon chronicled the feelings unleashed by the Primal Scream psychotherapy he was undergoing at the time. During the recording sessions, Lennon would sometimes break down crying, but found the process to be one of the most empowering experiences of his life.
But while Lennon was excited to face a new era, a heavy depression pervades McCartney. The album’s cover features “life’s cherries” scattered outside the bowl.
Released just half a year after Abbey Road, half of McCartney’s tracks are instrumentals, since McCartney had not generated enough new songs to fill an album. Thus his album continues to receive mixed reviews, while Lennon’s is now recognized as a classic, though it was mercilessly spoofed at the time by National Lampoon as “Magical Misery Tour.”
In marked contrast to the minimalist Lennon and McCartney solo albums, Harrison stood out with the explosive bombast of his triple album set All Things Must Pass, just as he once stood out from the others through his use of Indian music. Its Phil Spector-produced Wall of Sound was the perfect backdrop for a musician who had been ignored and was now determined to make as big a splash as possible. (Though Harrison would later regret using so much echo.)
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