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McCartney Declares War Then Peace On Lennon In “Too Many People” and “Dear Friend”

February 17, 2013 · by solobeatles

No song by McCartney captures the loneliness and anger of the Beatles’ feud as intensely as “Too Many People,” in which all his vitriol spewed out like an infected zit. The lyrics read as the anti-Beatles version of Starr’s “Early 1970.” McCartney is getting pushed around by Lennon going underground and letting himself be a mouthpiece for the Communist party radicals. One of them, Yippie A. J. Weberman, even took a break from harassing Dylan to stage a protest in front of Linda’s father’s Park Avenue residence on Christmas Eve 1970.11 McCartney also slams Lennon for sinking into heroin with Ono, losing weight, and just eating cake, as junkies have a notorious sweet tooth. Not only was Lennon preachy politically, Harrison was religiously preachy to the max as well. And all of them were trying to grab McCartney’s cake: under the groups’ contract, all the profits of each ex-Beatles’ albums go to the company and then the total is divided among them. (Although, truth be told, Harrison was the biggest seller at the moment, so the set up benefited McCartney in 1971.)

McCartney vows that he’s not going to hold back his feelings anymore, though he did temper the opening line. Originally it was “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” but he changed “Yoko” to “you.”

The performance opens with a malevolent groan that could either be an effects-treated guitar, a harmonium, or far-off horns. The sense of physical space in the recording conjures the dread of walking into a deserted mausoleum in a horror film, underscoring the “lucky break” taunt. No doubt it is meant to instill the unease in Lennon and Co. that they will never be able to measure up in the future without McCartney. It perfectly captures the eerie foreboding when partners are divorcing, with one wondering privately if he is making a mistake even while trying to scare the other that he will regret it. When Lennon heard it, did he have an inkling that he would only have one more number one record in his lifetime?

McCartney whips himself into a war dance, dancing around Hugh McCracken’s guitar pyrotechnics with falsetto shrieks and whoops, banging the floor tom drum.

Lennon would counter on his next album with “How Do You Sleep,” which would also be magnificently played and produced. But it is so overtly about McCartney that its subject can’t be separated from the performance, making it difficult to enjoy beyond the context of Lennon’s character assassination. By being lyrically just vague enough and played within an arresting sound scape, “Too Many People” transcends the backdrop that inspired it.

Ram’s back cover included the subtle snapshot of one beetle screwing another. The front featured McCartney holding a ram by horns, so for Imagine Lennon inserted a postcard in which he holds a pig by the ears, grinning. Lennon also continued to be a loose cannon in the press. He sent an open letter to McCartney via the music mag Melody Maker in which he wrote that McCartney had said to him, “‘Ringo and George are going to break you John’ . . . Who’s the guy threatening to ‘finish’ Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he’d ‘get us’ whatever the cost? As I’ve said before—have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” He then slagged off McCartney’s father-in-law.

Obviously, fighting with the vicious Lennon in public was like dancing around gasoline with a match. And while Lennon forgot the fact whenever convenient, to McCartney they had been best friends, which was why he had overreacted and botched the whole “dealing with Yoko” thing in the first place.

McCartney began working on the song that would become “Dear Friend” during the Ram sessions. For many critics it was the sole redemption of the Wild Life album. It was the record’s last song, showing the continued primacy of the feud in his life, as “Too Many People” had been the first song on Ram.

The disconsolate piano brings to mind a man walking through a dark cavern, as McCartney faced the precarious decision of whether to up the arms race of mutually assured destruction. His voice strains at the high end of his register, like a guy who has been bullied but knows he must speak up though he’s also afraid. He can’t believe they’ve come so close to the edge, and he’s shocked it all means so much to Lennon. Perhaps he’s referring to the money and how they were forcing McCartney to stay in the company to avoid paying higher taxes. Perhaps he’s referring to Lennon’s need to yell his side of the story through the press at everyone else’s expense.

The song is famously known as a conciliatory make-up song. With surprising honesty, McCartney sings that he’s in love with his friend and wishes him the best with his marriage. But McCartney also asks Lennon if he’s a fool and if he’s afraid, which sounds like a bit of a provocation, even as his voice is timid in the gloom, a passive-aggressive Gemini as always. Probably it was hard for McCartney to be the guy stepping back saying, “I don’t want to fight,” even though he had been the one who started it.

McCartney plays the same ruminating piano chords for almost six minutes, mirroring the emotional obsession he couldn’t shake. But he uses what he learned on the Thrillington instrumental album to sustain interest through a subtle build in accompaniment with forlorn strings and foreboding horns until everything recedes except the quiet, lonely piano, and then it finally stops as well. Wild Life was released in the United Kingdom in November 1971 and in the United States in early December. At some point, McCartney called Lennon, and shortly afterward Lennon sent McCartney a Christmas gift, a bootleg of the group’s audition for Decca Records. A little after Christmas, the McCartneys dropped by Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village home, and the former bandmates stopped attacking each other in public. Eventually, the postcard in Imagine was changed to one of Lennon playing the panpipes.

Did Lennon Pinch a Lick From a Coke Commercial For His Final Political Song?

December 13, 2012 · by solobeatles

When Lennon and Ono co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in January 1972, they brought in friends ranging from radical political figures to Chuck Berry. When Lennon performed “Imagine,” he made the comment, “Only people can save the world.” With “save” switched to “change,” the phrase would become the chorus for this MIND GAMES (1973) track and be printed on the album’s inner sleeve.

The ebullient melody reflects the hopeful little boy part of Lennon’s personality in the same vein as tunes like “I Should Have Known Better” and “Oh Yoko!” With its skipping, folk/R&B swing, it almost sounds like something that could have been sung by the Brady Bunch.

As Lennon was adept at finding inspiration for songs in commercials (i.e. “Good Morning, Good Morning”), it would be unsurprising to learn that “Only People” owed something to the famous “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial from 1971, helmed by Medium Cool director Haskell Wexler.

The commercial made such a splash that the New Seekers (“Georgy Girl”) quickly released it as a hit single refashioned as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” Coke allowed the proceeds to go to UNICEF.

(What do you think? Am I hearing things?)

“Only People” was certainly Lennon’s least threatening attempt to use pop to sway the masses. For the ultraconservatives who wrote books like The Beatles, LSD, and Communism, no doubt this would have struck them as one of Lennon’s most insidious propaganda pieces, refashioning a Coke commercial for socialism.

Bouncing back from Nixon’s 1972 landslide, Lennon commiserates with his fellow idealists. He concedes they’ve cried a lot of tears, but now they’re wiser and ready to start again. He throws in his usual feminist reminder that if man and woman work together they are unstoppable, and vows to resist the Pig Brother scene, conflating the “Big Brother” that had put him under surveillance and slang for the cops.

Whooping like a cheerleader before a clapping gospel chorus, Lennon finished his final political song. He and Ono would mirror their generation by abandoning activism, and by the end of the decade, Ono would transform herself into an economic wheeler dealer like the yuppies.

But while it would be easy to slam the sixties idealists for selling out, they had won the war against conformity and ended the Draft. The right to liberated sex without marriage, long hair, and freedom of expression and religion progressively melded with the mainstream throughout the decade. The ex-Beatles could look around at the new, freer world and know they had played a central part in changing it.

Lennon Celebrates the Love of His Life in “Oh Yoko!”

August 31, 2012 · by solobeatles

The romantic songs Lennon composed in the Beatles’ early days still resonate with millions of fans, but for the most part there has not been a woman put forward as the inspiration for those classics. By the time of Beatlemania, his first wife Cynthia and he shared a warm bond of security, but not passion. Lennon was rumored to have liaisons with strong women like folk singer Joan Baez, journalist Maureen Cleave, Help! actress Eleanor Bron, and model Sonny Drake — but perhaps in the early years his real love affair was the one between him and his audience, whose adoration he certainly craved “Eight Days a Week.”

By 1967, the euphoria of success had long worn off. “A Day in the Life” found him sunk in a near-catatonic depression (likely accelerated by rampant substance abuse). Though he sang mournfully, “I’d love to turn you on” (à la Timothy Leary’s “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out”), Lennon needed someone to turn him on. He imagined a dream woman coming to save him in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and gradually he began to realize she had arrived in the form of an avant-garde artist he first met at a London gallery in November 1966.

Lennon had envisioned himself the ultimate “Bad Boy,” but Yoko Ono was a bad girl more extreme than he had ever dared to be. She was an exhibitionist artist from New York who’d done time in a mental hospital and who might have been the prime instigator in their joint plunge into heroin. Yet she also strove to be a “people teacher” who wanted to change the world for good. She was the ultimate glass onion.

His earlier songs were not just “made to order” odes to puppy love; they expressed an ideal he’d been waiting to live out. In Ono, Lennon was electrified to discover that he had at last found his Juliet, and he sang it from the rooftops in the Let It Be film with “Don’t Let Me Down.”

The final song of the Imagine album, “Oh Yoko!” is another song that captured the intensity of his love, though from a more childlike and joyful angle. The proclamation that his love will turn her on echoes “A Day in the Life” and underscores his salvation since that tune. If he felt 100 years old then, he sounds like a little boy here, even bringing his harmonica back out from the cobwebs to express a joy he hadn’t felt since the triumphant early days in songs like “I Should Have Known Better.”

Still, there is a just a hint of bittersweet loneliness to Nicky Hopkin’s sparkling piano. Perhaps it is only producer Phil Spector’s famous echo. But perhaps it also reflects the mood of two needy children who had pushed the rest of the world away from their 72-acre estate Tittenhurst Park in 1971. After living in the spotlit fishbowl for two years, they now had to face each other truly alone for the first time, and the deal Ono had made for herself was becoming clearer. In return for the fame she had craved, she had to live with a guy who could be exceptionally moody, to say the least.

Lennon sensed her growing reservation and tried to tap back into the little girl in her who wanted to be innocently and passionately in love. But soon Ono would convince him to move to New York City with its myriad distractions, and eventually kick him out of the house for a year.

Still, despite the rollercoaster of the next few years in their marriage, by 1975 they would settle down together for good.

EMI wanted Lennon to release “Oh Yoko!” as a single but he declined, calling it too “pop.” This seems odd from a guy who stated his intention with the Imagine album was to get a “sugarcoated” hit. Maybe the song was just too vulnerable.

(Photo on home page from http://anneyhall.tumblr.com/)

Lennon Faces Off Against Li’l Abner Cartoonist Al Capp

August 30, 2012 · by solobeatles

Beatle expert Tom Frangione (Beatle Brunch, Beatlefan Magazine) pointed out that I had erroneously included Li’L Abner cartoonist Al Capp as one of the singers in “Give Peace a Chance.” He wrote:

Al Capp was decidedly not among them. He visited John & Yoko during the bed-in, and quite famously was rude & insulting to the point where Derek Taylor asked – no, make that TOLD – him to leave. This scene has been included in several of the Lennon docs over the years (Imagine, US vs. JL, etc). Check it out here:

From Wikipedia’s entry on Al Capp:

The cartoonist visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their 1969 Bed-In for Peace in Montreal, and their testy exchange later appeared in the documentary film Imagine: John Lennon (1988). Introducing himself with the words “I’m a dreadful Neanderthal fascist. How do you do?,” Capp sardonically congratulated Lennon and Ono on their Two Virgins nude album cover: “I think that everybody owes it to the world to prove they have pubic hair. You’ve done it, and I tell you that I applaud you for it.” Following this exchange, Capp insulted Ono (“Good God, you’ve gotta live with that?”), and is asked to “get out” by Derek Taylor. Lennon allowed him to stay however, but the conversation had soured considerably. On Capp’s exit, Lennon sang an impromptu version of his Ballad of John and Yoko song with a slightly revised, but nonetheless prophetic lyric: “Christ, you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are goin’ / They’re gonna crucify Capp! “^[32]

According to an apocryphal tale from this era, in a televised face-off, either Capp (on the Dick Cavett Show) or (more commonly) conservative talk show host Joe Pyne (on his own show) is supposed to have taunted iconoclastic musician Frank Zappa about his long hair, asking Zappa if he thought he was a girl. Zappa is said to have replied, “You have a wooden leg; does that make you a table?” (Both Capp and Pyne had wooden legs.) The story is considered an urban legend.

P.S. Please let me know any corrections or improvements in the Corrections section. Thanks!

Rolling Stone.com is Running Excerpts From the Book. Today’s: John and “Borrowed Time”

August 15, 2012 · by solobeatles

Rolling Stone is running excerpts from the book this week for the Beatles’ 50th anniversary (Ringo joined on August 18, 1962). Click the link below to check it out:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/book-excerpt-john-lennons-last-rebirth-on-the-stormy-seas-in-borrowed-time-20120815

Lennon’s Accidental Farewell, “Nobody Told Me”

August 3, 2012 · by solobeatles

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”

July 28, 2012 · by solobeatles

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.”

“Beautiful Boy” and Lennon’s Journey as a Father

July 13, 2012 · by solobeatles

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”

June 26, 2012 · by solobeatles

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.

Lennon Fights to Transcend the Past in “Remember”

June 1, 2012 · by solobeatles

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.

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