Song Lyric of the Day (John Lennon and Paul McCartney, on the People and Places ‘In My Life’)

“All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all.”—John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “In My Life,” performed by the Beatles on their LP Rubber Soul (1965)
 
Even with their very different sensibilities, John Lennon and Paul McCartney both cited “In My Life” as among their favorite Beatles songs.
 
It may be a product of advancing years, but the same goes for me.
 
It’s hard to believe that two young men, still only in their mid-20s, could create a tune of quiet reflection and affection for what had passed out of their lives. But, I guess, Joni Mitchell did much the same thing with “Both Sides Now.”

Flashback, December 1971: Lennon’s Yule Classic, ‘Happy Xmas,’ Released

Released 50 years ago this week, while American soldiers were still dying in Vietnam, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” did not enjoy the kind of immediate success that John Lennon was used to. But the single from the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono has since become a staple of the holidays.

The single was so melodic that some have decried it for sappiness. (Producer Phil Spector noted its resemblance to The Paris Sisters’ 1961 hit “I Love How You Love Me.”)

But Lennon wanted to leave listeners with more than the cheerful ditties that he, Paul, George and Ringo used to send each Christmas to members of members of their fan club.

As a religious skeptic who had caused a firestorm of controversy by claiming that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus,” he would not write a hymn to Christ the Redeemer. Likewise, he was uninterested in evoking the sleigh rides or winter landscapes that had increasingly filled the pop airwaves in the last few decades.

What he aimed for was, in part, a challenge—another attempt, like “Give Peace a Chance,” to attempt to rally sentiment against the Vietnam War through the power of music. His song’s refrain, “War is over (if you want it),” put to musical use a slogan of his “Bed in for Peace” protest with Yoko in late spring 1969.

The tune, recorded in late October 1971, came too late in the year for it to be promoted adequately in time for the Christmas season. (One singular exception: Lennon’s performance on the song in a December 16 appearance on The David Frost Show.)

From the last days of the Beatles through most of his decade as a solo artist, Lennon was engaged in a competition with Paul McCartney. One manifestation of that rivalry can be seen in their respective biggest Christmas hits as solo artists. Before he was murdered in 1980, it would not have been out of character for Lennon to compare his major solo Christmas song with McCartney’s, “Wonderful Christmastime.”

In the U.S., “Happy Xmas” peaked at number 36 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles and number 28 on the Record World Singles Chart. Over in the U.K., matters were even worse, as a publishing-rights dispute between Lennon and music publisher Northern Songs led the song to be delayed for a year. “Wonderful Christmastime” didn’t do particularly well, either, in the U.S., reaching only number 83 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles chart.

But in terms of how other artists how viewed the tunes, matters have shifted more decidedly Lennon’s way. The Website Second Hand Songs, which tracks song covers, lists approximately 100 interpretations of “Wonderful Christmastime” by other artists, versus more than 2 ½ times that amount for “Happy Christmas.”

The question of other artists’ interpretation of the song came to the forefront for me over 30 years after its release, when Sheryl Crow sang it live as part of the televised Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting in 2002. One year after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, with an attack on Iraq being prepared for the following year, Lennon’s call for collective responsibility (“Another year over/And what have we done?”) retained its melancholy undertone.

Nearly 30 years later, it still does, along with its appeal to universal brotherhood and the instinct for peace that crosses so many spiritual traditions.

This Day in Pop Music History (Harry Nilsson, Golden Voice of ‘Without You,’ Dies)

Jan. 15, 1994— Harry Nilsson, a singer-songwriter of rare versatility and virtuosity, died at age 52 in his sleep at his Agoura Hills, Calif., home, two decades after his manic lifestyle ruined his voice, shortened his career and wrecked his health.

I first became aware of this musician’s work through watching TV as a child around 1970. An ABC animated “Movie of the Week” called The Point, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, featured stories and music created by Nilsson, with the musician singing his own songs. Moreover, the theme of the Bill Bixby sitcom The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, “Best Friend,” was an adaptation of a song from Nilsson’s Aerial Ballet LP, “Girlfriend.” 

A self-taught musician who learned piano chords from rock ‘n’ rollers who performed at L.A.’s Paramount Theater, where he worked as assistant manager, Nilsson was soon building a solid catalog of his own work (enough to eventually lead him to being recognized as one of Rolling Stone Magazine’s “100 Greatest Songwriters”), notably “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” “Jump Into the Fire,” “Gotta Get Up,” “You’re Breakin’ My Heart,” and “One” (soon covered by Three Dog Night). 

Ironically, though, Nilsson achieved his greatest commercial success as an interpreter of other’s songs, especially with Fred Neal’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” (featured in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy) and Badfinger’s “Without You.”

Even now, it is only dimly appreciated how innovative Nilsson could be. More than a decade before Carly Simon and Linda Ronstadt, entering their “legacy years” as performers, tried out the Great American Songbook, Nilsson was experimenting with this rich (and, by now, neglected) mine of music with A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night. Furthermore, he compensated for his stage anxiety by taping a forerunner of MTV with his tune “Coconuts.”

John Lennon may have helped make Nilsson’s career with an enthusiastic endorsement of his talent (“Nilsson for President!”), but also helped ruin it with shared drug-and-alcohol-fueled hijinx several years later. 

When the ex-Beatle and wife Yoko Ono had a trial separation in the mod-1970s, Lennon entered a period often referred to as his “lost weekend.” The phrase only began to capture the intense, incomprehensible benders on which Lennon took his friend Nilsson —misadventures that led another Nilsson friend, songwriter Jimmy Webb, to describe their “mutually destructive aerial ballet” in his memoir, The Cake and the Rain.

Even more insane than their night-owl antics (Lennon narrowly escaped charges of assaulting a female photographer) were their studio sessions for Nilsson’s Pussycats LP, produced by Lennon. 

At one point, Webb, alarmed to hear Nilsson croak out a greeting and to see him vomiting blood into Webb’s kitchen sink, asked what had happened to his vocal chords. The laughing response: “I left it on the microphone.” Nilsson’s magnificent singing voice was never the same again.

Nilsson’s career was shorter than it should have been, but he made the most of his short window of time. I love this quotation from songwriter and admirer Randy Newman on this talent: “He had a gift for melody. Which is a rare, inexplicable talent to have. People like McCartney have it, Schubert, Elton John has it. Harry had that gift."

Quote of the Day (Ronnie Spector, on Dating John Lennon)

“I was 18, and I didn’t know John [Lennon] was married. John and George [Harrison] came and picked us [Ronnie and her sister] up at the Strand Palace Hotel in London. They said to my mom, ‘Mrs. Bennett, would you like to go out with us to dinner?’ I thought she would say, ‘Oh, you kids go out and have fun.’ But she said, ‘Let me get my purse!’ George and John almost passed out. After dinner, my mom took the hint and got in a cab. The rest of us went to the Crazy Elephant club and John said, ‘Ronnie, sing a bit of “Be My Baby” in my ear.’”—Ronnie Spector, pop legend and lead singer of the ‘60s group The Ronettes, interviewed by David Browne, in “The Last Word: Ronnie Spector on Her Childhood Hero, Getting Sober, Life With Phil Spector, and Dating John Lennon,” Rolling Stone, June 2, 2016

Quote of the Day (Mikal Gilmore, on the Significance of the Beatles’ ‘Revolver’)

“Sgt. Pepper captured a moment, but Revolver created the context and motion that became that moment. Partly because it was swallowed by the events of the summer of 1966, and partly because of the shadow cast by Sgt. Pepper, it would take years – decades, even – before critics and fans would widely regard Revolver as the Beatles' finest album. But the form-stretching possibilities it had unleashed would change popular music by giving it new and more blatant thematic range, matched by innovative and outrageous sounds. It introduced different angles in chords and melodies and gave other bands the courage to look at the risky moment as both internal and social unrest. The Beatles sneaked all of this into their music with flair and confidence, with beauty and dissonance.”— Mikal Gilmore, “The Beatles' Acid Test: LSD Opened the Door to Their Masterpiece 'Revolver'—But Also Opened Wounds That Never Healed,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1269 (Sept. 8, 2016)

This August marks the 50^th anniversary of perhaps the most unsettling month in The Beatles’ history as a group—begun with John Lennon’s controversial remark that the band had become “more popular than Jesus now,” and ended, in exhaustion, with the Candlestick Park appearance that served as the final stop of their last tour. In between came their transitional LP, Revolver. I discussed this masterpiece in a prior post, but it's worth another look in light of what Gilmore brings to light on its history.

Rubber Soul, as I discussed in this prior post, remains (for me, anyway) the most consistently satisfying Beatles studio album. But in his essay in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, Mikal Gilmore makes a credible case for Revolver as the group’s first to spring from a self-conscious search for personal meaning.

That search was spurred mainly by the LSD taken—first unwittingly, then more enthusiastically—by John Lennon and George Harrison. While Rubber Soul was what Paul McCartney later called the band’s “pot album,” Revolver originated with the more intense, dangerous LSD.  “Tomorrow Never Knows,” sometimes called the first example of  “acid rock,” derived from Lennon’s attempt to make sense of his LSD trip through reading Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience.

I wish I could have heard more from Gilmore about the evolution of the album’s other sterling songs (notably, "Eleanor Rigby," “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). But in view of the group’s subsequent history, it’s understandable why he delves into the LSD angle.

The drug opened up the band to new thinking and new sounds—and irrevocably altered its internal dynamics. From then on, Lennon and Harrison shared a bond that would endure until Lennon’s murder in 1980. Simultaneously, they treated McCartney as someone apart from their philosophical and creative journey, a Johnny-come-lately to their altered state.

Gilmore does point out a cost of the hallucinogen to Lennon: it worsened his drug habit, even leading to a 1968 incident in which he summoned astonished Apple employees to issue a press release announcing that he was Jesus Christ returned to Earth.

Gilmore might also have discussed how Lennon’s increased absences from the studio within a few years led to more tensions with bandmates, as well as to Lennon’s push back when McCartney sought to fill the inevitable leadership void. But altogether, he shines a strong light on a key album in rock 'n' roll history--one whose significance may only now be properly appreciated.

Flashback, December 1965: Beatles Exercise Creative Muscles With ‘Rubber Soul’

Only a year and a half after American fans first went crazy over their live appearances, the Beatles staked out considerably more ambitious territory with a studio album. With Rubber Soul, the Fab Four dug deeper into their own experiences and pushed harder to incorporate different sounds into their recordings.

Bob Stanley of the British newspaper The Guardian has written that Rubber Soul makes “a strong case for being the most concise and the most complete Beatles album.” My feeling is, if anything, stronger.

Roughly 20 years ago, I came across Rubber Soul in a music shop. It was the first time I had ever seen all the songs together, in their original context rather than filtered through best-of compilations. I’m not sure if I had ever heard so many songs that had wormed their way into my consciousness over the years. In time, I came to think of it as my favorite Beatles LP.

NPR music critic Tim Riley has written of the LP’s “restrained musical confidence.”  The group, pressing hard to expand the boundaries of conventional pop, exerted their newfound commercial power to the utmost: "Finally we took over the studio," John Lennon told Rolling Stone's Jann S. Wenner in a 1970 interview. "In the early days, we had to take what we were given, we didn't know how you could get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul. We were more precise about making the album, that's all, and we took over the cover and everything."

(Well, not quite everything. Four of the tracks from the British LP were left off the American release: “Drive My Car,” “Nowhere Man,” “What Goes On,” and “If I Needed Someone.” Instead, two songs from the Help recording sessions were used: “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “It’s Only Love.” The group smarted over Capitol Records’ affront to their creative intentions. They would have more clout from here on in.)

What fans discovered, upon the LP’s release on December 3, 1965 in the U.K. and three days later in the U.S., was more mature songwriting and studio confidence. Indeed, The Beatles were growing as men and artists, and they were betting—successfully, it turned out—that their admirers would follow them, whatever their creative direction.

The Liverpool quartet were commercially rewarded for their risk-taking, as the LP sold 1.2 million copies in nine days of its release in the U.S., en route to 59 weeks on the charts. Nothing new there. But it gave the group additional critical cachet, as well.

The past year had signaled a startling change in the cultural landscape. The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was no flowers-and-candy ode to women, but a loud expression of sexual unrest that seemed to encompass an entire world. More important, folk-rock—embodied most by Bob Dylan’s epic “Like a Rolling Stone”—meant that singer-songwriters were not just freed from conventional teen themes, but that some modicum of intelligence—a consideration of politics, perhaps, a dash of poetry, or even some offbeat psychology—might be required of them.

Enter the Beatles, joking. Or, to be more accurate, enter John Lennon, pondering, when he wasn’t tossing off a sardonic remark, how fame had transformed himself and the certainty he had lost.

Lennon’s murder 35 years ago this month understandably exalted him to martyr status and, consequently, made some slight the contribution of his songwriting partner, Paul McCartney. 

(Recall critic Robert Christgau’s repetition in The Village Voice of his wife’s remark after hearing about the shooting: “Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon? Why isn't it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?")

Paul was primarily responsible for some of Rubber Soul’s biggest singles, including “Michelle” and “You Won’t See Me.” But it was Lennon, trouble-tossed and introspective as he had been at no other time before, who gave the album its teeth. He embodied the Leonard Cohen lyric, “Where there’s a crack, that’s where the light gets in.”

Let’s start with a song that did not originate with him: Paul’s “Drive My Car.” The history of that song supports the notion that even if the original spark for a song did not come from Lennon, he could affect its development. In this case, one listen to McCartney’s tune and Lennon was ready to pronounce it “crap.” After trying out some alternatives, the two came up with a line that was far tougher and more suggestive than “I wanna hold your hand”: “Baby, you can drive my car.”

The song that may have embodied the band’s—and Lennon’s—sonic and lyric exploration best was “Norwegian Wood.” Earlier that year, with “Yesterday,” producer George Martin had added a string quartet, giving McCartney’s plaintive tune a classical feel. With Lennon’s sly, first-person narrative of a seduction, the Beatles employed, for what is believed to be the first time in a pop song, a sitar (an instrument discovered by George Harrison while the band was shooting the film Help!).

The highly unusual sound produced was the first clue that the listener was in unfamiliar, even uncertain and treacherous, territory. The second clue came in Lennon’s opening lines, which seemed to be about to introduce a conventional boy-meets-girl tale, only to undercut it immediately: “I once had a girl, or should I say that she had me?” Well, which is it? the listener wants to know.

And that might be the least of the surprises. Many people believe that the song was Lennon’s account of a fling, albeit carefully disguised so as not to arouse wife Cynthia’s suspicions.

Or did Lennon confess more than he intended? This is not, after all, a song about male sexual conquest—a popular enough theme in rock ‘n’ roll—but of male sexual naivete and even inadequacy. After the young woman has done her level best to seduce the narrator (he notices there isn’t a chair in the place, and she coos that it’s time for bed), he’s too tired to do anything more than crawl “off to sleep in the bath.”

Then he wakes up, only to discover, to his chagrin, that, in the song’s wicked double entendre, “this bird [i.e., the British term for what American males would shortly call “chicks” or, later still, “babes”] had flown.” Before the final one-line refrain, the narrator delivers what might be the most debated line on the LP: “So, I lit a fire.”

Pete Shotton, Lennon’s friend from boyhood to the Beatle’s death, thought that line might have derived from the musician’s purchase of furniture in the fireplace at Gambier Terrace in Liverpool when he lacked money for coal. But McCartney, who gave his songwriting partner ideas on how to open the song out beyond the opening couplet, was closer to the mark: the narrator had burned down the flat as an act of anger and revenge the morning after his all-too-uneventful encounter.

“Norwegian Wood” didn’t exhaust John’s darker impulses when it came to women. “Run for Your Life” was the taunting refrain of a lover to his girlfriend. Lest any doubt exist about his intention, pay special heed to one line, a direct threat: “Catch you with another man, that’s the end, little girl.” At the time, listeners might have gotten caught up in its fast, catchy tune. But nowadays, after Ray Rice, it sounds unremittingly ugly, a blot on its composer's subsequent reputation as an advocate of nonviolence. (In later years Lennon, in copping to his own domestic abuse in his 20s, admitted that it was one of his worst songs, written largely to fill out the album.)

The same could not be said of “Nowhere Man,” a stark picture of alienation. It’s hard to believe that the man in the song who “doesn’t have a point of view” could be Lennon, but he later told Beatles chronicler Hunter Davies that, after trying unsuccessfully to complete a song for five hours—and believing, in the midst of the frustration, that he might not be able to finish another—he himself felt like a “nowhere man.” If so, it constitutes an interesting counterpart to “Norwegian Wood,” with creative failure substituting for physical impotence.

In terms of Lennon’s future as a songwriter, however, “In My Life” may have constituted the true breakthrough on the album. He seems to have begun it by writing down place names from the Liverpool of his childhood, only to be jolted by associations with people: “Some are dead and some are living.” With his suburban home, wife and child, he was in a far more comfortable place than he had been growing up—but he didn't find it enough.

Five decades on, it’s hard not to be struck by the lyrical and attitudinal similarities between “In My Life” and Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” Were one not to have known the composers, just the lyric sheets at hand, one could only conclude that a middle-aged person could have written such rueful meditations on experience. (Indeed, it is the vocal version by the wised-up Mitchell, not by her girlish-sounding younger counterpart, that is used in the 2003 film Love, Actually).

Perhaps only the 1960s—a decade of startling social dislocation—could have produced similar exercises in nostalgia across the Atlantic by a pair of twentysomethings. Somehow, Lennon and Mitchell had transformed profoundly personal statements of confusion and loss into anthems for an entire generation of lost youth.