The 1971 song John Lennon didn’t want to play forever: “That bored me”
John Lennon was usually the hardest person to please when working on some of The Beatles’ greatest songs.
It’s not that he was meticulous about getting everything exactly right when he played or anything, but when you listen to the way that he approached every one of his songs, he was deliberately trying to make music that sounded weird as opposed to Paul McCartney’s more straightforward efforts. He lived to make music that moved people in a different way, but you could never go wrong with Lennon singing a pretty love song every now and again, either.
He was already writing the best pop songs that the band ever made in the early 1960s, and when you look at the way that he blossomed in his solo career, it wasn’t like he ever lost his touch or anything. His public image did tend to focus more on the massive political causes and protest anthems that he was rallying around, but when you look at his album cuts and even the songs that he gave away, he wasn’t above writing songs about having a great time whenever he played.
You have to remember that Lennon was far from serious all the time, and some of the best tunes that he ever wrote usually came from him trying to make music that would outlast him. No one can really do that when they are documenting the news every single time they sing, and Lennon felt that it was better to keep his music universal like he did when he was writing ‘Imagine’ back in the day.
A lot has been said about whether or not Lennon was promoting a close-minded message with his signature tune, but it’s not really about him trying to preach from a pulpit. It’s right there in the title, actually; he’s asking for us to imagine a world where people would be able to live in peace and unity, and that’s what has made the song endure for as long as it has throughout the years.
So many others would have been singing that song until the end of time, but Lennon couldn’t bear the idea of singing the tune for the rest of his days. There were plenty of tunes in his arsenal that packed a similar punch, but since he had given up the road all the way back in 1966, he had no desire to get back out and devote his life to playing multiple shows with ‘Imagine’ at the centre.
The tune meant a lot to him, so the last thing he wanted to do was to see it get cannibalised by driving it into the ground, saying, “That’s another thing that puts me off playing live – the fact that you’ve got to do the same thing over and over again every night, and the audience wants to hear the songs you’re associated with. I remember I sang ‘Imagine’ twice in one day when I was rehearsing it, and that bored me. I’ve nothing against the song, in fact, I’m quite proud of it, but I just can’t go on every night singing it. I’d try and vary it, but then I don’t like to see that myself.”
The Beatles usually had a million ways to keep their songs sounding fresh, but you can see why Lennon would have had an issue. He never wanted to work on any of his songs for too long in the studio, and if he was already getting bored with a few of his songs before the world had heard them, he wasn’t going to feel good about playing the same things whenever he took to the stage in the 1970s.
He needed to have a better outlet than that, and while he did hop onstage every now and again during the final years of his life, the studio was where he felt the most comfortable playing his material. There was no sense in him trying to drive his songs into oblivion, so why not keep on trying to make tunes that could still hit him the same way that they did when he first stumbled upon them?
