“How original!”: The band John Lennon threw into The Beatles’ shade
Imagine being the biggest band in the world, plonked onto a precipice so lofty it was positively unprecedented in human history, and thinking, ‘Let’s quit touring, scrap all the pretty little love songs that got us to this position, and give the folks at home, ‘I Am the Walrus”. It’s bonkers. But that’s exactly what The Beatles, four young working-class lads from Liverpool, were bold enough to do.
They were an explosion quite out of the ordinary. The period from the moment they announced themselves to the world on the Ed Sullivan Show to the moment they walked out of a studio together for the last time was shorter than that between the first lockdown and the present. They were a relative whirlwind that took the world by storm and changed it forever—releasing tracks as desperate as ‘Yesterday’, ‘I’m a Loser’ and ‘We Can Work It Out’ within months of each other.
But when you’re the champ, there’s always going to be people willing to take a swipe at you. Young upstart Todd Rundgren did just that in 1974. Steadying his aim at John Lennon, the musician commented, “Nixon was just like another generation’s John Lennon. Someone who represented all sorts of ideals but was out for himself underneath it all.”
While his opinion that Lennon was a symbol of phoney idealism was far from unique, he widened his scope for his next jab, taking a swipe at the whole of the Fab Four and their music. “The Beatles had no style other than being the Beatles,” he said. “So the Nazz used to do, like heavy rock, and also these light, pretty ballads with complex ballads,” he concluded, highlighting the work of his first band.
Lennon wasn’t going to let that lie. He wrote an open letter in response. Points six and seven sneered at the Nazz with cutting disdain, Lennon commenting: “[sic] 6) So the Nazz use to do ‘like heavy rock’ then SUDDENLY a ‘light pretty ballad’. How original! 7) Which gets me to the Beatles, ‘who had no other style than being the Beatles’!! That covers a lot of style man, including your own, TO DATE…..”
Retrospectively, this might seem like a punchy match that Rundgren was always set to lose, but in the mid-70s, sentiments were changing around The Beatles and Lennon, in particular. If they were the gods of the counterculture, then the problem that The Beatles faced was the same one that all religions must reckon with: at one point, faith surely has to sort this shitshow out.
“Everybody else thought The Beatles were God! I think that was not correct.”
Frank Zappa
In 1971, Lennon appeared on The Dick Cavett Show alongside Yoko Ono. In an army overshirt, he spoke of peace and love. Outside the Regis Hotel where it was filmed, things were falling apart in a rainy New York City. Between 1969 and 1974, the former bohemian utopia lost 500,000 manufacturing jobs. Subsequently, a million homes depended on welfare, rapes and burglaries tripled, drugs ran rampant, and murders hit a high of 1690 a year.
‘All You Need is Love’ seemed like a sorry sham from a time of distorted memories, and the likes of Rundgren were poking holes in the group’s legacy, Steely Dan were singing, “Only a fool would say that”, and Frank Zappa was saying, “Everybody else thought The Beatles were God! I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group.”
Even Lennon himself seemed to recognise how seasons change within an artist’s legacy. “The public, including the media, are sometimes a bit sheeplike, and if the ball starts rolling, well, it’s just that somebody’s in, somebody’s out,” he reconciled in 1975. Distancing himself a little from the issue by adding, “George is out for the moment. And I think it didn’t matter what he did on tour.”
However, perhaps Rundgren had a bit more of a personal axe to grind than most. In an interview with Louder Sound, “Ringo was the most approachable of all of the Beatles. I have met each of the band in turn. If you grew up on A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and watched The Beatles’ antics, to actually meet them in person was often a let-down. For instance, Paul McCartney was an unusually dour person and John was totally drunk and inanimate.”
Be that as it may, as Steely Dan, only a fool would attempt to pitch the Nazz against The Beatles.
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