Steely Dan

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. In a wider sense, the American war offensive in Vietnam intensified, and the post-war income gains began to drift from the median in favour of the 95th percentile for the first time.

It is, of course, easy cynicism to scoff at Lennon’s pledge for a pristine paradise of borderless dreams, but that’s an open goal that Steely Dan and millions of others were happy to score. It was their considered opinion that even having your heart in the right place can be folly if you’ve failed to read the room. While Lennon would argue that he was promoting hope and some much-needed spiritualism to act as a beacon in these dark times, Steely Dan opined that “only a fool would say that”. 

Their 1972 track, ‘Only a Fool Would Say That’, was written in response to Lennon’s parade of peace. It looks at idealism through the practical eyes of folks on the street. “You do his nine to five,” they sing, “drag yourself home half alive, and there on the screen, a man with a dream.” And with that, you get a sense of how grating and vacuous they thought that Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ campaign had become. They might have been fans of The Beatles, but now that innocence was lost, a new age of cynicism had arisen, and daft platitudes of peace put forth by the most powerful figures in pop culture no longer cut the mustard.

Todd Rundgren

Paul McCartney once said that the anti-materialistic side of The Beatles was a bald-faced lie. ”That’s a huge myth,” he said. ”John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now let’s write a swimming pool.’ We said it out of innocence.” But they said it nevertheless. And when Lennon truly turned political, it turned the likes of Paul Simon off him, who scoffed: “I don’t say that someone can’t write a social song, or even a song that’s a political song, and have it work, as a song and as a political statement. But mass manufacturing of tunes, sort of ‘let’s knock off ‘Power to the People’,’ I find it in bad taste. It offends me. I don’t feel it talking to me at all.”

This was the same stick that Todd Rundgren would beat the bespectacled Beatle with in a 1974 Melody Maker interview while promoting Todd. ”John Lennon ain’t no revolutionary,” he said. “He’s a fucking idiot, man. Shouting about revolution and acting like an ass. It just makes people feel comfortable. All he really wants to do is get attention for himself, and if revolution gets him that attention, he’ll get attention through revolution.”

“Hitting a waitress in the Troubador. What kind of revolution is that?” he asked in reference to an infamous drunken incident in Los Angeles during Lennon’s ‘Lost Weekend’ period of problematic alcoholism. “He’s an important figure, sure,” Rundgren continued, recognising his iconic status in culture, “But so was Richard Nixon.” 

He concluded, “Nixon was just like another generation’s John Lennon. Someone who represented all sorts of ideals, but was out for himself underneath it all. Like the Beatles had no style other than being the Beatles.”

Needless to say, Lennon obviously bit back with an open letter, the contents of which can accurately be surmised by the subheading he opted for: “Couldn’t resist adding a few ‘islands of truth’ of my own, in answer to Turd Runtgreen’s howl of hate (pain).”

Elvis Presley

It’s hard to tell what Elvis Presley hated most, John Lennon or what John Lennon represented. Hell, he even wanted to be an active part in deporting the Beatle from American shores. When he achieved everything he could in music, his next hope was to become the greatest conspicuous spy in the history of espionage. He hoped to serve his country like a Jailhouse James Bond. So, on December 21st, 1970, he met with Richard Nixon in the White House. A photo of the pair shaking hands horrified many of his fans, but the strange, secret bond they shared proved even more perturbing: they both hated Lennon with a passion.

When John Lennon sat on Dick Cavett’s couch in 1972, he made the revelation that left millions awestruck when he claimed that the FBI were spying on him. Silence filled homes across the nation. Most of the masses watching on were struck dumb by the thought that Lennon had finally lost it, he’d stepped one toke over the line, and they were watching the downfall of a deranged man. Thankfully, a dossier has since been revealed, serving as proof of the working-class peace espouser’s sanity.

Lodged in the FBI vault, is a 663-page report on “Presley, Elvis A”. Within that, we learn that “he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit.” Furthermore, he was also “of the opinion that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music.” 

This had brewed from the moment Lennon first met the King in Graceland. “John had annoyed Presley by making his anti-war feelings known the moment he stepped into the massive lounge and spotted the table lamps — model wagons engraved with the message: ‘All the way with LBJ,’” Chris Hutchins recalls of their cagey first encounter in the King’s lounge. From thereon the mention of his name would cause him to fly into a “fit of rage“.

Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell has lashed out at Bob Dylan for having bad breath, she called Madonna a “whore“, and said Paul Simon threw way too many words into his songs for his own good. McCartney might have said that Lennon always loved “strong women“, but when it comes to the fierce Mitchell, he certainly wasn’t a fan. However, Mitchell’s reasoning for their mutual dislike reveals her disposition equally.

When two prickly characters meet, someone is going to feel a spike. “When I met John Lennon, it was during his lost year in LA y’know,” Mitchell recalled of their clash. “That’s a class difficulty he had. He’s a working-class lad,” Mitchell explained. “I’m sure he had that same fight with George Martin because he was afraid that he was betraying his class. I know I’m going to get into hot water if I get into this but I have controversial opinions about him.”

“I watched this [English film], which was a roundup of the best musicians of the 20th century,” Mitchell continued. “As soon as it hit my era, the intelligence of it dropped considerably. When it came to me, this guy folded his arms and crossed his feet and said, ‘I never liked Joni Mitchell—she’s too twee.’ Well, that’s what John Lennon was like. It was that fear working-class people have of middle-class people.”

In truth, Lennon never once mentioned Mitchell’s class, he simply thought she was a little snooty and that it showed in her work. He may well have pointed to her own assumptions that his criticism was class motivate as evidence for this very point. Working-class pride and righteous activism is not a vendetta, but a noble cause. Yet, classi aside, perhaps above all, it seems obvious, knowing what we know about their respective characters, that Lennon and Mitchell were always destined to clash.

Paul McCartney

As they all say, there’s a fine line between love and hate.

The final message of Lennon’s divisive nature is that even the fellow who loved him most briefly hated him. Largely, this stemmed from when Lennon spat out, “Tell me, how do you sleep, you c**t?” during the recording of his proto-diss track of Paul McCartney, ‘How Do You Sleep?’.

The reason behind Lennon’s caustic effrontery was that he seemed to pick up on a few subtle digs that McCartney had thrown his way on his second solo album, Ram. While these are not readily apparent, McCartney admitted to one unambiguous jibe. “There was one tiny reference to John in the whole thing,” McCartney told Playboy magazine in 1984, “He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit. In one song, I wrote, ’Too many people preaching practices’.”

Before later adding that the line, “You took your lucky break and broke it in two,” was also aimed at his former bandmate.

Although this might have been petty, the spat was indicative of the anger that had built up between them. This came from natural studio tensions, but it was also worsened by Lennon quipping that McCartney was writing “silly little love songs“ and “granny music“, so it’s unsurprising that the pair’s love certainly waned for a little while. They may well have reconciled their differences and remained a symbol of brotherly love for the world to behold, but even some of the competitiveness that coexisted in their closest years has left McCartney with a great regret: “I never really said, ‘You know, I love you man’. I never really got round to it.”