The Beatles song John Lennon wanted to delete from history
If you have been an integral part of an everlasting river of incredible songs, the chances are that you won’t like all of them. However, when it comes to John Lennon and The Beatles, not only will that notion be true, but the feeling will also come with millions of fans who are slightly irate at the idea. The group have developed a section of society that is simply incandescent about The Beatles’ output and will stop at nothing to protect the sanctity of those songs. But it’s hard to ignore one of the founding members.
The truth is that the entire band was happy to share their thoughts on the music they created. They habitually picked out the ones that didn’t quite sit right as often as they celebrated the tunes that caught fire. But, as the years have passed, the bandmates have been more careful in how they speak about the work of the band in light of the growing, protective fandom surrounding their music. That said, Lennon was never afraid of a little backlash every now and then, and he would have undoubtedly welcomed such a fan furore.
In the now-iconic interview with Rolling Stone back in 1970, Lennon was still reeling from the disbandment of the Beatles and was clearly keen to make his feelings known. That sense of discontent might not have been because the group had called it a day, but instead, it had all come crashing down because Paul McCartney had decided to. It was an issue that had always irked the bespectacled Beatle, largely because he had tried to leave the band quietly the previous year.
Lennon had realistically been out of the Beatles for months when McCartney made the announcement. Having been the principal founding member of the group, its collapse hurt Lennon. It meant that the following year, he spent most of his time speaking as part of high-profile interviews to ensure the Beatles were under his foot in some capacity or another.
That’s not to say he didn’t share some sweet moments, too. In the same interview, Lennon rattled off a selection of his favourite moments from the band’s brimming catalogue, much to the delight of Beatles fans the world over. After avoiding a simple question from Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner on Lennon’s favourite song that he ever wrote for the Beatles, he delivers a typically flagrant response: “I always liked ‘[I Am The] Walrus’, ‘Strawberry Fields’, ‘Help’, ‘In My Life’”. Not leaving time for pause, Wenner interjects: “Why ‘Help!’?” he asks before Lennon delivers a typically coloured response.
The singer and guitarist replied with verve that he loved the tunes because of their collective authenticity: “Because I meant it, it’s real. The lyric is as good now as it was then; it’s no different, you know. It makes me feel secure to know that I was that sensible or whatever — well, not sensible, but aware of myself. That’s with no acid, no nothing… well, pot or whatever.”
Lennon clarifies his point: “It was just me singing ‘help’, and I meant it, you know. I don’t like the recording that much, the song I like. We did it too fast to try and be commercial.”
Equally, the songs Lennon picks out on the opposite end of the scale are done so because, to him, they appear phoney or unwarranted – needless puffs of perfumed pop rather than solid iron art to hang your hat of credibility on. Over the years, he has called out McCartney’s love of music hall ditties as “granny shit” and taken a particular dislike to his co-songwriter’s widely derided ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. But it’s not only the songs written by others that he dislikes.
One track, in particular, stood out to Lennon as the band’s worst. The song he mentioned was the Rubber Soul track ‘Run For Your Life’. Lennon noted at the time: “I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he revealed. Such flippancy was not something Lennon would take into his later work. It’s a large part of why the track fell so flat with him.
The track takes a line from Elvis Presley’s song ‘Baby Let’s Play House’: “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”. The line refers to preferring to murder a girlfriend rather than seeing her be unfaithful to him. The line prompted one radio listener to claim the track promoted domestic violence against women and saw the Ottawa radio station CFRA ban the track from the airwaves.
It’s a piece of lyricism that, among the many elements of The Beatles’ output, deserves to see the inside of the bin and is never picked back up. Lennon said: “It was inspired from – this is a very vague connection – from ‘Baby Let’s Play House’, there was a line on it, I used to like specific lines from songs, so I wrote it around that, but I didn’t think it was that important.”
Considering the abusive undertones, it’s a track that most Beatles fans in the 21st century would rather see the back of, just like John Lennon would have.
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