The John Lennon song Paul McCartney said held up over time: “It stands for what I stand for now”
Time tends to be an artist’s worst enemy. As much as certain masterstrokes might work great at the moment, no one can really predict whether that same piece of art is going to hold up decades later or even matter in a few weeks’ time. Although The Beatles have had a golden halo put around most of their greatest work ever since their breakup, Paul McCartney considered John Lennon’s ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ one of the more relevant tunes he ever wrote.
Because by the time the Fab Four had left the road, there was no point in them writing sentimental love songs every time they got into the studio. They were grown men at this point, and that meant actually sounding like they were maturing, whether that was talking about their internal feelings of alienation or writing an anthem for the counterculture on ‘All You Need is Love’.
And while Macca did have his personal side, there wasn’t a single disingenuous bone in Lennon’s body. No matter what he thought, he would normally write a song about it, and when sessions for The White Album began, he was more open than ever on tracks about his mother like ‘Julia’ or when he tried his best to cram ideas together on ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’.
Out of all the Lennon tunes submitted for the album, ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ is by far the funniest. Since McCartney had already gone down a slightly country route on tunes like ‘Rocky Raccoon’, this is Lennon’s mirror image of that concept, complete with a Spanish guitar opening before telling a tall tale about a man hunting for sport.
Despite having a lighthearted tone, there’s always been a satirical angle behind half of this song. It might celebrate Mr Bill for being able to kill any game that he sees out in the wild, but it’s clear that Lennon is painting him as the kind of boneheaded huntsman who thinks that having a gun in his hand somehow gives him dominion over every animal in the wild.
So, for as much as it sounds like a singalong, it’s absolutely biting, and for McCartney, the sentiment was as relevant as it was in 1968, recalling in 1994, “This is another of his great songs, and it’s one of my favourites to this day because it stands for a lot of what I stand for now. ‘Did you really have to shoot that tiger’ is its message. ‘Aren’t you a big guy? Aren’t you a brave man?’ I think John put it very well.”
And it’s not like McCartney hasn’t taken this message to heart, either, eventually becoming a full vegetarian when getting together with his wife, Linda. It seemed that the world had yet to pick up on what Lennon was alluding to regarding the mistreatment of animals, with his writing partner eventually penning ‘Looking for Changes’ in the early 1990s about how man has become too much of a predator regarding animals.
While Lennon would become a lot more pointed about his social comments in his solo career, this is still one of the greatest examples of him landing a satirical jab. ‘Bungalow Bill’ might like to kill, but there’s probably a good contingency of Fab fans who don’t realise that that’s an indictment.
