‘The Word’: the John Lennon song that changed The Beatles forever
“So, they sent them down from Liverpool,” George Martin recalled of his first meeting with The Beatles. “And when I listened to what they were doing, it was okay, but it wasn’t brilliant. It was okay, but I thought, ‘Why should I be interested in this?’” Going from an early prognosis like that to the biggest band in the world in a matter of months, these days, people would call you ‘indsutry plants. ‘ But part of the transcendent beauty of the Fab Four is their evident evolution.
They began as upbeat kids who just wanted to catch a whiff of the dream that Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and a few more of their heroes were emanating. But soon, a leap presented itself to them to go beyond that and being a new sense of spiritualism to the world. It was a bridge the band were happy to cross, bringing along a brand new message as they came. It was a John Lennon song that would change The Beatles forever.
John Lennon’s contributions to songwriting can never really be underestimated. He and Paul McCartney’s partnership is bafflingly fruitful. From a very young age, the duo could sit down and crash out a pop record that could, and most often did, hit the top of the charts. But while pop stardom is all well and good, soon enough, they wanted more.
When The Beatles met a singer by the name of Bob Dylan in 1964, their worlds were changed, almost overnight. While many will point towards Dylan’s apparent dosing of the Fab Four with marijuana, introducing the group to the drug and getting the band stoned for the first time. We’d say it was his unique songwriting style that appealed most to the band.
McCartney and Lennon were transfixed by his ability to make songs that not only gathered attention from the public but also bore the soul of their author. This was an alluring proposition, and Lennon began to employ it throughout the songs on 1965’s Rubber Soul album. The record was imbued with the life and times of those who wrote it, and it marked a massive change for the group.
From pop stars to icons, Lennon and McCartney decided to use their new position as the mouthpiece of a generation to spread a brand new message, the song the pair used to share their new theories was ‘The Word’. It was curious off-kilter and would’ve been kicked out of town by Meet The Beatles, but its attraction was also obvious, especially to the band.
The song marked the bridge between songs like ‘She Loves You’ and ‘All You Need is Love’ and saw the Fab Four write about love as a concept for the very first time. As Lennon says in The Beatles’ Anthology about the track, “It sort of dawned on me that love was the answer, when I was younger, on the Rubber Soul album. My first expression of it was a song called ‘The Word’.
“The word is ‘love’, in the good and the bad books that I have read, whatever, wherever, the word is ‘love’. It seems like the underlying theme to the universe.” It was clear that the influence The Beatles held had finally landed on the band members’ shoulders.
It’s fair to say that while they were opening their own minds to their newfound roles, they did have some help in the matter too. The introduction of marijuana into the band’s career is well-documented and Lennon confirmed the drug’s influence on the track, “‘The Word’ was written together, but it’s mainly mine. You read the words, it’s all about – gettin’ smart. It’s the marijuana period. It’s love, it’s the love-and-peace thing. The word is ‘love’, right?”
It’s something McCartney confirmed in Many Years From Now: “We smoked a bit of pot, then we wrote out a multicoloured lyric sheet, the first time we’d ever done that. We normally didn’t smoke when we were working. It got in the way of songwriting because it would just cloud your mind up – ‘Oh, shit, what are we doing?’ It’s better to be straight. But we did this multicoloured thing.” The lyric sheet was eventually given to John Cage as a birthday present from Yoko Ono but the message remains with us all to this day. It’s one that you think of when you think of the Fab Four.
The Beatles’ catalogue can be split into two factions. One saw the band’s rise, their meteoric rise, to the top of the pop charts and notoriety around the world that had never truly been seen before. The other saw the group mature into mercurial musicians and outspoken role models for a new generation. ‘The Word’ acts as the bridge between these two moments and changed The Beatles forever. So, you may as well say it changed the world to boot.
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