The line John Lennon thought was too cheesy to use: “That was such a cliché”
The Beatles always had a great way of balancing each other out throughout their time together. Even if not every song was a winner, it was always better to have John Lennon and Paul McCartney bouncing ideas off each other rather than leaving them to their own devices once they got to the back half of their career. While both of them had grown into seasoned veterans by the time of Abbey Road, Lennon was always a stickler when it came to how a proper lyric should sound.
Then again, Lennon’s penchant for the written word wasn’t always the most coherent thing in the world. He freely admitted that there were a handful of his songs that didn’t quite work well lyrically, and even when he made some of his masterpieces like ‘I Am The Walrus’, he even admitted that the whole point of the song was to sound weird than trying to have a coherent storyline going throughout the track.
When he wanted to touch on something heavy, Lennon could be the most well-spoken out of every member of the group. Despite everyone’s presumptions that all McCartney did was make catchy tunes with lighthearted lyrics, Lennon could still put together a brilliant melody with lyrics that could break your heart, whether that was looking at a better world on ‘Imagine’ or renouncing every single thing that he put his heart and soul into on ‘God’.
There is a way to go too far in that respect, though, and Some Time in New York City is still a mess of an album during his solo career. He had clearly started seeing the lyrics as the main focus with the songs as an afterthought, and since he was operating at half capacity, it felt like listening to a lot of propaganda slogans from a protestor rather than the songwriting machine of old.
“How many times can you say the same thing over and over?”
john lennon
While Lennon and Yoko Ono admitted that the record was destructive to their creative ideas, Mind Games was where he swung all the way back to pure melody. A lot of the tunes may have been pining for Ono in light of their brief separation, but hearing him return to his roots on ‘Tight A$’ and make a lush ballad like ‘Out of the Blue’ was exactly what most fans needed to hear. And while the title track says it all for the record, there are still pieces that Lennon thought needed to be taken out.
Lennon had the concept of making a song about a song that preached love and peace, but some lines were a bit too hippy for him to be using, saying, “It was originally called ‘Make Love Not War’, but that was such a cliché that you couldn’t say it anymore, so I wrote it obscurely, but it’s all the same story. How many times can you say the same thing over and over? When this came out in the early 1970s, everybody was starting to say the ’60s was a joke, it didn’t mean anything, those love-and-peaceniks were idiots.”
But while ‘Mind Games’ is a much better title, it’s easy to see why those kinds of cliches work. Lennon’s ‘Power to the People’ is a brilliant call to arms, and even when in the hands of Patti Smith later on in her career, hearing her flip that on its head for ‘People Have the Power’ is the kind of line that can always put a fire in the belly of everyone wanting to change the world around them.
So despite Mind Games being a fairly mixed bag compared to Imagine or Plastic Ono Band, the title track is the clearest way to see where Lennon’s head was as he dreamed of a much better world. ‘Imagine’ may be the definitive version of that sentiment, but it never hurts to remind the audience why love is all they need.
