The one lyric Paul McCartney considered quintessential John Lennon: “No doubt who wrote it”
The greatest moments in The Beatles’ canon are when John Lennon and Paul McCartney work together on songs. Both of them may have represented mirror images of each other half the time, but without McCartney’s whimsy to balance Lennon’s cynical side, they probably would have never made as many classics as they did. Even though The White Album marks the moment when things began to come to a halt for them as a songwriting team, McCartney thought that ‘I’m So Tired’ is about as pure John Lennon as one could get.
It’s not like the group didn’t want to step away from the collaborative spirit anyway. They had all been to India to practice transcendental meditation, but while they still loved playing together, it was clear that every songwriter had their own separate agenda on how they wanted their tunes to sound in the studio.
Considering how biting Lennon and McCartney could be with each other, it’s almost ironic that George Harrison walked away with the best song on the record in ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. Because listening to Lennon and McCartney’s songs in isolation, you’d swear they were coming from two different solo acts.
If both of them had been made into separate projects, Lennon’s tracks would have been one of the strangest albums released by a massive pop star, whether that was the gentle fingerpicking of ‘Julia’ or managing to cram three different song ideas into one within the span of three minutes on ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’.
For all of the strangeness, ‘I’m So Tired’ is Lennon at his most straightforward. ‘Dear Prudence’ may be prettier, and ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey’ rocks harder, but chilling out with a plain bluesy tune was the perfect way for him to talk about his separation from Yoko Ono, which was causing him bouts of insomnia wondering what was going half a world away.
But the line about cursing Sir Walter Raleigh for introducing tobacco to the world was still Macca’s favourite lyric of Lennon’s looking back, saying, “It has that very special line, ‘And curse Sir Walter Raleigh/ He was such a stupid git.’ That’s a classic line, and it’s so John that there’s no doubt who wrote it. I think it’s 100 percent John.”
Because outside of being one of the most vicious of the Fab Four out of context, putting that kind of line at least shows off that Lennon still had a sense of humour about it. He was going through an emotional hell separating from his wife, but having the foresight to badmouth a manufacturer of tobacco just sounds like him breaking character midway through the track for the hell of it.
But maybe this wasn’t a case of him breaking the character at all. If ‘Revolution 9’ was any indication, Lennon wanted to break out of the confines of his Beatles persona, and hearing him speak so matter-of-factly may have been his meagre attempt at showing his human side outside of the Beatle bubble he had around him.
