The song John Lennon called his ‘Like A Rolling Stone’
In the immediate years after The Beatles split, John Lennon’s relationships with his former bandmates became incredibly bitter. To some degree, it’s understandable that the collapse of the band you helped become the biggest in the world would make you feel a little emotional, but the disdain with which he spoke about his old colleagues who he achieved immeasurable success alongside was perhaps a stretch too far.
Lennon lashed out at George Harrison on a couple of occasions, with the two allegedly having fistfights in the studio during the Let It Be sessions when the band were on the cusp of splitting and rarely talking in the years after. However, Lennon’s relationship with Paul McCartney was even more tense, and the his acrimonious feelings towards his former songwriting partner were publicised in a variety of ways.
To be fair to both parties, McCartney didn’t have a great deal of positive things to say about Lennon after the split either. His song ‘Too Many People’ was allegedly written about his relationship with Lennon and was overtly critical of Lennon’s departure from the band, making subtle jabs at the singer and his wife, Yoko Ono, throughout the track.
In response, Lennon penned the even more cutting ‘How Do You Sleep’, in what can be described as an early exchange of diss tracks between two high profile musicians. In Lennon’s track, he’s a lot less subtle about who the song is being aimed at, and his references to the song ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’ in the lyrics makes it immediately obvious that this is a retort to McCartney’s ‘Too Many People’, albeit with about half the intelligence and wit.
Lennon said in the liner notes to Imagine, the album from which ‘How Do You Sleep’ was taken from, that “it was like Dylan doing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, one of his nasty songs. It’s using somebody as an object to create something. I wasn’t really feeling that vicious at the time, but I was using my resentment towards Paul to create a song. Let’s put it that way”.
In some respects, the song does bear some similarities to the famous Dylan track, although Dylan was intelligent enough to never make it clear who he was being critical of in the song, never once confirming or denying any suspicions of its subject matter. It’s a song that clearly resents someone else and their actions, but it doesn’t do it with anywhere close to the same level of poeticism that Dylan was able to deliver. You can hardly look at a line like Lennon’s “the only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’, and since you’re gone you’re just another day” and say with any conviction that it has the same level of lyrical mastery that “as you stare into the vacuum of his eyes and say, ‘do you want to make a deal?’” does.
Lennon may well have wanted to vent his frustrations at McCartney in retaliation for his original jibe, but there’s absolutely no comparing ‘How Do You Sleep’ to a song of the calibre of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ as far as scathing critiques and character assassinations go.
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