The 1965 song with the worst lyrics The Beatles ever wrote, according to John Lennon
In 1964, The Beatles came across Bob Dylan for the first time, and it completely revolutionised their outlook on music.
It dawned on the group that it was possible for pop to “go a little further”. In time, they wouldn’t even be peddling art that vaguely resembled pop. They were certified avant-gardists with a bent for the deeply profound and the absolutely bizarre.
All of this happened in one fell swoop. In just about two years, they went from “teeny boppers” to Revolver. The influence of Dylan evidently presided over the sudden transition, but it impacted John Lennon most of all. He began to idolise Dylan’s profundity. There was always deepness to the bespectacled Beatle. His childhood had been pitted with loss and a sense of displacement. Music offered salvation.
So, as the band shifted towards a more serious outlook, he endeavoured to pursue a new level of introspection in his songwriting. The flip side of this was that the poppier tracks often met with his scorn. This was even the case when it was Lennon himself who had written them, and that is certainly how things unfurled when it comes to the ineffably “bland” track ‘It’s Only Love’.
Featuring on their 1965 album Help!, the song found the group in the midst of a transitional period. They were pushing towards a new horizon, but they were also simply pushing full stop. It’s important to note that while their hearts were set on loftier horizons, they had only announced themselves to the world on The Ed Sullivan Show a mere 18 months earlier.
They hadn’t built up enough stock to allow themselves the liberty of painstakingly developing a pioneering new perspective for pop music. There was immense pressure on their shoulders to churn as well as change, and they were all barely 25.
As Paul McCartney improbably reflected, when the band first touched down in America, even with countless eyes upon them, they were worried that they would “just fizzle out as many groups do”. Heading into Help, that was still a distinct possibility, even if it seems impossible today.
Thus, the odd act of conformity to what they knew was to be expected in the early days. So, while ‘It’s Only Love’ might have flourishes of complexity when it comes to its composition, the band hurried the lyrics and felt somewhat crushed by the regrettable outcome. Lennon especially lamented it as a blot on his copybook as he progressed in ever more adventurous ways in his later years.
Even years down the line, Lennon would bemoan the track as their most shallow. “‘It’s Only Love’ is mine,” he recalled in an interview with Playboy, wincing:
“I always thought it was a lousy song.”
He continued, “The lyrics were abysmal. I always hated that song.” He always held his hand up to it, nevertheless, almost seeing it as a juncture within his development in subsequent years, turning a failure into a yardstick for how far he had come and how remiss he was to return to anything short of profound.
In this regard, you can view the track as an essential moment in his discography. In the 1980s, when hits were in short supply for Lennon and his bandmates were, once again, conquering the mainstream, it seemed that ‘It’s Only Love’ served as a portent of the possible pitfalls of chasing hits. He utterly refused to be glib and ensured that he could always stand by his tracks, even if the public didn’t join him in their masses. That was the triumph of The Beatles; they always tested themselves.
Paul McCartney also seemed to see the song as a marker that they had to surpass. “Sometimes we didn’t fight it if the lyric,” he subsequently mused. “[If it] came out rather bland on some of those filler songs like ‘It’s Only Love’. If a lyric was really bad, we’d edit it, but we weren’t that fussy about it, because it’s only a rock ‘n’ roll song. I mean, this is not literature.”
Except songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘I Am the Walrus’ really were literature. They were daring and extreme departures from what the world had come to know. ‘It’s Only Love’ was a reminder of what the world had known all too well and was growing weary of in the heady 1960s. In fact, nobody was wearier of it than the Beatles themselves.
Except maybe Lou Reed, who looked upon songs like ‘It’s Only Love’ and barked, “The Beatles? I never liked The Beatles, I thought they were garbage,” he opined. “I don’t think Lennon did anything until he went solo”.
‘It’s Only Love’ by The Beatles lyrics:
“I get high when I see you go by
My oh, my
When you sigh, my, my inside just flies
Butterflies
Why am I so shy?
When I’m beside youIt’s only love, and that is all
Why should I feel the way I do
It’s only love, and that is all
But it’s so hard
Loving youIs it right that you and I should fight
Every night
Just the sight of you makes night time bright
Very bright
Haven’t I the right
To make it up, girlIt’s only love, and that is all
Why should I feel the way I do
It’s only love, and that is all
But it’s so hard
Loving youYes, it’s so hard
Loving you
Loving you…”
Well, it’s true, they’re certainly not quite War and Peace. But perhaps without sustaining their success and the mania surrounding them with a wellspring of passable pop like this, we would never have arrived at ‘I am the Walrus’ and ‘A Day in the Life’.
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