The 1966 song John Lennon could never approve of: “I don’t like it”
Anything that The Beatles ever did was usually given the most critical treatment by John Lennon.
He may have been the one who helped write every single one of those classics, but even in the modern world, where contrarians are a dime a dozen, you couldn’t find anyone who had more of a problem with the Fab Four than Lennon did after the band broke up. But even when they were still going strong, there were certain songs that Lennon was convinced that he was never going to like, even if he played the song 100 times for days on end.
Then again, that always tends to happen with working songwriters. No one has to like every single thing that they create, and even if there are some fantastic love songs in Lennon’s catalogue, are we seriously going to make the case that a song like ‘Little Child’ deserves the same kind of praise and respect as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ or ‘I Am the Walrus’. Those songs sound like they come from two separate bands, but it took a while for Lennon to reach that point in his songwriting.
For the longest time, the Fabs were known as a teenybopper band that happened to write great pop songs, but somewhere around the time of Rubber Soul, Lennon didn’t want to keep making the same tunes over and over again. The band were growing up by leaps and bounds, and when you listen to the love songs on that record, a tune like ‘Girl’ pales in comparison to what a tune like ‘If I Fell’ or ‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’ were doing a few years before.
Lennon was clearly borrowing from his heroes like Bob Dylan, but Dylan was paying attention right back whenever he heard the band’s tunes. You have to remember that Dylan was a popular artist for those who were paying attention, but if he was going to garner any mainstream hits, he was going to need to borrow a few tricks from what his British friends were doing. And while ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ changed the game for a lot of people, ‘4th Time Around’ was a bit too much of a steal in Lennon’s mind.
After all, the main riff of Dylan’s tunes is pretty much a carbon copy of what ‘Norwegian Wood’ was on Rubber Soul. It was clear that Dylan meant the song as an homage to what The Beatles had been doing, but for someone who had studied everything that Dylan was doing over the past few years, Lennon felt too insecure about his own song to think that Dylan was having a laugh at his expense.
‘Norwegian Wood’ was clearly a step up from what the Fabs and Dylan had been doing, but ‘4th Time Around’ was the first time that Lennon said that he couldn’t listen to one of Dylan’s tracks, saying, “I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I don’t like it.’ I didn’t like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn’t like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out-and-out skit, you know, but it wasn’t. It was great. I mean, he wasn’t playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit.”
And so began one of the single greatest songwriting battles in music history. It was all in good fun most of the time, but when looking through Lennon and Dylan’s solo careers, there would be the odd moment where they would lob songs at each other in good fun, whether that was Dylan playing off of something that Lennon said or the former Beatle writing ‘Serve Yourself’ after Dylan became an evangelical on ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’.
That relationship started off pretty rocky, but Lennon didn’t need to spend his time being paranoid about Dylan’s songwriting. His American colleague was clearly a fan of what he did, and while anything that came out of the folkie’s mouth had the potential of sounding sarcastic, there was a sincere appreciation underneath those dark shades and curly hair back in the day.
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