The 1967 song John Lennon could never imagine making: “I would never dream”
The entire magic of John Lennon and Paul McCartney was always because they never quite fit together.
They were always two completely different songwriters whenever they wrote theory tunes, but it took Lennon’s snideness to help balance out all of the chipper tunes that McCartney wrote every single time he got on his ‘granny music’ streak. Each of them was able to keep the other in check every time they performed, but there were a few tunes that Lennon said were well beyond anything that he could ever write.
First of all, it’s not like Lennon was the same kind of musician that his friend was every single time they played. He was never looking to be the greatest musician in the world, and sometimes his limitations were his greatest strength. He didn’t know the first thing about studio production, but that naivete is what made him believe that a tune like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ could manage to sound so weird when they laid it down with George Martin.
The band were already looking to go off in different directions after they left the road, but the Sgt Pepper period is either one of their greatest records or an album that the band doesn’t want to talk about. The idea was unprecedented for the time, but compared to McCartney’s vision for the project, both Lennon and George Harrison had some trepidation before they got into the mindset of some imaginary band.
This kind of performative playing wasn’t what Lennon signed up for when he first made his tunes, and since ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was a lot more personal, he didn’t want to suddenly make characters in his tunes. Then again, Macca was already ahead of all his bandmates when it came time to make the idea of a fictionalised group with Billy Shears as the frontman and different characters.
McCartney’s tunes could be little short stories depending on which song you were listening to, and while he had been woodshedding tunes like ‘When I’m 64’ ever since performing in the band’s days at the Cavern Club, Lennon felt that there was no way that he could have ever come up with a tune like that if he had tried, saying, “Paul’s, completely. I would never dream of writing a song like that. There’s some things I never think about, and that’s one of them.”
That might sound like a diss, but it’s more about the way that Lennon approached his songs half the time. He had a separate musical persona that wrote those puppy love songs during their moptop phase, but whenever you listened to one of the band’s records post-1966, you were usually getting something more introspective from Lennon, whether it was talking about his love for Yoko Ono or unpacking his own personal baggage on tunes like ‘Julia’ or ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’.
Turning himself into another entertainer wasn’t what he was looking for in 1967, but maybe Lennon just needed to catch up to what his bandmate was doing. Sgt Pepper had the makings of a concept record, but even if the concept fell apart, Lennon seemed to take the imaginary band idea to the nth degree later in life, eventually working on the Plastic Ono Band while the Fab Four were still technically together.
He didn’t mind the idea of working on other projects like that, but they needed to have a lot more passion behind it than what he was hearing out of McCartney. His writing partner could turn his tunes into little short stories, but whereas McCartney could have been a musical novelist, Lennon was more about structuring his tunes like a subtle journey into his own mind whenever he sang.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.