The Beatles classic that Paul McCartney describes as “an anti-John song”
There aren’t many revolutionaries quite like John Lennon. The Beatles man somehow once coupled a global protest with one of the longest lie-ins in history when he curled up with Yoko Ono for two week-long stints dubbed the Bed-ins for Peace. And when he wasn’t lying down for a good cause, he was lying down for pleasure, famously quipping, “Time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted time.”
It was that same act of idleness that inspired a Beatles classic. And there’s a lesson in creative flow for all of us therein; sometimes you can’t force it. “I’d spent five hours that morning,” John Lennon told Playboy Magazine regarding the inception of ‘Nowhere Man’, “Trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then ‘Nowhere Man’ came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down.”
As far as lie-downs go, that’s not a bad one. To take a break and manage to muster up a single that charted in territories all over the world as opposed to just lying there in a deepening pit of self-questioning is a triumph that probably only John Lennon is capable of. Albeit the irony is that the song itself actually comes from the place of self-pity, it’s just that Lennon transfigured that state of being into something typically profound.
As Paul McCartney would go on to say, “When I came out to write with him the next day, he was kipping on the couch, very bleary-eyed. It was really an anti-John song. He told me later, he didn’t tell me then, he said he’d written it about himself, feeling like he wasn’t going anywhere. I think it was actually about the state of his marriage.”
“It was in a period where he was a bit dissatisfied with what was going on,” Macca recalled, depicting a period for The Beatles when they were coming age in the adult sense amid the biggest fanfare the world has ever seen. “However, it led to a very good song. He treated it as a third-person song, but he was clever enough to say, ‘Isn’t he a bit like you and me?’ – ‘Me’ being the final word.”
“I thought of myself sitting there,” Lennon once reflected, “Doing nothing and getting nowhere,” and that’s very much the same quandary that the protagonist of the piece finds himself in. Just as the lyrics suggest: “Knows not where he’s going to / Isn’t he a bit like you and me?” – the protagonist is far from alone.
It was a stint of idleness that proved incredibly profitable for the Fab Four too. Aside from the revenue generated from the finished product, the original hand-written lyrics themselves fetched a pretty penny, selling for $455,500 at an auction in New York in 2003. Not bad for something scratched up on the carpet following a nap.
After all, sometimes, that’s the most creative place to be. As Lennon affirms: “Once I’d thought of that, it was easy. It all came out. No, I remember now, I’d actually stopped trying to think of something. Nothing would come. I was cheesed off and went for a lie-down, having given up. Then I thought of myself as ‘Nowhere Man’ – sitting in his nowhere land.” The song glides from thereon in a fitting fashion—like the moment you stop forcing the saw is the moment it slides along like its cutting butter.
