The Beatles song John Lennon used to take a swing at Frank Sinatra: “You can’t hear me”
Later down the line, Frank Sinatra gave The Beatles perhaps the biggest compliment they could hope to receive. When talking about their song, ‘Something’, before doing his own cover of the track, Sinatra said it was “one of the best love songs I believe to be written in the past 50 or 100 years”. But years before that, he took a cheap jab at the band, and they jabbed right back.
Music was at an interesting crossroads in the mid-1960s. When we reflect on it, we typically think of that era as the pinnacle of counterculture. Rock and roll dominates our recollections as if the 1960s were a time when everyone in the world was turned on, tuned in and dropped out.
But in reality, the mainstream was still very classic or even ‘vanilla’. Pop music still led the way largely in the charts, and while teenagers might be getting down to the new sounds, their parents certainly weren’t. Instead, they were still hooked on the crooners.
In 1966, while The Beatles were prepping to release Revolver, Frank Sinatra was still earning number-one spots with his record, Strangers in the Night. After a blip in popularity at the start of the new decade, Ol’ Blue Eyes was making a real comeback, reclaiming his place at the top. And while he tried to do that, he took a weird swipe at The Beatles, who were undeniably the ones leading the way in music at the time.
“If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons,” a press release sent out by Sinatra’s team in April 1966 read, continuing, “’Tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is,’ crooned the world’s greatest kid singer in his enigmatic reply, ‘and your bird can swing. But you can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.'”
Recognise those words? That press release was forwarded to The Beatles right when they were at EMI studios working on Revolver. It was also written in a profile in Esquire magazine that “Bird”, the journalist said, “is a favourite Sinatra word. He often inquires of his cronies, ‘How’s your bird?'”
With an odd dig at the Fab Four to fuel them and this strike of inspiration from the press release, ‘And Your Bird Can Sing’ was born, seemingly as a direct response to Sinatra. Directly quoting from the release, The Beatles sing, “You tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is / And your bird can swing / But you can’t hear me / You can’t hear me.”
But they took it even further. In that same Esquire piece, the journalist wrote of Sinatra as “the fully emancipated male … the man who can have anything he wants”. But as The Beatles maintained their position on top while Sinatra was clearly struggling with a bid to regain relevance as the teen invasion of counterculture grew, the Beatles mocked it, singing, “Tell me that you’ve got everything you want / And your bird can sing / She don’t get me / You don’t get me.”
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