“He couldn’t do anything”: The solo song that destroyed John Lennon’s voice
Whenever talking about the core sound of The Beatles, everything goes back to the harmonies. Most listeners were no strangers to hearing two-peart harmonies in rock and even the fantastic vocal groups out of Motown when the Fab Four began, but hearing every one of them singing so strong right out of the gate was enough to make girls delirious whenever they tossled their hair singing the vocal break on ‘She Loves You’. But there were more than a few breaking points where John Lennon admitted that he couldn’t take it any more.
Then again, Lennon was always highly critical of his voice before he even became a legend. ‘Twist and Shout’ always lived in infamy in his mind as one of the few songs where his voice was completely shot to hell, and his need to double-track his vocals stemmed from the fact that he never liked the sound of his voice in isolation.
But what was so interesting about his voice was what he could do with it throughout one album. Despite his penchant for singing loud rock and roll songs, Lennon could manage to get even more sentimental than Paul McCartney in a few places, like the frail little child at the centre of ‘Julia’ or the unreleased version of ‘Good Night’, which Macca had said was far superior than what ended up on The White Album with Ringo Starr singing it.
Lennon may have been uncomfortable with his voice, but by the time he started his solo career, he really couldn’t have cared less. He was not remotely interested in making everything sound nice right out of the gate, and while the experimental albums with Yoko Ono had already tested fans’ patience, Plastic Ono Band was the first time that he let everything out that he needed to express.
Outside of closing the book on the Fab Four’s legacy, much of his debut solo record is about him working out his pent-up feelings. He knew that there was more for him to say than standard love songs, and while they do eventually crop up on tracks like ‘Love’, ‘Mother’ really is the mission statement of the whole record, singing about the kind of trouble that he had relating to his issues with a mother and a father who were either distant or never involved in his life.
“John would come in at the end of the session every evening. He’d say, ‘Put ‘Mother’ on.’ I’d drop in at that point and he’d go for the vocal because it was really raw on his voice.”
John Leckie
A song like that needed some emotional weight to it, and while Lennon delivered on the final version with his screams, engineer John Leckie remembered how the song nearly broke his voice, saying, “John would come in at the end of the session every evening. He’d say, ‘Put ‘Mother’ on.’ I’d drop in at that point and he’d go for the vocal because it was really raw on his voice. It’d always have to be at the end of the night, because after that, he couldn’t do anything. He’d lose his voice.”
And while the actual version that ended up on the record is harrowing to listen to, it’s even more harsh listening to the vocals in isolation. The piano might be the one thing anchoring the listener to the ground on the album, but this vocal take is Lennon ageing himself down to that wounded child all over again, to the point where he has nothing left to do but to scream out in pain for the people he loved that abandoned him.
So while the decision to have this tune open the record may have been difficult for many Beatles fans to take in, it was almost necessary for them to hear what he was going through. When he was with The Beatles, he had to keep up appearances in the press, and this was the first time the world saw him in the most authentic light possible.
