“It was a difficult time”: why John Lennon refused to credit Yoko Ono for ‘Jealous Guy’
The ending of The Beatles was always bound to get a bit nasty. Even though there were some fantastic moments throughout their career, things were going to go sour very quickly once lawyers were brought in and a lot of money started being exchanged between the Fab Four. Although John Lennon was more than happy to live a quiet life on his own, he wasn’t ready to commit fully to his union with Yoko Ono on absolutely everything.
Then again, The Beatles’ breakup was always going to leave a nasty on what was already a tortured soul. Lennon had spent the better part of a decade living with his best mates, and since everything had devolved into everyone moving in different directions and suing each other, it’s no wonder why he had enough unbridled anger to make something as caustic as ‘How Do You Sleep’ to attack Paul McCartney.
But Lennon was always interested in other things than attacking his writing partner. While there needed to be some sort of response to acknowledge that something had taken place, Lennon was more interested in closing that chapter of his life by the end of the 1960s, usually making the most avant-garde music as an excuse to run away from the moptop monster that had followed him around throughout his 20s.
So when he finally made his own material, a lot of his problems got directed inward again. He had spent years trying to unravel the layers of his broken soul, and when Plastic Ono Band came out, he knew that he couldn’t live his life strictly as one cog in this band that excited the entire world. And when Imagine came out, he wasn’t about to stop his emotional streak.
While the album featured tributes like ‘Oh Yoko!’ and ‘Oh My Love’, he still kept Ono at a distance. She had served as a great springboard for many of his greatest ideas, but listening back to a song like ‘Jealous Guy,’ he knew it was better for him to take the brunt of the writing credits rather than splitting them with Ono.
Despite being one of the most emotionally gripping moments of Lennon’s career, Ono said that he refused to give her any credit for fear of what the public would have thought, saying, “Well, if it was just John, [he] would have given me the right credit, but it was a difficult time. No famous songwriter would have thought of splitting the credit with his wife.”
Still, it’s hard not to see the song as being majorly influenced by Ono’s writing. A lot of her poetry was about the bare essentials, but whereas Plastic Ono Band brought all the music back to basics, this was him being as direct as he could using very little window dressing, pleading with his other half to forgive him for all the wrongs that he had made in the past.
Even though footage exists of Lennon working on the song during The Beatles’ sessions, a song about going through Rishikesh would never have worked. This was a softspoken lyric, and while ‘Child of Nature’ does a great job at framing everyone in his mindset circa 1968, ‘Jealous Guy’ is the kind of honesty that Lennon needed to inhabit after peeling back the layers of his fragile mind.
