The John Lennon song that made Ringo Starr storm out of the studio: “John wasn’t happy”
There’s usually a certain bubble placed around the era that The Beatles were together. As much as things got ugly towards the end of their time as a band, most like to remember everything being all smiles in the studio until one day when business came in and tore everything apart. Nothing happens that easily in history, and even when the band got back together to create one more masterpiece, Ringo Starr wanted no part in being dictated on the song ‘Polythene Pam’.
After the band finished work on The White Album, most should be grateful that they could even stand to be in the same room with each other for more than five minutes. The band may have been fractured, but as long as the music was still of good quality, it didn’t really seem to matter. In theory, yes, but the aborted Get Back was proof enough that whatever they had going for them back in the day wasn’t working anymore.
Rather than put on the boxing gloves one more time, Paul McCartney suggested that the band create one special album for the fans, which turned into Abbey Road. The only problem was that they had a lot of half-finished songs that nobody knew what to do with.
While songs like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘Something’ were being tested out during the sessions for Get Back, the full tracks only constituted half of the album. Inspired by George Martin’s idea, the band figured the best way to recycle these tunes was to make a huge medley out of them, despite none having any connection to the others.
Though John Lennon was opposed to the idea at first, he did have a few ideas about how he wanted ‘Polythene Pam’ to sound. Although the song features one of George Harrison’s most lyrical guitar solos on the record, it’s still fairly acoustic-oriented, with Lennon playing the strings as if he’s trying to break them half the time.
The only problem was the drums, eventually leading to Starr storming out of the studio for a while. As engineer Geoff Emerick recalled to Music Radar, “John wasn’t happy with the drumming on Polythene Pam. He had some problems with Ringo’s performance, and Ringo got pissed off and split for a couple of days. But he came back and redid the track, and John was pleased”.
From the sounds of it, Starr was also a real workhorse on the rest of the album. Outside of his second fully-written song on ‘Octopus’s Garden’, Starr worked his ass off to make sure everything sounded right, from counting through the confusing time signature of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ to playing his first and only drum solo he ever laid down on a Beatles record on ‘The End’.
‘Polythene Pam’ also sounds amazing due to that hard work. Compared to the other mellow grooves on previous Lennon songs like ‘Come Together’, there’s almost a nervous energy that’s closer to punk in how Starr performs the track, keeping everything pretty energetic before it crashes into McCartney’s ‘She Came In Through the Bathroom Window’.
Considering how much work they put into it, though, it’s a shame that the song is criminally short, only lasting a minute before the song is out. That’s The Beatles’ work ethic for you, though. Any song demanded careful attention, and if it lasted only a few seconds, it had to be up to their standards.
