The song John Lennon wanted to walk out on: “The feeling in the studio wasn’t good”
From the minute that The Beatles called it a day, John Lennon was going to be doing whatever the hell he wanted.
He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life tied to one band, and even though he still had a few solo records to make as part of his contract, he wanted to use it as an excuse to vent his feelings rather than make the same pop songs that he and Paul McCartney had made all those years ago. But that doesn’t mean that everything he got up to in his solo career was exactly fun whenever he got behind the microphone.
I mean, no one would have said that going through the recording of an album like Plastic Ono Band was fun by any means. Lennon was going through some of the hardest therapeutic exercises of his life, and while he would have gladly done whatever he could to get his mind straight, you can feel the pure pain behind his words as he’s singing songs like ‘Mother’ or renouncing his old band on ‘God’.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still get some of his friends involved on his records. He definitely needed some time before working with Macca on anything, but it didn’t hurt to have George Harrison contributing guitar to the album Imagine, especially when he was tearing up some of the slide guitar lines on ‘How Do You Sleep’. Then again, if there was one Beatle that could bring every band member together, it was Ringo Starr.
He definitely was the least ambitious out of every member of the band in terms of songwriting, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have some fun with his old friends. He and Lennon in particular were always the best of friends whenever they worked on his records, and even though not every one of Starr’s records was an absolute knockout, it’s hard not to get a big smile on your face when you hear Lennon counting in songs like ‘Goodnight Vienna’ with the rest of the band.
By the end of the 1970s, though, Starr had started to hit a bit of a lull with his records. It seemed like the further that he got away from the band’s breakup, the more people started to realise that the band were never going to get back together, so it was no use trying to cope with Starr’s standard rock and roll records. And while Lennon could still find time to throw in a few songs for his old friend, he didn’t exactly have the best time with ‘Cookin’ In the Kitchen of Love’.
The song itself is one of the more mindless songs that Lennon had written for Starr, but when working in the studio, he came dangerously close to storming out of the studio, saying, “Arif Mardin … no fault of Arif’s, but just the vibes in the studio were not good that day. And I’d come all the way from New York with Yoko. I didn’t really wanna go down there and do the session. And Ringo had asked, so we went down there and did it, but the feeling in the studio wasn’t good and the track didn’t come alive at all. And I’m thinking what the hell am I doing down here, you know, being taken for granted, I felt.”
While Lennon was able to grin and bear it for the sake of Starr’s song, it’s hard to think of anyone trying to go in a different direction from what he was doing. Arif Mardin was simply doing his job, but considering he also went on to produce the absolute trainwreck on Ringo the 4th, he could have certainly taken a few cues from Lennon when working on some of his songs than ignoring the former Beatle.
No one could have expected that this would be the final song that Lennon would ever give to Starr, but the drummer probably learned a good lesson about how to handle the studio with his fellow Fabs. He certainly did get by with a little help from his friends most of the time, but it’s important to never take them for granted.
