“Changed my sights”: the song John Lennon didn’t want to define him
Any artist who has seen at least half of the heights that John Lennon would have been more than happy to die at peace knowing that they had made it.
There are simply no other people on this Earth that seemed to have the same kind of golden halo put around them as all of The Beatles did, and over the years, it seems like their star has only seemed to rise the more people go back to their iconic tracks. But as much as Lennon had become a god among men for a lot of people, there wasn’t a single person on this Earth who seemed to have as much disregard for their own celebrity.
Lennon didn’t want to be put in a box throughout any part of his life, and by the time that the band started to become one of the most unconventional rock stars of all time, he seemed genuinely interested in toying with what he could get away with. ‘Revolution 9’ was already a strange interlude at the very end of The White Album, but all of the avant-garde albums that he was making with Yoko Ono around the same time sounded like him trying to actively diminish his celebrity.
No one seemed to approve of what he was doing, and looking through a lot of those records, it’s not like he was shooting for hit singles if you listen to every single piece of ‘Cambridge 1969’. But when he finally came back to the world of pop music on his first solo albums, he was looking to go even further with what he could do with his voice. ‘Cold Turkey’ was as blunt a statement as he could have made at the time, but when listening to Plastic Ono Band, every single veil that he had over him was taken off.
He wanted to show everyone the real man underneath everything, and there were more than a few songs that were incredibly blunt about how far he had come. He didn’t believe in Beatles anymore like he said on ‘God’, and while it was okay for the rest of the world to move on right along with him, the lines that he was getting away with her were enough to reduce fans to tears, like him talking about his harsh childhood without his parents on ‘Mother’ or the primal screams that he lets out on ‘Well Well Well’.
No one really wanted to hear him make these kinds of songs, but this was only a good thing as far as Lennon could see. He had gone through his time as a pop star, and while he said in one of his most famous songs that he would never lose affection for what came before, he also didn’t want to live the rest of his life being defined by the songs that he had been singing when he was still figuring out what songwriting was.
The pre-Dylan years of the band were a lot closer to teenybopper music, and while there was some great music, Lennon felt that ‘She Loves You’ shouldn’t have been a part of his legacy, saying, “I never wanted the Beatles to be has-beens, I wanted to kill it while it was on top. Remember I said ten years ago, ‘I’m not going to be singing She Loves You at thirty’. Although I expressed it that, by thirty, I guess I would have woken up a bit or changed my sights.” And it’s not hard to see the difference between that decade of time in between both of those projects.
Compared to everything on Plastic Ono Band, ‘She Loves You’ feels like a distant memory, and when you look at the way that Lennon was working, there was no way that he could have managed to match what he had done if he tried. He had new strengths at this point, and his best songs were now about dissecting what love was all about rather than telling the same puppy love stories that he had been used to.
So when Lennon eventually talked about wanting to go back and re-record all of the old Beatles tunes that he did, it might not have been about him thinking that all of them was pure crap. He was just a different person than he was back then, and the idea of him revisiting a song like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ would have held a much greater resonance with him after years away from the days of the moptops.
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