The songs John Lennon said were too bad to release: “You couldn’t use them”
If there’s one thing John Lennon could be counted on throughout his lifetime, it was talking trash about his own work.
Even though there are many people these days who claim that The Beatles are overrated, no one seemed to agree with that sentiment more than Lennon, to the point where he was practically dismissing most of his records within the first few months of the Fab Four splitting up. And while he could talk a big game about how Paul McCartney ended up sabotaging his work, Lennon could be equally as cutthroat when he thought one of his songs didn’t match his standards.
Then again, it’s hard to really agree with every single assessment of Lennon. This is the same guy who said ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ was nothing but garbage, and since that song has become one of their most beloved classics, it’s not like he was always right when he talked about their songs not working. But it all comes down to the sounds that he heard in his head whenever he wanted to make a particular song.
And if he had strong feelings about how his own material was supposed to sound, you’d better believe that he had an opinion about what his idol’s best songs should sound like. But when Lennon first started off his solo career, the thought of him making a covers album like Rock n’ Roll wasn’t really in the cards for him. He had spent his final years moving away from playing other people’s material, but after being slapped with a lawsuit, his way of serving his time for stealing Chuck Berry’s song ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ became the album that would not end.
The whole thing seemed like a decent enough romp when working with rock and roll legend Phil Spector, but every single session felt like it was ripped straight from hell. Lennon was hitting the booze pretty hard in those days, and since he was separated from Yoko Ono, there’s a lot of secondhand pain that you can feel in his voice in between him shredding his larynx through songs like ‘Slippin’ n’ Slidin’.
Not even bringing the two best musical minds in rock history could have saved this record. Even with all of their business dealings being water under the bridge, the fact that Lennon managed to get Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder down for a session to play a bunch of old tunes and still made it sound like trash is the clearest indication that something was very wrong whenever they walked into the studio.
And even after Lennon got back the tapes from Spector, he felt that a lot of the material was nowhere near the kind of album that he wanted to put out, saying, “I started playing the eight tracks – I didn’t even wanna hear them. Only about four of them were savable, the rest of them were… miles out of tune… just mad. You couldn’t use them, 28 guys playing out of tune!! I just salvaged what there was of them. And I was getting depressed. What can I do? Make an EP? They don’t have EPs in America. Put them out one by one? I wasn’t sure enough of their quality that they were gonna be singles. Some of them were alright, but I didn’t feel confident about them.”
When the songs did finally see the light of day, though, you could hear that Lennon was able to tweak them ever so slightly. His version of ‘Stand By Me’ is one of the best covers that he ever did, and while you can definitely hear the excessive side of him coming out on a few of the tunes, the fact that it ends with a sublime version of ‘Just Because’ feels like the perfect snapshot of the kind of music that Lennon loved when he was a kid.
And since this was the era when movies like American Graffiti had begun the 1960s nostalgia, the fact that Lennon was able to get a little hint of that magic right before he retired for five years was a great way to put a bookmark in his career – he had been a champion for peace ever since the 1970s started, but this was the record that showed everyone he could still rock those same Chuck Berry licks when he wanted to.
