The remarkable true stories behind five of John Lennon’s best songs
John Lennon still presents us with a riddle: How can a man whose every move was pretty much documented, remain an enigma? We might know everything about ‘The Smart One’ of The Beatles, but he is an unsolvable puzzle all the same. In part, it is this bottomless depth that made him so beloved—you can wade into the psyche and artistry of the man without ever getting bored.
However, perhaps the best loophole into the cogs of his mind is via the stories behind the songs it created. Lennon had a way of bearing his vulnerability in song and expressing his innermost thoughts and feelings. Granted, that sometimes adds to the problem because of how obfuscated these nuggets dragged from the mire seem to us squares. Thankfully, that’s where his honest explanations come into it.
Below we have compiled some of the best of these, which, by design, are also attributed to some of his best songs. From the laziness of ‘Nowhere Man’ which seemed to forecast his future bed-in for peace, to the all-encompassing entreaty of ‘Mother’, these beautiful tracks lift the lid on a master songwriter and the wherefores of his oddball constitution.
The true stories behind five of John Lennon’s best songs:
‘Come Together’
‘Come Together’ represents a segue into the strange American political life of Lennon. The track was initially written as a campaign song for Timothy Leary as the pro-drugs activist ran for office in California. Without too much nuance, he urged fans to come together over Leary. Sadly, Lennon had backed an outsider who proved a bit too much of a political pariah to make an impact and his campaign was cut short. Nevertheless, he transmuted the song and turned it into something with a much more artistic bend by throwing in abstract absurdity.
The peculiar tale is indicative of Lennon’s approach to politics. He was more interested in artistic subversion than wading in too deeply with the nitty gritty. Eventually, this led to an FBI ploy to have him deported. When John Lennon sat on Dick Cavett’s couch in 1972, he made the revelation that left millions awestruck when he claimed that the FBI were spying on him. Silence filled homes across the nation. Most of the masses watching on were struck dumb by the thought that Lennon had finally lost it and they were watching the downfall of a deranged man. A declassified dossier would later prove him entirely correct.
‘Nowhere Man’
I’d spent five hours that morning,” John Lennon told Playboy Magazine regarding the inception of ‘Nowhere Man’, “Trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then ‘Nowhere Man’ came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down.”
As far as lie-downs go, that’s not a bad one. To take a break and manage to muster up a single that charted in territories all over the world as opposed to just lying there in a deepening pit of self-questioning is a triumph that probably only John Lennon is capable of. As Paul McCartney would go on to say, “When I came out to write with him the next day, he was kipping on the couch, very bleary-eyed. It was really an anti-John song. He told me later, he didn’t tell me then, he said he’d written it about himself, feeling like he wasn’t going anywhere. I think it was actually about the state of his marriage.”
‘Woman’
A matter of days before his death, Lennon opened up about this masterpiece and told Rolling Stone: “’Woman’ came about because, one sunny afternoon in Bermuda, it suddenly hit me what women do for us. Not just what my Yoko does for me, although I was thinking in those personal terms… but any truth is universal. What dawned on me was everything I was taking for granted. Women really are the other half of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of the song. It’s a ‘we’ or it ain’t anything.”
In part, the song is an apology to Yoko Ono after his “thoughtless” lost weekend period where he ventured out for an 18-month bender and engaged in an affair with his assistant May Pang. With a feeling of cathartic forgiveness and genuine appreciation, this track of transcendence became his posthumous hit and helped to define his latter legacy.
‘She Said, She Said’
Peter Fonda is the hidden star behind this gem. His troubled life was interwoven with pop culture in more ways than one. Following his mother’s suicide, Peter and his sister Jane moved to an uncle’s house in Nebraska, where he almost accidentally killed himself. On his 11th birthday, he unintentionally shot himself in the stomach and nearly died.
Years later, while tripping out on LSD with The Beatles, he told John Lennon, “I know what it’s like to be dead”, a line which John Lennon later worked into the ‘She Said, She Said’. It was Lennon’s second acid trip and the experience was one that he simply couldn’t note down in a song.
‘Mother’
Lennon had a turbulent childhood to say the least. As a boy, there is a story that his father tried to sneak him off to a new life in New Zealand away from his largely absent mother. However, she foiled the plan and publicly made him choose between the two. He never saw his father again. However, he didn’t with his mother after that either because she was with a new man, and it fell to his aunt Mimi to raise him.
Lennon remained on good terms with his mother, even though he chose to live with Mimi. However, tragedy would strike in July 1958, when Julia was killed by a car while walking home after visiting her sister’s house. The teenage Lennon never fully reconciled his mother’s sad death, and instead, he turned to drink in a bid to escape his thoughts and often found himself in internal turmoil.
In 1970, he embarked on a programme of primal scream therapy, during which he would literally yell to expunge his soul. “It’s just a matter of breaking the wall that’s there in yourself and come out and let it all hang out to the point that you start crying,” Yoko later said about the therapy to Uncut in 1998. She added: “He was going back to the days of when he wanted to scream, ‘Mother.’ He was able to go back to that childhood, that memory.”
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