The throwaway Beatles song John Lennon hated more than any other
Everyone wants to be a rich and famous rock star, but it seems as though no one is prepared for the pitfalls that often follow success. John Lennon was one of those people, as the moment that The Beatles broke America, his passion for the music they were making steadily started to dwindle.
There were a few issues Lennon had with the music The Beatles were putting out at the time, but one of the biggest was his struggle to be truly honest in his lyrics. Sure, the world was happily singing along to ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, but once he got into Bob Dylan’s work, something clicked – he saw just how powerful words could be, and he wanted in. Shame his record label didn’t quite see it the same way.
As far as the band’s label was concerned, it was very simple: everyone liked The Beatles, people enjoyed dancing to their music and swooning over the members and their mop-tops, so they continued playing into that. Vague love songs, charming interviews and upbeat live shows were pushed to the forefront of the band’s priorities, and before you knew it, Lennon was writing tracks for the sake of it as opposed to actually taking time to carefully craft pieces of music.
Granted, there are a fair few songs from this period that he was proud of, predominantly the ones where he got to show slivers of his true self to the listener. When asked about his favourite Beatles songs, those that come packaged with elements of truth were the ones which made the cut.
“Because I mean it, it’s real,” said Lennon when explaining why he felt so drawn to the track ‘Help!’, “The lyric is as good now as it was then, it’s no different, you know. It makes me feel secure to know that I was that sensible or whatever, well, not sensible, but aware of myself. That’s with no acid, no nothing…well pot or whatever […] It was just me singing ‘help’, and I meant it, you know. I don’t like the recording that much, the song I like. We did it too fast to try and be commercial.”
Of course, for the most part, a lot of the songs that Lennon was writing, he wasn’t a fan of. The record labels were pressuring him for extensive releases, and the songs he wanted to write were often rejected. As such, he would often pull lines from other songs and make a new one around them.
He did this with the track ‘Run For Your Life’, a pretty disturbing number about a jaded lover insistent on killing his ex if she doesn’t want to be with him. “I never liked ‘Run For Your Life’ because it was a song I just knocked off,” he explained, “It was inspired from—this is a very vague connection—from ‘Baby Let’s Play House’. There was a line on it; I used to like specific lines from songs, ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’, so I wrote it around that, but I didn’t think it was that important.”
The track isn’t a fan favourite, and as evidenced, Lennon would often rehash how it is his least favourite Beatles song, not necessarily because of the haunting connotations, but rather because it was a nothing event birthed from a nothing idea.
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