What is the worst Beatles number one?
Picking the worst Beatles songs tends to be like pulling teeth for any serious music fan. Out of all their albums, there aren’t a ton of moments where the Fab Four completely struck out, and discounting the album cuts like ‘Revolution 9’, most of what showed up on the hit parade was usually the most inventive stuff that they could think of at the time. Although the band kept growing with every subsequent release, it wasn’t until one of their final singles came out that they had their first forgettable number-one song.
Then again, it’s hard to judge what a “failed” number one is at the moment. Most people may have tried to put a golden halo over everything The Beatles did, but it’s hard to take that logic seriously when John Lennon himself had said that half of what he had done in the group was nothing but rubbish. Although the chipper monstrosity ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ was released as a single in a few countries, it mercifully never reached the top spot.
But while McCartney’s annoying “granny songs” would certainly qualify for this list, Lennon made one of the most pedestrian songs of his career on ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’. That being said, even the worst Beatles songs have always found a way to be interesting, and this is no exception.
Always wanting to live in the moment, this song recounting his marriage to Yoko Ono has some decent lines, with Lennon rambling like Bob Dylan and spewing out details about how he and Ono are being treated in the tabloids. Considering how early he was on the alternative and punk bandwagon with Plastic Ono Band, hearing him say ‘Crucify me’ in the chorus was the most counterculture move he could have made.
The lyrics are certainly a nice journey through time, but it’s a shame that it had to be paired with some of the most boring instrumentation in the world. Since the song is only Lennon and Paul McCartney playing everything, hearing them try to make a full song out of disparate ideas sounds like amateur hour in places, especially when Lennon’s guitar lick starts running through the entire song and never seems to stop.
Compared to the finely crafted tunes they were making on The White Album, this feels like one of the leftover tracks from that album that never got fully fleshed out. Even when Lennon is singing, there’s hardly any movement in the melody, almost like he wrote the lyrics down first and is trying to shoehorn them into a song as quickly as he can.
And sadly, this wouldn’t be the last time Lennon tried this tactic. Listening to what he did on half the songs from Some Time in New York City, ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ may as well have been a teaser for this style of writing, where Lennon decided to write down everything he wanted to say, played a few chords over it, and prayed that it came together in the final mix.
Still, there are some decent pieces of the tune, whether that’s the rustic approach reminiscent of The Band or the bits of wisdom that Lennon talks about Ono telling the press. But considering how far the band had come after making such grandiose singles like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Hey Jude’, this feels like a giant step backwards production-wise while also being a sad omen for the end of the group.
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