March 28, 1966 (1 week)
Coming out of the breakup of The Beatles in 1970, John Lennon was doing pretty well for himself. Sure, former bandmates George Harrison and Ringo Starr were having the bigger hits out of the gate but he had healthy sales, critical acclaim and the approval of hip critics and fans. His old friend and songwriting partner Paul McCartney not so much. With legal battles dividing them, the pair of once close friends began going after one another. The two would take turns penning letters to the NME and Melody Maker for all to see and then Macca took it a step further with "Too Many People", a deep cut off of his second solo album Ram. While not nasty, the song's lyrics rip into "too many people preaching promises" which were directed at Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono.
Lennon's response dispensed with ambiguity altogether. On the Imagine album which dealt with peace, becoming a better person, honesty, the military and love, "How Do You Sleep?" was the petty odd one out on what is his finest solo work. (I am aware that most people nowadays opt for John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band but it can be a grim listen at times; whatsmore, I suspect that much of its praise is down more to its influence rather than its overall quality) No doubt, he failed to anticipate the backlash. Rolling Stone magazine had been a staunch Lennon supporter but they described the song as "indefensible". The blowback was such that Lennon soon began to backpedal. Excuses like "McCartney started it" came forth before he eventually began the dubious claim that it was more about himself than anyone else. (I like to think that had I been a music journalist in the seventies that I would've posed the following very obvious follow-up question which no one seemed to bother with: "How so?")
The attack song was something Lennon did from time to time, "Sexy Sadie" from The White Album being perhaps the most notable. While he rips into the Maharishi over an alleged affair the Indian mystic had with a young woman at his ashram, it's more likely that the singer had become disillusioned with Transcendental Meditation since it hadn't cured him of his insecurities and self-loathing. In 1974, Lennon put out "Steel and Glass" on his rather overlooked Walls and Bridges album. This time the subject of his ire is his shady ex-manager Allan Klein. (I've always thought that "Baby, You're a Rich Man" is about previous manager Brian Epstein particularly given the homophobia and racism Lennon "jokingly" added)
To his credit, Lennon wasn't above going after himself and he did it much earlier. While compositions like "I'm a Loser" and "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" suggest he could be his own harshest critic, "Nowhere Man" confirmed it. Struggling to get another song completed in the hasty run up to getting the Rubber Soul album ready for the Christmas '65 rush, Lennon gave up and went for a lie down in his mammoth mansion outside of London. He had everything he could ever want at his fingertips and yet all he could think about at that moment was about being a "real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land". From that, it pretty much wrote itself. He hadn't quite come to terms with it but "Nowhere Man" represents a point in which Lennon began to realize that the life of a wealthy pop star wasn't enough.
It is commonly suggested that there are three Beatles' songs which are perfectly suited to kids: "Yellow Submarine", "All Together Now" and "Octopus's Garden". While I can certainly see why they are classified as such, I don't really think of the latter two that way. "All Together Now" is more accurately a song for parents to sing to babies and/or toddlers; children over the age of around four aren't going to find much in it for them to explore. "Octopus's Garden", meanwhile, relies too much on its predecessor having done all the heavy lifting. Like "Yellow Submarine", it is sung by Ringo (who, notably, went on to narrate the Thomas the Tank Engine cartoon) and it uses a nautical theme but it lacks the sense of wonder and imagination. If anything, fellow Abbey Road tracks "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Here Comes the Sun" have much more in them for youngsters.
In truth, a number of Fab Four songs have the potential to appeal to children. Most of the early Beatlemania tracks remain fun and exciting, the perfect thing for hyperactive kids to jump on the bed to, while the later psychedelic material has enough English whimsy and Lewis Carroll about it to keep youths interested. Then, there's the group's rhyme structure on numbers such as "Taxman", "Hello Goodbye" and, yes, "Nowhere Man". It no doubt also helped that the latter had a prominent place in the Yellow Submarine animated film, a picture that many kids from my generation grew up on and was their entree point for the band. (A young Sean Lennon had watched the movie at a friend's house and when he came home he asked his famous father, "were you in The Beatles?")
The Beatles encounter with Jeremy Hillary Boob in the Sea of Nothing (aka the Nowhere Land) is one of Yellow Submarine's more memorable spots. A brilliant polymath with a variety of books, compositions and works of art on the go, he never stops to take a breath let alone contemplate what he's been getting up to. Yet, he's friendly, self-deprecating ("if I spoke in prose you'd all find out, I don't know what I talk about") and tries to help John, Paul, George and Ringo out. Yet, they sing "Nowhere Man" to him which seems rather heartless.
But there's also some degree of empathy involved, which is something that the bulk of Lennon's future attack songs lack. "Isn't he a bit like you and me": the target of the singer's ire may well be humanity as a whole as we waste away our lives in bubbles of out own pettiness. The middle eight even tries to find some hope — "nowhere man, please listen...", "...take your time, don't hurry, leave it all til somebody else lends you a hand", the sort of sentiments that "How Do You Sleep?" could have done with. Lennon could be scathing but he also had a generous heart which is revealed both towards anyone he may have been having a go at and, crucially, himself.
Ironically, "Nowhere Man" only hastened Lennon's lethargy as his output diminished while his drug intake took off. As Ian Leslie suggests in his recent wonderful book John & Paul - A Love Story in Songs, this could well have been his intention all along. Rather than assuming he was bashing himself for not being as involved in London's underground arts scene as McCartney, he just as easily could have been looking down upon those who were getting too involved while he was content to sit much of it out. Future compositions "I'm Only Sleeping" and "Good Morning Good Morning" even find him making a virtue out of his sloth, something which seems hard to believe had he really been trying that hard to shake himself out of his slumber. (In any case, Lennon was still very much active throughout the bulk of 1965, even up to when he wrote "Nowhere Man"; it was only as the group's commitments tailed off in the early part of '66 that his layabout years began)
With soaring three-part harmonies, a rollicking bass part from McCartney that guides the tune while remaining in the background, yet another brilliant but unflashy performance from Starr and guitars that were starting to sound increasingly acid rock-influenced, "Nowhere Man" is stately, a minor masterpiece from a group whose vast achievements were beginning to sound increasingly routine. Critic Ian MacDonald's dismissiveness is in a way understandable — I, too, find that third go round of the middle eight to be a chore, especially since it's just a lazy rehash of the first one — but this song is far too good, far too engaging and far too important to be without. If not quite top tier Beatles, "Nowhere Man" is once again proof that they were well ahead of virtually everyone in pop, even when they weren't even trying all that hard.
Score: 9
