John Lennon was never one to hold back an opinion. Lennon’s comments famously ranged from witty to ascerbic: his How Do You Sleep? is one of the most brutal “diss tracks” ever put on vinyl. But Lennon didn’t just reserve his acid tongue for his former bandmate. His judgements on some of his own songs could be just as crushing.
The list of Beatles songs that Lennon either dismissed or actively hated is extensive and covers some of their most-loved hits.
Most famously, though, Lennon sneered at “Paul’s granny music” — and a great deal more of Paul’s contributions, besides.
The “granny music” jibe was, of course, aimed at When I’m 64. It’s a song first Paul McCartney worked up on the family piano when he was about 15. Over the years, he kept toying with it, before dusting it off for the Sgt. Pepper album. Dismissing it as “granny music shit”, Lennon avowed, “I would never dream of writing a song like that”.
But it was far from the only song on the acclaimed Sgt. Pepper that Lennon disliked.
Lovely Rita was “Paul writing a pop song”. In particular, Lennon disliked writing about what you didn’t know: “I’m not interested in writing third-party songs. I like to write about me, ‘cuz I know me. I don’t know anything about secretaries and postmen and meter maids”.
Of his own Good Morning, Good Morning, he “was never proud of it, I just knocked it off to do a song”. Being part-inspired by a breakfast cereal ad probably didn’t help. “It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought … I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over, and then I wrote the song.”
Lennon could be disappointed with even one of his most acclaimed songs on Sgt. Pepper. His dislike of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds is that it’s “just terrible. I mean, it is a great track, a great song, but it isn’t a great track because it wasn’t made right. You know what I mean?”
But Paul’s music-hall predilections cropped up again and again, to Lennon’s disgust. Even George Harrison disliked Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da enough to swipe at it in his own Savoy Truffle. Even worse, McCartney ran the group through so many takes on the “a bit twee” song that Lennon lost his temper and stormed out of the studio, and sound engineer Geoff Emerick quit the next day.
Other Paul songs from the White Album get off little better. Birthday “was a piece of garbage”, while Rocky Raccoon was “embarrassing”. “I saw Bob Hope doing it once on the telly years ago; I just thanked God it wasn’t one of mine.”
As for McCartney’s love song to his dog, Martha My Dear… “Enough said”.
Even some of McCartney’s most revered songs were apt to provoke dismissive commentary. Let It Be was “Nothing to do with the Beatles”, probably referring to McCartney drawing inspiration from Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water. “I don’t know what he’s thinking when he writes ‘Let It Be.’”
Even Yesterday doesn’t totally escape criticism. “The lyrics don’t resolve into any sense, they’re good lines. They certainly work, you know what I mean? They’re good— but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything; you don’t know what happened. She left and he wishes it were yesterday, that much you get, but it doesn’t really resolve.” Still, he does concede that it’s, “Well done. Beautiful— and I never wished I’d written it.”
But if Lennon was hard on his former musical partner, he often reserved his harshest criticism for himself.
It’s Only Love from Help! was “the one song I really hate of mine. Terrible lyric.” Just to drive the point home, Lennon emphasised that “I always thought it was a lousy song. The lyrics are abysmal. I always hated that song.”
Run For Your Life has come to be regarded as one of the Beatles’ most “problematic” songs, being accused of justifying domestic violence. In fact, Lennon thought it was “just a sort of throwaway song of mine that I never thought much of”. As for its controversial opening line, “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man” was cribbed from an old blues song made famous by Elvis, Baby, Let’s Play House. At other times, Lennon regarded it as his “least favourite Beatles song”.
From the final Beatles years, Lennon considered many of his songs just “nonsense”, like Dig a Pony: “literally a nonsense song. “You just take words and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do and some of them don’t. Similarly, with Sun King (“a piece of garbage I had around”), the lyrics are literally gibberish. “We just started joking, you know, singing ‘quando para mucho.’ So we just made up… Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, you know. So we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something.”
Like Good Morning, Good Morning, Mean Mr. Mustard was a piece of doggerel inspired by a chance news snippet. “I’d read somewhere in the newspaper about this mean guy who hid five-pound notes, not up his nose but somewhere else.” The result was “a bit of crap that I wrote in India”.
Even his favourite songs, though, could be ruined in Lennon’s estimation by being badly recorded. Across the Universe was “a lousy track of a great song, and I was so disappointed by it.”
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