John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t always see eye-to-eye on The Beatles’ music
The Beatles step off a PAN AM plane as they arrive in the United States(Image: Apple Corps Ltd)
The Beatles were never scared to try something new and experiment with different sounds. The Fab Four revolutionised popular music in the second half of the 1960s, evolving from their early rock and roll stylings to create an innovative, psychedelic and avant-garde new sound.
1965’s ‘Rubber Soul’ is credited with beginning that journey in earnest, as the band looked more closely at what they could achieve with an album and how they could push the boundaries lyrically and musically. The 1966 album ‘Revolver’ is viewed as the start of The Beatles’ psychedelic era, influenced by their time in India and use of LSD.
The following year saw ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ reinvent what could be done with an album – using new studio techniques, capturing the zeitgeist of the so-called ‘summer of love’ and changing music forever. Though The Beatles’ experimental music in this period was adored by critics and fans, it didn’t always lead to harmony within the band.
The ECHO has recently looked at John Lennon’s dislike of ‘Sgt Pepper’, his worry that Paul McCartney was trying to sabotage his work on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and his disdain for the song ‘Let it Be’. We’ve also looked into how the recording of ‘Back in the USSR’ on 1968’s ‘The White Album’ led Ringo Starr to leave The Beatles temporarily.
The sessions for ‘The White Album’ were notoriously ill-tempered as each member of The Beatles wanted to put their stamp on their work and express themselves creatively. About that period of recording, Paul said: “There was a lot of friction during that album. We were just about to break up, and that was tense in itself” and John later added: “The break-up of The Beatles can be heard on that album.”
The disagreement on ‘Back in the USSR’ was one of many disputes during those sessions, which took place between May and October 1968. ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ was written by Paul while The Beatles were in India in early 1968 and he was inspired by the growing popularity of reggae music in the UK.
The song follows characters Desmond and Molly and the title phrase came from a friend of Paul’s. About writing it, he later said: “I had a friend called Jimmy Scott who was a Nigerian conga player, who I used to meet in the clubs in London. He had a few expressions, one of which was, ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra’.
“I used to love this expression… He sounded like a philosopher to me. He was a great guy anyway and I said to him, ‘I really like that expression and I’m thinking of using it,’ and I sent him a cheque in recognition of that fact later because even though I had written the whole song and he didn’t help me, it was his expression.
Paul McCartney playing a Hofner 500/1 violin bass guitar and John Lennon playing a Gibson J-160E acoustic guitar(Image: David Redfern/Redferns)
“It’s a very me song, in as much as it’s a fantasy about a couple of people who don’t really exist, Desmond and Molly. I’m keen on names too. Desmond is a very Caribbean name.”
It was one of many demos played at George Harrison’s home when The Beatles returned from India and they recorded it over several days in July. George and John did not like the song at all.
Recording engineer Geoff Emerick said John “openly and vocally detested. John was said to have said it was “more of Paul’s ‘granny music s**t'” and the recording of it sent him storming out of the studio, before he returned (having smoked some cannabis) and sat at the piano and played the opening chords deliberately loudly and quickly in protest.
Engineer Richard Lush recalled: “John Lennon came to the session really stoned, totally out of it on something or other, and he said, ‘All right, we’re gonna do ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. He went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said, ‘This is it! Come on!’.
“He was really aggravated. That was the version they ended up using.”
Paul continued to tinker with the song, to the frustration of John, Ringo and George. According to Mr Emerick, producer George Martin offered Paul some advice on his vocals but Paul replied: “Well you come down and sing it.”
A frustrated Mr Martin responded: “Then bloody sing it again! I give up. I just don’t know any better how to help you”, according to Mr Emerick, who quit the band during the recording of the song due to the unpleasant mood of ‘The White Album’ sessions. Despite John’s derision, the song was broadly praised by critics.
NME reviewer Alan Smith said it had a “good-to-be-alive groove”, adding it was “a great personal favourite”. In his Rolling Stone review, Jann Wenner said the track was “fun music for a fun song about fun”.
However, it was voted the worst song of all time in a poll run by chocolate company Mars in 2004. The New York Times’ 1968 review said of the song: “none of it works, it all loses out to the originals, it all sounds stale.”