It’s funny, growing up when I did. The 1990s were a good economic time and, a time when, it seems, everything was getting a remaster. The operation was to move massive droves of records and that’s just what the industry did — propagating grunge and gangsta rap, sure, but also redoing the likes of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Beatles digitally for CD. To us, the medium was what we grew up on and the music sounded great. I’d been weaned on cassettes too and wouldn’t have known a vinyl record from a coffee table coaster.
But there was always this underlying sense that being into the old music was “cool.” And sure, it’s like that still, to this day. It’s alarming to me, though, when a movie like Yesterday (2019) comes out and ushers in, apparently, the premise that nobody is into the Beatles anymore, or what have you.
More than any other track, I think, “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which surfaced as a 1969 single and doesn’t grace any of their full LP’s (though it would crash the 1 party, the compilation heralding all the band’s British #1 singles), explicates vividly the magnanimity of the life that John Lennon lives. The song, according to Wikipedia, “chronicles the events surrounding the wedding of Lennon and Yoko Ono,” his widow. It’s a hurried song, meant to implicate a hectic landscape, I think, detailing copious encounters with papa razzi, voyeuristic media, and, generally, obstacles that occluded the couple’s facility in getting hitched (one of the lines plays “You can get married in Gibraltar near Spain”; apparently attempting to send them halfway across the nation of France, in the process). And, of course, the song comes to the memorable head, in the chorus, of “The way things are going / They’re gonna crucify me”, a proclamation that was obviously all too prescient.
Still, it’s not a brooding, difficult or uncomfortable song, in any right. It’s a song that takes ultimately a relatively cavalier disposition before the lyrics that Lennon is nonetheless earnestly spouting and it’s a song that exists joyfully and stylishly within the burgeoning genre of rock and roll, like “Get off of My Cloud” by The Rolling Stones or “Wild Thing” by The Troggs. Lennon wanted you to internalize the hardships and travails he was incurring in his personal life, but equally, he wanted to nod your head and have a good time. This is what the masters do.
In all its verbosity, then, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” fashions various intricate, narrative choruses, and that repeated chorus, as well as a middle bridge section that furnishes the lines “Last night night the wife said / ‘Oh boy when you’re dead / ‘You don’t take nothin’ with you but your soul”. Now, the concept of “soul” happens to be something on which I ruminate quite often. In fact, it never quite sat right with me — like when a person mentions his or her “soul,” it seems like a cop out. It seems like there should be something more they’re trying to express. A soul is like death, as Lennon’s lyrics seem to imply.
But “The Ballad of John and Yoko” is music that’s GOT soul — it puts it to use instead of just puffing onself up for possessing this intangible, abstract and essentially lifeless inner component. It’s also, darkly, an overall narrative that seems to express the intrinsic adversity and antipathy of the world in which we live — Lennon is experiencing something, as a famous musician, that should invite a supreme level of satisfaction and enlightenment, but instead undergoes staunch, indefatigable irritation and invasion of privacy. His message in it is foreboding, doling dark implications for the future. In this way, actually, it’s similar to “Get off of My Cloud,” in theme and lyrical components. It also stands to illustrate how rock and roll may exist, perhaps at its most potent, at a certain precious and exhaustive confluence of life of uncertainty regarding the afterlife and frustration and hopelessness as saturating this present reality in which we claim to relate so sensibly and gracefully.
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