The Beatles song John Lennon hated — and he wrote it!
The Beatles’ Anthology 4 dropped on November 21, adding another volume of outtakes and rarities to the three Anthology albums released in the 1990s. Now, as the Anthology docu-series returns to screens this week — along with a revealing new Episode 9 — it’s worth remembering that the group churned out a core catalog of 213 songs between 1962 and 1970.
That’s a lot of tracks in just eight years. And, as you might imagine, the Beatles themselves weren’t fans of everything they produced.
That goes double for John Lennon. In the latter years of his career, the most critical Beatle took a particularly dim view of many songs in the group’s catalog, including his own.
His most withering condemnations were saved for the songs he stamped out in cookie-cutter form or peeled off as nonsensical filler. "It's Only Love" is an example of the former, a Help! track he called “abysmal”, while the latter includes Abbey Road's "Mean Mr. Mustard," a bit of light-hearted fluff he denounced as “a piece of garbage.”
And then there's the song Lennon called his “least favorite.” It appeared on the group's 1965 album Rubber Soul, which may seem odd, given that record's status as the group's first conceptual work, in which every song received its own well-considered musical arrangement.
Released on December 3 of that year, it was the Beatles' sixth album and the second to come out in 1965, following Help! As long-players go, it was something of a rush job, with 13 of its 14 songs written and recorded in two month's time following the Fab Four's U.S. tour. (Another two original songs — "We Can Work It Out" and "Day Tripper" — were also created for a single release during this time, such was the Beatles' remarkable creative output.)
Even so, the band took care in the studio to give the songs exactly what they required, experimenting with folkier sounds and new instruments, including George Harrison's sitar on "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and Paul McCartney's fuzz bass on Harrison's "Think for Yourself."
Source: Phil Weller/guitarplayer.com
