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get-back-homeward · 1 year

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Imagine this

How Do You Sleep that

Have you considered the most interesting song on the Imagine album may be How?

George was right. The song deserves attention.

Tumblr search is zero help on this song because it only picks up How Do You Sleep. But has anyone ever written about it?

Given John’s “How? + Why?” response to Paul’s 12-page letter about dissolving the partnership, I think it’s worth looking at. That exchange is sometime in summer 1970.

Song Origins

The earliest version of How? is a home demo dated as late 1970. This demo only has the “we” part of the song:

How can we go forward When we don’t know which way we're facing? How can we go forward When we don’t know which way to turn? How can we be certain About something we’re not sure of? Oh, no, oh, no

In the final version, this part is the end of the song (the bolded words change slightly). This ending is a shift from the personal “I” used in the rest of the song. So he started with “we” in 1970 and then evolved it into more self-directed reflection over time.

The demo is very rough, he's still searching for the notes. But something about it made me think of Look At Me, which has a similar plaintive tone and features several existential questions to the listener (Who am I supposed to be? and Who are we?). Look at Me originates from India and has an earlier 1968 demo that captures a glimpse of John’s state of mind during this crucial time. The How? demo would be recorded around the same time John is revisiting Look At Me to record formally for the Plastic Ono Band album.

The added self-reflection verses continue the same format of existential questions, moving from feelings to love. It's a blatantly honest look at depression in the wake of a loss, which I think George would have noticed and in some sense seen himself in. It's unclear when these verses are added (John just says “last year” in 1971 for all the verses), but they are probably influenced by John's experience of undergoing Janov's primal scream therapy (April-September 1970?). Possibly the questions left unanswered at the end of those 6 months.

How can I have feeling when I don't know if it's a feeling?

How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?

All three verses include the idea of uncertainty (I don’t know), which could be its own essay on existentialism vs epistemology in the face of a destabilizing event. But for now, let’s focus on the emotional aspect. Here, two places ascribe blame to drive his uncertainty: his feelings have always been denied and love is something he never had. This seems to go a bit far, but remember depression is a liar and part of Janov's therapy was probably that John’s closest relationships had all been a lie.

John adds the middle eight during Imagine sessions. It balances the bleakness of depression with the will to live:

You know life can be long

And you got to be so strong

And the world is so tough

Sometimes I feel I've had enough

This middle eight repeats twice, and each time, the end fuses to the first word of the questioning verses, without the typical space of a few beats in between. This lack of space suggests a relationship, as if the questions are part of the fight to keep him going past the bleakness of feeling like giving up.

Its first recording is May 26, 1971, nine days after Ram is released. Take 31 and Take 40 (Raw Studio Mix) were released on the Ultimate release of the album but aren't too different from the final lyrics/melody wise.

Supposedly, another version of How? includes a question about home: “how can I go home when home is something I have never had” and it’s not clear which lines replace it. Perhaps “how can I give love when I don’t know what it is I’m giving?” Questions of home would be a result of Janov’s primal scream digging into his childhood and bringing forth old wounds. But in the absence of a physical home, it’s the people around you who become your home. This home line makes me think of that Get Back sessions moment, when John shares with Paul his excitement about getting Apple Studio functional and feeling like home. It's a picture of feelings being denied in action as Paul responds by changing the subject. For whatever reason, this home line gets cut by Take 31.

The placement of How? in the album tracklist is curious too, directly after the angry Paul-directed How Do You Sleep. Its title holds the same question but none of the anger. It’s like an echo of How Do You Sleep, informing the source of its anger and revealing what it masks: fear and indecision about the future.

Song Context

It’s interesting to place this song next to Ram, where the overwhelming theme is the exact opposite: grab life by the horns and move forward to find your own way. Ram sessions started in NYC in October 1970, around the same time as the How? demo. Each song, from Too Many People to Back Seat, reveals Paul’s mental exercise of extricating himself from his former life and moving on with his family in Scotland. Personally and professionally, Paul is building a new home away from John.

The final version of How? is produced more in the vein of The Long and Winding Road, the song at the nexus of the breakup. Its beginning is marked by the same distinct stop-start syncopated beat and the instrumentation builds across the song to make a bleak song more palatable. If Paul didn’t turn off the record the moment he heard John’s diss track, he would have almost certainly picked up How?’s link to TL&WR. That song being his own plaintive moment of fearing the future, considering life without the band that was his world. And the last straw when Spector remixed it without his approval.

In his April 1971 LIFE interview that precedes the Ram release, Paul shares a recent exchange between him and John. John recalls the infamous “bubble bursting” question, and Paul corrects him in the past tense: the bubble has already burst. This is one of several exchanges where Paul’s saying catch up, it’s done, let me go and John’s saying what does that even mean?!

Hearing Paul’s declaration of independence on Ram made John angry. He calls How Do You Sleep “an outburst” in response to Ram and not reflective of how he thinks of Paul all the time. But Ram also gave him a direction forward that McCartney did not. If John thought the album had messages to taunt him, he almost certainly heard the taunt in Monkberry Moon Delight:

Catch up! Cats and kittens Don’t get left behind

I don’t know about you, but hearing that taunt from my ex-partner/BFF/lover/whatever would certainly make me angry, hot enough to ignite my competitive streak and get to work.

It reminds me of the moment Fred Seaman recalls in 1980, when John hears Paul's Coming Up:

John told me that Paul was the only musician who could scare him into writing great songs, and vice versa.

Imagine is hardly my favorite John solo album. I'm not about to dismiss the terrible things John said about Paul or Ram or forget how the bad press buried the album for years. But I think in focusing on the anger, we can miss the simple fact that Ram inspiring John to write anything was actually the biggest compliment he could give. Sometimes, anger is the only fuel available to drive you forward, where anything is preferable to nothing. It’s not ideal or fair, and it’s up to you to pick up the mess of your storm later, but it’s something. Like a basic survival instinct kicking in in the midst of drowning. Any fight that pushing you back to the surface is preferable over laying down and dying.

In that way, I think John was being honest when he later admitted that How Do You Sleep was about himself. Not in the exact lines specific to Paul but in the action, to write (or accept), record, and release them. How? as an echo to this anger shows the before and after, how John used Paul as a punching bag in response. That action was all about John himself.

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get-back-homeward · 1 year

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Ram Revisited

Paul and Linda record their album Ram from October 1970 to March 1971, and it is released May 17, 1971. By May 26, John already had his infamous response, recording How Do You Sleep. This song gets a lot of attention for how cruel it seemed. One of John’s defenses by the album’s launch was that Paul had written special messages to him on Ram, only Paul didn’t print the lyrics so you couldn’t hear them. He mentions it a couple times, in print...

and at St Regis hotel press conference for the album release:

JOHN: But... I was laughing at [Ram] later, but first, I was saying, “Oh! Hmm. Oh, I see. Oh, that’s what he thinks,” huffing and puffing. That’s the first thing I heard on his album, was all this – this message, you see. [x]

JOHN: It’s just a moment of anger. But I just put it down on paper. And also, I’m answering Paul’s last album, which mostly because he didn’t hand out a lyric sheet, [people] don’t know what he was saying [on it]. [x]

JOHN: You mightn’t hear ‘em, but I can hear ‘em, and I know Paul. [x]

and during live interviews, where he gets cut off from finishing his point every time. But he seems particularly bothered by the lack of printed lyrics.

JOHN: Little messages that Paul sent to me on Ram. Which, funny, I publish my lyrics you see. He doesn’t, so you have to listen. [x]

It’s tempting to laugh at this, if you think it’d just an excuse for HDYS, or call him kookoo, if you think he’s just obsessed with Paul and reading things that aren’t there. But I find the comments rather curious in light of idea that the Beatles, particularly John and Paul, had a shared language that dates back to when they were kids in Liverpool and was used as late as 1969 as seen in Get Back. By design, the language is used to protect and exclude, so any analysis by outsiders will probably be utterly meaningless. But I thought I’d take it on face value that John was hearing something the average listener couldn’t without printed lyrics to try to understand the root of the anger that drives HDYS.

As a thought experiment, I decided to relisten to Ram for the first time while reading the lyrics, with an eye for words I couldn’t hear (or misheard before) along with album themes. Full disclosure, I’ve always listened to this album while working on something else, so while I may be have seen looked up lyrics for a song or two independently (Too Many People, Back Seat), I didn’t read them while listening to the song or consider them in the context of the full album, all of which create a different experience. I used Spotify’s lyrics function while listening to the 2012 remastered album, so any lyric variations may be Spotify’s fault.

Starting from the top. The album begins with Too Many People, which opens with an indiscernible line that’s a play on words.

Piss off cake-->piece of cake. I had no idea that’s what he was singing at the start. For 20 years, I heard this line as “this I got to say-ay-ay”. That said, “piss off cake” still doesn’t tell us much. I’m with this guess that this phrase is an in-joke turned nasty, like a firing shot John heard right at the start.

Two “mistakes” are mentioned here. The first mistake gets a lot of attention (”going underground”, “took your lucky break and broke it in two”) and is generally attributed to John asking for a divorce/leaving the band, though I question it (see below). But the last mistake is the hidden dagger I never heard without looking up the lyrics:

“I find my love awake and waiting to be...” followed by the stinger chord is an unfinished sentence. The verb ‘be’ is doing all the work, suggesting a missing past participle left unsaid. John is no stranger to using simple verbs to stand in for prohibited ones, as Norwegian Wood and Don’t Let Me Down show. Paul stops just short of making it vulgar, but the implication is there. By making the arena in bed, the suggestion is inherently sexual--not only in the unfinished sentence but also in the 1-minute guitar solo climax that follows, complete with dog howling. This makes the dagger a sexual taunt, and I keep trying to hear other interpretations, but I only hear one: Literally this could have been you in my bed but you blew it and now I have her. Not ever but never again. It’s a closed door. Slammed in your face. Now what can be done for you? as the guitar goes wild. Suggestive of bedroom fun you’re shut off from.

Okay, I can see how that could ignite someone’s anger, especially one prone to jealousy.

The trouble I have with this is timing. If “first mistake” is the divorce meeting (Sept 20) then what is the “last mistake” that deserves this sexual taunt? Paul always talks about the divorce meeting as if John declaring he’s leaving the band and wanting a divorce (from him) as the same moment. Maybe the “first mistake” is mislabeled, as John’s “going underground” wish begins in 1968 with Yoko and his controversial public actions from nude album covers to bagism events (not to mention private actions like covering personal debt and bringing outsiders into the recording studio) that caused a schism at Apple at its crucial first few months. Paul talks about summer 1968 as a difficult time for him, where he felt like everything was falling apart. Dick James their publisher is watching all of this and making business calculations. By March 1969, in the middle of their honeymoons with their wives, he decides to sell Northern Songs.

Would John pinpoint his "first mistake” as Yoko? IDK. He’d know when his relationship with Paul got rocky, at least professionally. They seem to be arguing about this underground direction as early as May 1968 (NYC), perhaps even earlier. In interviews, Yoko seems to focus on this part, which may indicate her feeling it was about her.

But if the “first mistake” is May 1968 and in the realm of music/business/professional, then the “last mistake” is the final straw and it’s personal.

Don’t let them tell you what you want to be

Paul recounts September 20 as if John betrayed him, getting him to sign the EMI contract before telling him he wanted the divorce. Paul felt tricked, like the rug was pulled out from under him. The hidden dagger in the song works the same way.

The second track, 3 Legs, begins innocently enough (When I walk on my horse upon the hill). It seems like empty nonsense until this accusation:

It’s a explicitly John-directed lyric: Paul’s emotional state is caused by John’s actions. I still hear “you let me down” (recalling Don’t Let Me Down) even though the original lyrics sheet says “left” and these printed ones say “laid.” So it’s worth taking a closer look at the rest.

This is a weird lyric taken literally. Paul’s doodling a three-legged thing and a three-legged dog on the lyrics sheet for this song. The dog doesn’t look like any of the dogs they had at the time to my knowledge. Dog could be a stand-in for another word John understood.

I enjoy @jobey-wan-kenobi’s idea of “three leg” as surrealist imagery that suggests an off-kiltered scene and reflects the writer’s state of mind. Both John and Paul spoke about being inspired by surrealist art and using it in lyrics to mask.

Didn’t John talk about having a reoccurring dream of flying above the clouds as a kid? I believe he used it to justify his whole egocentric interpretation of Strawberry Fields. But this flying seems the opposite of an ego trip:

He’s so unstable, the listener could knock him down from his flight with a feather.

But you know it’s not allowed

Ram On is the nearest to the title track but only a wisp of a thing, so it gets lost in the attention to Too Many People. I swear every time I hear it, I hear it another way.

Is it about needing love quickly? You’ll take anyone who appears next around the bend? Or is it about the unpredictability or impermanence of love? The someone round the bend coming to take the somebody you just gave your heart to? It shapeshifts, depending on how you approach it. But the second one reminds me of what John says later about love slipping away as soon as you look at it directly, as soon as you try to possess it completely. And hey what was that in 3 Legs?

When I thought, when I thought you was my friend... But you laid me down Put my heart round the bend

That lyrical link suggests the latter option. The earlier question in 3 Legs also fits with this theme of the unpredictability of love.

When I walk, when I walk On my horse upon the hill... Will my lover love me still?

But it may also suggest freedom. To do your own thing outside and then return home with a lover waiting. Like Too Many People. She’s waiting for me...

Big Barn Bed (not released til 1973) is first recorded with other 1970 Ram home recordings. It starts as a coda for Ram On and later becomes its own song. It has a similar “round the bend” line: Who’s that coming round the corner? Will it be my friend?

Which suggests more anticipation than worry but gives the same feeling of unpredictability toward the listener who is also the friend who let him down.

Bug lore is that John thought Dear Boy was for him, though I’m having trouble finding a source on that. I always found it pretty hilarious, as I do think it fits best with Paul’s story that it’s Linda’s ex-husband. The “When I stepped in” part makes sense with that interpretation. But it’s funny to think about John thinking it’s about him:

What’s John hearing Paul say here? I loved you and you didn’t even see it! And you know what, maybe Paul knew John would hear it like that and it was half the fun. It’s not hard to see that Paul identified with Linda’s feeling of being unappreciated in her prior marriage. And it’s common for Paul to start a song about one person or idea and then it becomes transformed into being about something else. Layers are possible in all their songs. John talks about the layers he hears in their old songs in Jan 1969, layers that he didn’t hear when they wrote them. So it’s possible John heard this connection. It may have just made him angry because John suggests elsewhere that he was the one who felt unappreciated and neglected.

However, even with Paul’s interpretation, John still shows up as the reason Paul’s heart was down and out and positions Linda as an antidote:

Oh what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive

I always filed away Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey as a simple character mashup. But looking at the words, I started to question that. Could Uncle Albert, a real uncle of Paul’s, also act as a stand-in character for someone else? The theme of no one left at home is echoed in Little Lamb Dragonfly, which is home recorded with RAM songs but held back until 1973 Red Rose Speedway.

But the line that follows is a peculiar one. I always thought I was hearing it wrong, surely it is it’s gonna rain. But the lyrics tell me it’s I’m gonna rain:

So could it be a metaphor or stand-in for an emotion like sadness or a visible reaction like crying? Or is it like 3 Leg? More surrealist projection of instability when charting new waters.

The second section, Admiral Halsey, has nautical themes that suggest more than meets the eye. Remember both John and Paul talked about the Beatles as a boat, with John talking about leaving the Beatles as jumping off Paul’s boat and onto Yoko’s boat.

Paul’s delivery of “berth” sounds like “bath” to me, so I can’t see how anyone could pick up this line in full before, except maybe if you knew that’s how Paul pronounces -er- sounds. But it certainly is a suggestive of a metaphor for a significant event. Perhaps about the day that Ringo as the messenger notified Paul about the McCartney release date change (to make room for his own album)? Or more personally, about Paul having to back away from John to make room for Yoko?

But what on earth is butter pie? Wiki tells me it’s a Lancashire-based savory pie of onions and potatoes (so meatless). But my mind goes straight to Penny Lane (finger pies), so I’m just gonna assume it’s something dirty.

Hands across the water, hands across the sky

Linda’s harmonies and backing vocals are just so cool. It had to have gotten to John that she so easily fits into this vocal role next to Paul, especially in the more silly moments featured here. Especially considering humor was such a large component of John and Paul’s relationship.

There’s limitations to printing lyrics though and I get Paul’s right to not print them earlier because sometimes it take away from all the wordplay and double meanings inherent in the sounds of the words. For example, I always heard some of these “smile away”s in Smile Away as “it’s my way,” and so I’m surprised that phrase is never printed in the lyrics:

However, given the double meanings elsewhere, I think it’s worth still considering because "it’s my way” fits into the album theme of not blindly following along and finding your own path.

Don’t let them tell you what you want to be

A lot of focus is on Too Many People as the trigger for How Do You Sleep. But it’s a question directed a line from Heart Of The Country.

I’m gonna get me a good night sleep

It’s the one respite on the whole album and I can see how the image of smug Paul could send John in a writing fury.

Monkberry Moon Delight plays with “ketchup” and “catch up” and both of these appear in the lyrics. But is it beretta the gun or biretta the hat? Or something else? Ram sessions include Oh Woman Oh Why with gun sounds that gets left off the album, and photos from the session show Paul holding a prop gun. There’s also a gun-like object drawn on the Ram back cover. So maybe he did mean the gun. Inclusion of that song would have turned the tone of entire album, from jaunty taunts to serious violence, so it’s the right choice to keep it off. John would only hear the beretta line here with “banana” and the gun on the back cover:

and i don’t get the gist of your letter

Considering John and Paul are sending letters back and forth across 1970, this line sounds like a taunt for John alone. Along with what follows:

don’t get left behind

which makes this...

...another sexual taunt like Too Many People. Haha, look at what you’re missing!

If you’re doubting that, the track order clears it up fast because it’s followed immediately by....

Eat At Home. No explanation required.

It is an outright banger. No way John wasn’t a tad impressed by it. Even if it exudes those aggressive “I am having so much fun with my wife right now and not even thinking of you” vibes that left John shook.

Am I the only one that thought some of these “little lady”s were “lad”s? Paul stresses the -d so the -y sounds silent except for Linda’s backing. The result is pretty...ambiguous at times.

So I’m left thinking it’s a bit odd how this song ends on the negative: don’t do that. If the sexual connotation starts it, it ends with something that sounds unwanted, like it goes too far. A revoking of consent. But is it the lad(y) going too far? Or someone else?

Don’t let them tell you what you want to be

Long Haired Lady is an ode to Linda that starts with a jokey call and response between Paul and Linda and builds into a section that channels The Mamas & The Papas with lush, blissfully layered harmonies:

I’m good up til “win or lose it” but I don’t know if anyone could have heard “into the soul”. I’m not so sure it matters much, but the suggestion seems to be that love continues whether or not you “win or lose” love. That no matter if you are wrong, love is stable, constant. Wait, where have I heard that before?

Generally, I find Back Seat of My Car to be the strangest one for John to think was directed at him (and Yoko?). It’s just so big and sweeping and wasn’t Paul and Linda the one who did the joyriding? But that whole we believe that we can’t be wrong really got to him. He mentions it a lot, sometimes attributing the line to him and Yoko and other times to Paul and Linda about them (”well I believe that you could possibly be wrong!“). It’s a real hangup for John around this time, the idea that Paul is always right and he is wrong. Seeing Paul’s predictive powers, I can see how infuriating it would be after a while, and how comforting it would be to have people around you who counter that, to tell you “no, you are right and he’s wrong.” How it’d make you dig your heels in and work hard to get people off the McCartney bandwagon.

There’s a whole gibberish sounding section not picked up in the printed lyrics that sounds like “everyone’s tried to love her” or “i’m gonna try to love her” sung at an auctioneer’s pacing. You could possibly read something into that depending on what you hear.

Here’s another mention of “my way” after “highway”, suggestive of the idiom “my way or the highway”. The second half of the “looking for a ride” lines I can’t hear even with the lyrics:

“and all I found” would have been my guess.

But if you’re taking everything else as a sexual taunt, looking for a ride could hold a double meaning.

The climatic ending of the song and album is the height of choosing your own way and building your own world:

We believe that we can’t be wrong

A brash assertion of confidence in your own choices? A mocking condemnation of someone else’s choices? Or aggressive positivity to vanquish agonizing about whether you’re right or wrong? Like others on the album, it depends on how you look at it. But the first option fits with the overall album theme, with the third behind it as another layer.

There’s a snowglobe imagery to the feeling of this ending. Swirling and wondrous and heady but also contained and protective and isolated by design, living in this world you’ve built for yourself. You control it to a point while fearing what’s outside, the unpredictability of the future and the unknown of what’s waiting for you around the bend.

Wrapup

Overall, there’s a story in the album themes. Starting with a declaration of independence and naming mistakes and ending with the denial of wrongness, suggesting your own. From John’s comments, we know he got that part. In between a conditional: if you choose wrong, love is long. Throughout, the main theme is strong, finding your own way and building a new life to push forward, which makes the cover less of a joke and more of an apt metaphor for a precisely crafted album. The pronouns look fairly consistent too, which is a big surprise to me: you are sending hearts around the bend, but she waits for me. There’s double meanings galore with possible sexual taunts as hidden daggers. But, above all, there is the repeated need for love that’s in alignment amidst confusion and miscommunication.

Will my lover love me still? (3 Legs)

Bring the love that you feel for me in line with the love I see (Eat At Home)

Do you love me like you know you ought to do? (Long-Haired Woman)

The trouble with any shared language is what may get lost from the communicator to the listener. If you get 9 out of 10 things but the 10th thing was important for understanding the other 9, the risk of misunderstanding is still huge. So I’m left wondering whether John listened to the album enough in those first 9 days to hear these lines before recording HDYS. He may have regretted venting his anger in more obvious public daggers than Paul’s more hidden ones the more he listened. By September, he knows the album well enough to sing an exact match on the spot.

Undoubtedly, John knew just where to hit because he knew Paul’s weaknesses. He shows that by dragging it into the public sphere. If Paul’s messages are directed at John but subtle or hidden, John’s messages are blatant as neon lights about Paul to the world. There’s an unevenness there that makes us uneasy.

By focusing on John brandishing the dagger so obviously in one song, it’s easy to miss the hidden daggers in Ram along the gems. A concealed dagger can do the same damage. But the overall theme of needing a constant unwavering love is one they ultimately shared, signalling a place where they could find common ground once the anger cleared.

#no idea what to tag this as too long dont read #there's song wars and then there's this whole declaration of independence album #my text #ram #long post #album listen #i started this almost a month ago #it was a simple exercise when i started but it grewwwww #this album really does get better and better with repeated listens #never thought i'd have this much to write about #its really wild this album got dismissed and buried as some square thing #its so fresh its like its from yesterday #double entendres included #still never heard where john might have been hearing 'documentary my dear datsun'#(which i assume is an in-joke on the sherlock holmes quote)#give a shout if you can find it #thought experiment #song wars #john pov #1971 #1970 #too many people #i guess i have to tag it mclennon but its paul mccartneys fault #eta the links #my idea when i started this was to link up all the bits and pieces ive collected but there's so many #the breakup

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