I explained a while back about the pressure John Lennon was under to produce a song for the first worldwide satellite broadcast, and how, improbably, "All You Need Is Love" just materialized out of the ether for those auspicious purposes.
Well, John wanted to go double or nothing after that.
A few years later, here comes Timothy Leary - the Timothy Leary - and Mr. Leary is ready to challenge incumbent Ronald Reagan for the office of governor of California. Leary had the Berkley Ph.D, the Harvard teaching cred, the cachet of running extreme psychedelic human experimentation programs that boiled over into disarray and personal grandiosity. So the populist appeal was there.
He just needed a song.
When Leary came to John Lennon for this campaign song, John knew he had his follow up to "All You Need Is Love" served up for him on a countercultural platter. Leary's slogan was "Come together, join the party." John's song would write itself. It would, except it didn't. Not really. He got together a nice little chorus, but there was nothing more to be proud of by the time Leary was imprisoned on drug offenses, ending his campaign.
And this is the natural order of things. Classic songs are not just produced on request, no matter what you think "All You Need Is Love" proved. Regardless of the reputation of the writer, songs are more likely to end up cast out into the heap of false starts than surviving to completion, much less ending up transformational.
But the songwriting persisted. Maybe Leary would get out of prison and ask for it? (He didn't. Leary instead opted to escape and spend the next few years as a fugitive in the care of arms dealers and other luminaries.) Probably that little germ of a chorus that John had was just too cool to give up on.
And when the final recorded Beatles album Abbey Road came out, there it was as the first track, "Come Together." The political aspects are basically gone; the verses are busy with crazy descriptions of maybe one person, maybe four, maybe four personalities in one body. The chorus seems to have the only lyric surviving from the Leary commission.
And what a nice little damned achievement the song turned out to be too. The chorus is short but obviously has its fantastic melody. And I like the verses a lot, that swampy bass line.
The real cool of this song for me is in the instrumental sections, the solo and the ending fade out. The pace is just perfect, the drums and bass putting down a great groove. Just great rock n roll. I love John in the ending, the ideal John, long hair, granny glasses, the white suit, following each "come together" with a sharp "yeah."
Timothy Leary had five wives.