John Lennon Couldn’t Stand the ‘Pretentiousness’ of This Beatles Album
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon frequently spoke critically about the work he made with the band. He said he didn’t consider himself a fan of The Beatles and complained about his bandmates. He had harbored negative feelings about the band while they were still together. According to longtime Beatles producer George Martin, Lennon was visibly fed up while recording one of the band’s final albums.
John Lennon had problems with the final album The Beatles recorded
While Let It Be was the last album The Beatles released, they recorded it before Abbey Road. They recorded it in 1969, the same year Lennon announced he was leaving the band. According to Martin, Lennon’s fatigue with the group came through while recording Abbey Road.
“John got disenchanted with record production. He didn’t really approve of what I’d done or was doing,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “He didn’t like ‘messing about’, as he called it, and he didn’t like the pretentiousness, if you like. I could see his point. He wanted good, old-fashioned, plain solid rock: ‘The hell with it — let’s blast the living daylights out!’ Or, if it was a soft ballad: ‘Let’ do it just the way it comes.’ He wanted authenticity.”
Lennon said his vision for the album clashed with what his bandmates wanted.
“I personally can’t be bothered with strings and things. I’d like to do it with the group, or with electronics,” he said, adding, “I can’t be bothered going through that hassle with musicians — but Paul digs that; that’s his scene. It was up to him where he went with the violins and what he did with them, and I think he wanted a straight kind of backing [on ‘Golden Slumbers’] — nothing freaky. That’s what he was getting into on the back of Abbey Road. I never went in for that pop-opera stuff. I like three-minute records, like adverts.”
John Lennon also disliked another Beatles album
Lennon also disliked the final album The Beatles released, Let It Be. While he enjoyed the final version after producer Phil Spector worked on it, he disliked the way the songs originally sounded.
“If anybody listens to the bootleg version, which was the version which was pre-Spector, and listens to the version Spector did, they would shut up — if you really want to know the difference,” he said. “The tapes were so lousy and so bad none of us would go near them to touch them. They’d been lying around for six months.”
Everyone could sense it was the band’s last album
While Lennon disliked Abbey Road, the process of recording it was more pleasant for the band than Let It Be had been. Martin wondered if this was because everyone could sense that the band’s time together had come to an end.
“Nobody knew for sure that it was going to be the last album — but everybody felt it was,” Martin said. “The Beatles had gone through so much and for such a long time. They’d been incarcerated with each other for nearly a decade, and I was surprised that they had lasted as long as they did.”
They had fought often while recording some of their later albums, but they managed to avoid bitter disagreements they endured on Let It Be.
