John Lennon ‘Thanked God’ He Didn’t Write This ‘Quirky’ Beatles Song and It’s Easy to Understand Why

There are many songs by The Beatles that John Lennon didn’t like. Some of these he wrote himself, while others are works by Paul McCartney or George Harrison. Lennon said there is one song he “thanked god” he didn’t write, and it is one of the band’s stranger songs. 

‘Rocky Raccoon’ is one of the Beatles’ weirder songs

“Rocky Raccoon” is featured on 1968’s The White Album and is a pure Paul McCartney track. The song centers around a character named Rocky Raccoon, whose girlfriend leaves him for another man. Rocky challenges the man to a duel but is shot first. He then discovers Gideon’s bible and takes it as a sign from God. 

This song isn’t terrible, but it is one of the band’s weirder tracks. McCartney’s vocal performance is good, and the guitar playing is fine, but there isn’t much to make it stand out as one of their better songs. However, it’s impressive that McCartney could create a bizarre story like this and share it in a musical form. This song does have its fans, especially from the Marvel universe, as it became the basis for Rocket Raccoon. 

John Lennon ‘thanked god’ he didn’t write ‘Rocky Raccoon’

Lennon didn’t like the song and said he “thanked God it wasn’t one of mine.” When asked if he wrote “Rocky Raccoon” in an interview with David Sheff, Lennon replied, “Couldn’t you guess? Would I go to all that trouble about Gideon’s Bible and all that stuff?”

Lennon reacted similarly to many Beatles fans who may have been overwhelmed by McCartney’s bizarre story. In the book Many Years From Now, McCartney acknowledged the song is “quirky” and explained he wanted to do a parody of a western. 

“‘Rocky Raccoon’ is quirky, very me,” McCartney admitted. “I like talking blues so I started off like that, then I did my tongue-in-cheek parody of a western and threw in some amusing lines. I just tried to keep it amusing, really; it’s me writing a play, a little one-act play giving them most of the dialogue. Rocky Raccoon is the main character, then there’s the girl whose real name was Magill, who called herself Lil, but she was known as Nancy.”

John Lennon preferred to write more personal songs for The Beatles

Writing stories like “Rocky Raccoon” wasn’t Lennon’s preference. He often wrote songs from his perspective as he felt his songs were stronger if the emotions were authentic. In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, John Lennon said the best songs he wrote for The Beatles were the ones he “wrote from experience.”

“I don’t know about anything else, really, and the few true songs I ever wrote were like ‘Help’ and ‘Strawberry Fields.’ I can’t think of them all offhand,” Lennon explained. “They were the ones I always considered my best songs. They were the ones I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it. I always found that phony, but I’d find occasion to do it because I’d be so hung up, I couldn’t even think about myself.”