COME TOGETHER
Meaningful nonsense, a heavy drug fug, and an awesome groove beguile .
N 1969, MERSEYSIDE FOLKLORIST FRANK SHAW published a collection of Liverpool children’s rhymes entitled You Know Me Aunty Nelly? Subtitled ‘Notes On Kids’ Games And Liverpool Life’, it brought together hundreds of vernacular poems from the working-class streets of the city, many of them dating back to the First World War.
Writing in the foreword, folklorist Peter Opie zoned in on the bright metaphor and sarcastic nonchalance of these “ordinary yet extraordinary” songs and rhymes, a “living literature” that resisted “the self-conscious and the precious”.
Inside the pages were characters named Bungalow Sam, meals of “yellow belly custard and green snot pie”, songs about “me and my monkey” and chants that asked, “What’s yer name, Mary Jane?… won’t you come out to play?”
In its mixture of the crude, the smart-aleck, the innocent and the very funny, You Know Me Aunty Nelly? reads like an Ur-text for Beatles Lennon, from the mean-eyed surrealism of In His Own Write to I Am The Walrus’s post-LSD retreat into childhood, and culminating in this, among the last tracks all four Beatles would record live, in one place, all together.
“What’s there to sing about?” Lennon asked Barry Miles in the ‘Beautiful Freaks’ issue of Oz magazine in October 1969. “Dylan was always saying, ‘Listen to the words, man,’ and I made a conscious effort […] Now I’ve relieved myself of that burden. I’m only interested in sure sound… You know, Dizzy Miss Lizzy… THAT GUY.”
Did Lennon really say “sure sound”, or was it “pure sound”? Either way, Come Together is possibly the best example of the singer relinquishing “the words, man”, and locating himself in the floating meaning of “sure sound”.
Appropriately, the song had begun in the political, as a campaign slogan – “Come Together, Join The Party!” – written for the California LSD advocate, Timothy Leary, running against Ronald Reagan for governor of that state in the 1970 election. But after the disgraced Harvard psychologist was arrested in December 1968, Lennon took the song back, bringing it to the Abbey Road sessions on July 21, 1969.
Lennon’s original run through was a fast retro rocker (“You know, Dizzy Miss Lizzy… THAT GUY”), with an opening line lifted from Chuck Berry’s 1956 Chess single You Can’t Catch Me, and an “over me” refrain intended as an Elvis Presley parody. However, when its similarity to the Berry number was pointed out, McCartney suggested slowing it down with a hypnotic, “swampy bass-and-drums vibe”.
Centred around that Leary chant, with verses comprised of Lennon playground “gobbledygook”, (“joo joo eyeballs”, “toejam football”, “walrus gumboot”) and a dirty pun at its heart (“come together/over me”) here was the revered singer finally relinquishing his role as pop-culture spokesperson, rejecting politics for nonsense rhyme; better Edward Lear than Edward Heath.
Other influences were in the blood. In Revolution In The Head, Ian MacDonald argues Lennon was using heroin at the time. Whether true or not, thanks to McCartney’s deep, stoned bass line, Ringo’s left handed delay on a towel-dampened beat, George’s bassy double-tracked hustle, and Lennon’s sussurating “Shoot [me]!” sung through clapped hands, the whole song possesses a low, tar-heavy drag, redolent of a drugged freedom that was no longer about enlightenment, but simply the relinquishing of responsibility and meaning. Lesson over. Back to the playground.