For a person who complains a lot about Phil Spector, I sure do have a lot of his productions at the top of my favorites. I guess that’s inevitable when he was so heavily involved in John’s and George’s early solo works. I do hold a grudge against this song, though – his involvement in it directly led to his being brought in to the Let It Be sessions, where in my opinion he ruined a bunch of songs.
Setting aside my unreasonable notion that a composition could be responsible for actual human actions, this gets my vaunted #2 spot on the John list because it’s freaking awesome. OK, maybe I can break it down better than that. First of all, it’s
AN ALAN WHITE SHOWCASE! Hmmm, doesn’t have the same ring. But that drumming is madness and not something I’d have expected from White based on my other knowledge of him (I don’t do Yes, so I’m talking about other Beatles collaborations). Truly phenomenal. I wouldn’t want to rank a song so highly, though, if it were dependent upon the contributions of a non-Beatle, and this isn’t. John’s vocal is Twist-And-Shouty goodness, absolutely shredding it. And although I don’t believe in karma, I think the lyrics are the most interesting of his overtly political tomes, with their tongue-in-cheek “get yourself together” criticisms combined with the optimism of “we all shine on” or the exhortation that we aren’t here to live in pain and fear. It’s a decidedly positive and communal view of where we can go, unlike the more individual directives of, for instance, “Give Peace A Chance.” In that sense, it’s more reassuring that if we all work together as one, we could accomplish something, though this idea was presented here in a less polished fashion than “Imagine.” The more optimistic lyrics are complemented by the upbeat vocal and accompaniment – unlike many John songs of this vintage, he sounds like he’s having fun.
The backstory of this song is crazy, with John having gone from concept to composition to recording to release in…get this…10 days. It reached #3 on the US charts and was the first “solo” Beatle recording to sell a million copies. It wasn’t exactly solo, of course, since George played guitar and electric piano and provided backing vocals. George and…everyone else on the planet. In typical Spector-y fashion, a billion and one musicians were brought in to work on the track, from mainstays Voormann, White, and Preston, to a chorus of uncredited backing vocals that included awful-person Allen Klein. To that Spector added his usual echo and reverb effects and wanted to add strings, too, but John deemed the song complete without them, thank goodness. I believe strings would have detracted from the raw, primal nature of the song that makes it one of my top 10.
John and Yoko did a lot of promotion for this song. They cut off their long hair and presented it to a Black power activist as some sort of signal of a “new beginning” for 1970. And they did a series of TV performances of the song, including
this little number that features Yoko soundlessly knitting with a Kotex pad taped to her face as a blindfold.
. We still have 45 voters without one song listed. I agree with 
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