Come Together

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Come Together is a song off The Beatles' 1969 album Abbey Road and also released as the B-Side to the Something single. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Contents

[edit] Writing

John Lennon had originally written Come Together as a political rallying cry for writer, psychologist, and pro-drugs activist Timothy Leary. Lennon told Playboy in 1980, "It's a funky record. It's one of my favorite Beatle tracks or one of my favourite Lennon tracks, I'd say. It's funky, it's bluesy and I'm singing pretty well. I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it. I'd buy it." The song was written to support Timothy Leary's campaign for California governor against Ronald Reagan. Leary and his wife Rosemary travelled to Montreal for John Lennon's bed-in for peace on June 1, 1969. The Learys participated in the recording of Give Peace A Chance, and were both mentioned in the lyrics.

"Everybody's talking about:
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary,
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper,
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg, Hare Krishna
Hare Hare Krishna"

The next day, John Lennon offered to help Leary's campaign. Leary's campaign slogan was "Come together, join the party." John Lennon sent him a demo tape of song ideas, but when Leary was jailed for cannabis possession, his campaign ended. Because of this, Lennon wrote new lyrics and recorded it with The Beatles. Lennon told Playboy in 1980, "The thing was created in the studio. The lyrics are gobbledygook and Come Together was an expression that Leary had come up with when he was running for president. They'd asked me to write them a campaign song. I tried and tried and tried and couldn't come up with it. But I came up with this Come Together, which would have been no good for them. They couldn't have had a campaign song like that, right? But Leary attacked me years later, saying I ripped him off. Well, I had written another little thing called [singing] "Come together and join the party..." It never got further than that. And they never came back to ask for the song. I didn't rip him off. I had the song there waiting for him." Leary was bemused when he heard Lennon's new lyrics for Come Together. Leary recalled, "Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way... When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else." Come Together was Lennon's last politicized stance in The Beatles, mocking hippy figureheads who tried to gain the support of dropouts of society. The song was musically similar to Chuck Berry's 1956 song You Can't Catch Me. Besides having a similar tune, both songs contained the lines "Here come old flat-top." Lennon would later be sued by Berry's publisher Morris Levy. This was settled in court, and Lennon agreed to record some songs owned by Levy. Lennon told Playboy in 1980, "It's me, writing obscurely around an old Chuck Berry thing. Though it's nothing like the Chuck Berry song, they took me to court because I admitted this once years ago. I left in one line, which is not just Berry's: "Here come old flat top." I could have changed it to "Here comes old iron face." The song remains independent of Chuck Berry or anybody else on this earth." The result of the lawsuit was Lennon's 1975 album Rock 'N' Roll, which contained Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen and You Can't Catch Me, as well as Lee Dorsey's Ya Ya, also owned by Levy (which featured 11-year-old Julian Lennon on drums).

[edit] Recording

The Beatles first recorded Come Together on July 21, 1969, when eight takes of the basic track were recorded at Abbey Road Studios' Studio Three. John Lennon sang and clapped while singing "Shoot me." Engineer Geoff Emerick recalls, "On the finished record you can really only hear the word 'shoot'. The bass guitar note falls where the 'me' is." The song was conceived as a Chuck Berry style rocker, but Paul McCartney suggested that it be slowed down to minimize similarities to You Can't Catch Me. McCartney recalled in his authorized biography, Many Years From Now, "He originally brought it over as a very perky little song, and I pointed out to him that it was very similar to Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me. John acknowledged it was rather close to it so I said, 'Well, anything you can do to get away from that.' I suggested that we tried it swampy - 'swampy' was the word I used - so we did, we took it right down. I laid that bass line down which very much makes the mood. It's actually a bass line that people now use very often in rap records. If it's not a sample, they use that riff. But that was my contribution to that." The original track featured Lennon on vocals and tambourine, McCartney on bass, George Harrison on guitar, and Ringo Starr on drums. Take 1 featuring a guide vocal from Lennon is featured on Anthology 3. John Lennon recalled in 1969, "Come Together changed at a session. We said, 'Let's slow it down. Let's do this to it, let's do that to it,' and it ends up however it comes out. I just said, 'Look, I've got no arrangement for you, but you know how I want it.' I think that's partly because we've played together a long time. So I said, 'Give me something funky,' and set up a beat, maybe, and they all just join in." On July 22, New vocals, electric piano, rhythm guitar, and maracas were overdubbed. Engineer Geoff Emerick recalls, "Initially, Paul played the electric piano part, but John kind of looked over his shoulder and studied what he was playing. When it came time to record it, John played the electric piano instead of Paul. Paul might have been miffed, but I think he was more upset about not singing on the choruses - John did his own backing vocals." The Beatles must not have been satisfied with the vocals from this date, because they were rerecorded on July 23 and July 25, and other overdubs were done on July 29 and July 30. Paul McCartney later regretted not singing harmony vocals with John Lennon on this song. He recalled, "Even on Abbey Road we don't do harmonies like we used to. I think it's sad. On Come Together I would have liked to sing harmony with John and I think he would have liked me to but I was too embarrassed to ask him and I don't work to the best of my abilities in that situation."

[edit] Recording Sessions

  • July 21, 1969: Recording Session. Songs Recorded: Come Together. →


[edit] Single Release

Come Together was released as the B-Side to the Something single. It was released in the US on October 6, 1969 and eventually reached number one in that country. It entered the Top 40 on October 18 and remained there for sixteen weeks. Come Together only reached number four in the UK, likely because it was banned by the BBC for unacceptable product placement for the line "He shoot Coca-Cola." This single was the first Beatles single to feature songs available in exactly the same form on an album. This was Allen Klein's idea to keep Apple in business.

[edit] LOVE Mix

A new mix of this song appears on the 2006 Beatles remix album LOVE. For most of the mix, the song is largely unchanged, though during the fadeout it plays part of Dear Prudence. After the Dear Prudence section has ended, the song changed to a mix of Can You Take Me Back?. This mix featured drums from Come Together, piano from A Day In The Life, and strings from Eleanor Rigby.

[edit] Personnel

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] Production

[edit] Available Versions

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] John Lennon

[edit] Known Unavailable Versions

All tracks are unavailable on any release, legitimate or bootleg, unless otherwise noted.

A (%) indicates an overdub, edit piece, or basic track available only as part of another recording. The overdub, edit piece, or basic track by itself has not been released.

[edit] Available On

[edit] Cover Versions

[edit] Sources

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