The John Lennon solo song he refused to perform: “I couldn’t sing it”
Out of all the former Beatles, John Lennon seemed to be the natural-born poet. George Harrison may have moulded himself into a great songwriter, and Paul McCartney may have been one of the greatest melody writers of his time, but when it came to speaking his mind, Lennon was the only one of the Fab Four who seemed to care as much about what he was saying as he did about the harmonic construction of his song. That’s not to say he couldn’t loosen up now and again, and ‘Beef Jerky’ was the first time he realised that he didn’t need words.
Considering where Lennon was during the late 1970s, chances are he needed to loosen up a little bit. He had already been through his “lost weekend” trying to get his covers album, Rock ‘n’ Roll, made, and the massive amount of booze he was consuming around this time really started to wear on his mind.
Since he was also separated from Yoko Ono for the first time since the 1960s, Lennon sounded like a lovesick man on Walls and Bridges, which stands as the most honest album he had ever released. Compared to the man who knew all the answers to a happy life on Imagine, songs like ‘Going Down on Love’ and ‘What You Got’ make him sound desperate for some kind of relief, going so far as to use the same vocal hook from ‘Help!’ in the former song.
Although the album would be home to one of Lennon’s greatest hits, ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’, he was interested in cutting loose with a lick he had created in the studio. Surely, someone of Lennon’s calibre could turn out a classic riff when he wanted, but there was just one problem: he had just written something he couldn’t perform properly.
Rather than just putting some lyrics over the jam in post-production, Lennon didn’t even attempt to try, saying, “It’s called ‘Beef Jerky’. I get off on this because I don’t have to hear me voice all the time. That was an instrumental where I just had the lick. I couldn’t sing it and play it at the same time, so I never got any lyrics for it. So it’s an instrumental, and I’m rather glad about it, really”.
Whereas the rest of the album saw Lennon unpacking most of his emotional baggage, this is the one moment where he seems to be enjoying himself in the studio. Outside of random voices chanting the song title at the end of the track, this is just a calm before the storm before Lennon brings us to the rousing finish on the song ‘Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)’.
Even without lyrics, there may have been a bit of cheeky references put into the final track. Since Lennon had confessed to being a fan of Paul McCartney’s latest album, Band on the Run, the lick that connects pieces of the song has an eerie similarity to Wings’ ‘Let Me Roll It’, which was already being compared to being a Lennon-esque song.
Regardless of where the lick came from, it was nice to see Lennon finally getting to a happy place in his life. He had been through his own demons at the start of the 1970s, and it was going to be a few more months before he got Yoko back, but he was more than happy to find joy in picking up his guitar.