John Lennon Allegedly Insulted Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney in a Scathing Recording
John Lennon had problems with Paul McCartney, but he generally seemed to like Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger. Early in his career, he spoke about how much he liked Dylan’s music, and he spent a good deal of time with Jagger while living in New York. An unearthed recording that experts believe belonged to Lennon told a different story, though. On the tape, Lennon insults Dylan’s music and refers to him, Jagger, and McCartney as company men.
John Lennon spoke about his admiration of Bob Dylan
Lennon discovered Dylan in the early years of The Beatles, and he became a fan. While he didn’t think Dylan would ever be as big as The Beatles, he predicted success for the American musician.
“The first time you hear Dylan you think you’re the first to discover him,” Lennon said, per the book No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton. “But quite a lot of people have discovered him before us … I think Bob Dylan’s music will grow steadily in this country, but I can’t see him becoming the new craze.”
He also spoke about how Dylan helped inspire The Beatles’ 1965 song, “In My Life.”
John Lennon called Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney ‘company men’ in a diary
Lennon and Jagger were also friends, and they spent a lot of time together in the 1970s. While he had his well-publicized problems with McCartney, they’d worked out many of their differences by 1980. Still, Lennon insulted all three men on a recovered tape from 1979. The 13-minute recording was reportedly part of an audio journal he kept in the months leading up to his murder.
“I was listening to the radio and Dylan’s new single or album or whatever the hell it is came on. ‘Everybody’s got to be served.’ I mean, what was it?” Lennon said, per Rolling Stone. “‘You’ve got to serve someone’ … ‘You’ve got to serve somebody.’ So he wants to be a waiter now? A waiter for Christ.”
He referred to the song as “embarrassing” and the singing as “pathetic.” Lennon later took another jab at Dylan, and threw Jagger and McCartney into the mix.
“So here we sit, watching the mighty Dylan and the mighty McCartney and the mighty Jagger slide down the mountain, blood and mud in their nails … [They’re] all company men in various disguises, but basically company men.”
While it’s difficult to confirm the veracity of an audio recording, voice analysis expert Dr. Phil Harrison believed the tape was authentic.
“All you can do in terms of forensic phonetics is to say there are similarities,” he said. “And there were. It appeared to be dead-on everywhere I looked. I’m personally sure that it is the right voice, but it’s not something I would say as a legally binding statement. But I can’t see how it couldn’t be the voice of John Lennon. I would be very surprised if this was a forgery.”
Some of his physical diaries were stolen
In 2006, some of Lennon’s written diaries, among many other items, were stolen from Yoko Ono. Eleven years later, German police recovered some of the items at an auction house. Per The Independent, “two pairs of his iconic round spectacles, a recording of a Beatles concert on tape, sheet music, and a cigarette case” were also discovered with the diaries.
As Beatles memorabilia can be sold for enormous sums at auctions, the diaries likely would have fetched a large sum of money.
