John Lennon Said The Beatles Made Meaningless, ‘Wallpaper’ Music
While in The Beatles, John Lennon was a part of one of the most successful bands of all time. He reached unprecedented levels of fame, and the music the band put out was both commercially and critically lauded. When the band broke up, though, he criticized their catalog of work. He felt that the music he was putting out in the 1970s was more meaningful than anything The Beatles had created.
John Lennon helped create The Beatles
In 1957, a teenage Paul McCartney attended a party where Lennon was playing with his band, The Quarrymen. He was impressed with what he heard and found Lennon after his set. McCartney played a song for Lennon, who invited him to join the band.
“I turned around right then on first meeting and said, ‘Do you want to join the group?'” Lennon said, per NPR. “And I think he said yes the next day.”
McCartney suggested that his younger friend, George Harrison, also join the group. While Lennon wasn’t as sold on Harrison, McCartney kept pushing for him. They began referring to themselves as The Beatles in 1960, and in 1962, they invited Ringo Starr to join the group as well. By 1964, they were the biggest band in the world.
He insulted the music he used to make with the band
After The Beatles broke up in 1970, the four former members began pursuing solo careers. Lennon hoped to set himself apart from the other Beatles, particularly McCartney, with his album Imagine.
“John immediately went into his home recording studio, even though it was still under construction, to make a new solo album, Imagine, which he hoped would show the world where he stood in relation to the solo albums of Paul McCartney,” Lennon’s girlfriend May Pang wrote in the book Loving John.
Lennon hoped that his album would be “meaningful,” a quality he hoped that The Beatles’ albums lacked.
“It would make a meaningful statement and not be wallpaper music — the term John and Yoko used to describe the music of The Beatles,” Pang wrote. “He was also determined that it be more successful than McCartney’s solo albums.”
John Lennon admitted that there was something he missed about The Beatles
Lennon often spoke about his problems with The Beatles. He complained about his former bandmates and admitted that he felt embarrassed by some of the songs the band put out. Still, he said there were some parts of being in the band that he looked back on with nostalgia.
“Because in spite of all the things, the Beatles could really play music together when they weren’t uptight, and if I get a thing going, Ringo knows where to go, just like that, and he does well,” he told Rolling Stone in 1970. “We’ve played together so long, that it fits. That’s the only thing I sometimes miss is just being able to sort of blink or make a certain noise and I know they’ll all know where we are going on an ad lib thing. But I don’t miss it that much.”
