Released 57 Years Ago Today, The Beatles Classic That John Lennon Thought Was a Dig at Yoko Ono (That Became a No. 1 Hit Across the Globe)

Some Beatles fans speculate that John Lennon’s relationship with Yoko Ono was what caused the band’s breakup. Regardless of whether you subscribe to that belief or not, there’s no doubt that his relationship with the Japanese artist caused some tension between him and other members of the Fab Four. So, when Paul McCartney wrote “Get Back” for the Let It Be album, a song that tells people to “Get back to where you once belonged”, it’s not surprising that Lennon had his reservations about the song.

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According to All We Are Saying, Lennon definitely thought “Get Back” took jabs at Yoko Ono. That didn’t stop the song from being a hit, though. “Get Back” went No. 1 in the UK, the US, and several other countries.

“I think there’s some underlying thing about Yoko in there,” Lennon told David Sheff. “You know, ‘Get back to where you once belonged.’ Every time [McCartney] sang the line in the studio, he’d look at Yoko. Maybe he’ll say I’m paranoid. You know, he can say, ‘I’m a normal family man, those two are freaks.’ That’ll leave him a chance to say that one.”

Who Are Jojo and Loretta?

If you listen to “Get Back”, you’ll hear McCartney call out a character named “JoJo” throughout the song. Thanks to “Jojo”, Yoko Ono wasn’t the only person people thought the song was about.

According to SongFacts, fans of the song thought that “Jojo” was a reference to Linda McCartney’s first husband, Joseph Melville See Jr., whom she was married to for three years before meeting McCartney. McCartney and Linda were married from 1969 to 1998.

However, as McCartney explained in his autobiography, Many Years From Now, “Jojo” was a character who was “half-man and half-woman.” At the end of “Get Back”, McCartney also introduces a second fictional character: Loretta, whom he says “thought she was a woman / but she was another man.”

McCartney would also later tell Barry Miles, he had “no particular person” in mind when writing the Let It Be track. “I often left things ambiguous,” he explained. “I like doing that in my songs.”

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