When John Lennon left The Beatles, he also mostly left behind his tendency to write opaque lyrics that were sometimes intended to lead listeners off on a wild goose chase looking for meaning. It was all about the simple, direct approach.
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But that didn’t mean his mischievous sense of humor completely abandoned him. Lennon had a little bit of fun with the concluding lyrics to his 1970 song “Remember,” which featured a bang of a finish that might just have left some listeners looking for clues.
Going Out With a Bang
Toward the end of his time with The Beatles, John Lennon was starting to get a bit fed up with listeners who scoured for secret meanings in the lyrics he wrote. To have a little fun at their expense, he wrote songs like “I Am the Walrus” and “Glass Onion,” which were specifically designed to confuse people.
But when he was making John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, his first album after the breakup of The Beatles, things had changed. His emotions laid bare by the primal scream therapy he had been enduring, he wrote lyrics that didn’t try to hide anything. In fact, they were so raw as to be harrowing.
“Remember,” a piano-driven rocker from that record, was just such a song, as it dealt with how the pain we build up as adults makes it difficult to recall the innocent days of childhood. In the final moments of the song, Lennon sings, Remember / The fifth of November, at which point the sound of an explosion is heard to conclude matters.
Folks in Great Britain immediately picked up the reference to the 1605 incident, celebrated each year in the country, when authorities foiled a plot to blow up Parliament. But Lennon conceded in an interview with Rolling Stone that it was a spur-of-the-moment lyric he decided was an irreverent way to end the song:
“It was just an ad-lib. It was about the third take, and it begins to sound like Frankie Laine – when you’re singing ‘remember, remember the fifth of November.’ And I just broke and it went on for about another seven or eight minutes. I was just ad-libbing and goofing about. But then I cut it there and it just exploded ’cause it was a good joke.”
Exploring the Lyrics to “Remember”
Aside from the explosive business at the end, “Remember” finds Lennon confronting his audience, trying to convince them to make peace with their wounded psyches: And don’t feel sorry about the way it’s gone / Don’t you worry about what you’ve done. The rest of the song explains why we should forgive ourselves, as Lennon suggests we’ve been misled since we were kids.
Children are given a rosy view of the world, one that insisted that right always prevails: Remember when you were young / How the hero was never hung / Always got away. But it’s not long after that when reality sets in: Remember how the man / Used to leave you empty handed / Always, always let you down.
Lennon gives us another cheeky reference with these lines: If you ever change your mind / About leaving it all behind. These lyrics paraphrase the song “Bring It on Home to Me,” a hit for Sam Cooke the former Beatle would cover a few years down the road from when “Remember” was recorded. In this context, these words seem to reference people fed up with the way they’ve been led astray by what they were originally taught.
By bringing Ma and Pa into the picture later in the song, Lennon is reviving a common theme from the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album about the damage done to him in his formative years. But he sends his listeners out with a directive to try to cut the past loose and focus on the present: Remember, remember today, he sings.
“Remember” is one of the most potent songs on that classic album, and not just because it ends with the whole song blown to smithereens. John Lennon might have been having a little fun with the explosive conclusion, but his serious message about dealing with the scars of the past made the most impact.
Photo by Andrew Maclear/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
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