The Legendary Beatles Tune That Started as a Campaign Song

The origin of a song doesn’t matter quite as much as the finished product. John Lennon proved that in “Come Together”. It’s a song that veered off from its initial intent into a wildly different location.

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The Beatles ended up with a No. 1 single in the US with the track, Lennon’s most significant contribution to Abbey Road. “Come Together” proved that his way with words was often too elusive and potent to be cooped up once it got started.

Lennon and Leary

John Lennon missed a good chunk of the Abbey Road sessions due to injuries he suffered in a car accident. Who knows if he would have even been able to contribute something as substantial as “Come Together” if the song hadn’t already been in the works for another purpose?

During his bed-ins for peace that he held in 1969 with his wife Yoko Ono, Lennon crossed paths with noted LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary. Leary was considering the possibility of running for governor in California. Who better to write a theme song than John Lennon?

Lennon agreed to do it, but, as he explained to David Sheff, things got away from him a bit:

“It’s gobbledygook,” Lennon said. “‘Come Together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, ‘Come Together’, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?”

“Come Together” would cause Lennon some angst down the road. He borrowed the opening line (“Here come old flat-top”) from Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me”. That drew the ire of the song’s publisher. To compensate for that, he agreed to record a pair of Berry songs as a solo artist. His ill-fated Rock ‘N’ Roll album came out of that process.

Exploring the Lyrics of “Come Together”

Much of “Come Together” features the kind of nonsensical word soup that Lennon had utilized on “I Am The Walrus”. He was concentrating more on the sound of the words and how they went together, rather than any coherent meaning. That’s how you end up with passages like this: “He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football / He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola.”

Elsewhere, Lennon makes oblique reference to his recent escapades. “He bag production, he got walrus gumboot,” he sings. “He got Ono sideboard, he one spinal cracker.” In the middle of all that, he delivers a sneaky message to his audience about the counterculture gurus who were popping up all over the place at that time.

Lennon suggests these characters have no real plan. “Got to be a joker, he just do what he please,” he warns. They try to court the disaffected with fake familiarity. “He say, I know you, you know me,” Lennon sings. Something sinister seems to emanate from their very being: “Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease,” he warns.

One bit of lyric that you can’t hear too well on “Come Together” is the phrase “Shoot me”. That gets drowned out by Paul McCartney’s bass every time Lennon goes to sing it. That’s just one more quirk to be found in a runaway hit that, fittingly, featured lyrics that ran away from the original meaning.

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