Who knows what the four movies directed by Sam Mendes about The Beatles will look like when released in 2027. Will they perhaps move into areas outside of their time with the group? If so, the time in John Lennon‘s life when he made the album Walls and Bridges and recorded the song “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)” might be an interesting one to explore.
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What is the song about? Who was the artist Lennon had in mind when writing it? And what was going on in Lennon’s personal life that engendered such raw feelings? All the answers ahead as we dive into this somewhat unheralded Lennon album cut.
Lost and Found
After the brilliant one-two punch of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine started off his post-Beatles career, Lennon floundered a bit. Problems in his personal life certainly didn’t help matters. A separation from Yoko Ono and a move to Los Angeles with new girlfriend May Pang led to Lennon’s infamous “Lost Weekend” period, one where drugs and alcohol stunted any creative tendencies he might have felt.
Luckily, he managed to pull it together in the summer of 1974, putting aside the excesses for a while and returning to New York to record the album titled Walls and Bridges. Perhaps because he was momentarily free from the drugs and booze, Lennon found clarity and was able to articulate his feelings at this difficult time in his life, as he explained to David Sheff in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono:
“I think I was more in a morass mentally than Yoko was. If you listen to Walls And Bridges you hear somebody that is depressed. You can say, ‘Well, it was because of years of fighting deportation and this problem and that problem,’ but whatever it was, it sounds depressing. The guy knows how to make tables, but there’s no spirit in the tables. I’m not knocking the record. But I’m saying it showed where I was. It’s a reflection of the time.”
Calling the Chairman of the Board
Perhaps the emotional centerpiece of Walls and Bridges, “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)” finds Lennon bringing all his emotions to the surface in fearless fashion. But oddly enough, as he told Sheff, he actually imagined the song being sung by a pretty famous someone else:
“Well, that says the whole story. I always imagined [Frank] Sinatra singing that one, I dunno why. He could do a perfect job with it. Ya listenin’, Frank? You need a song that isn’t a piece of nothing. Here’s one for you. The horn arrangement—everything’s made for you. But don’t ask me to produce it!”
Who knows if Sinatra actually even heard the song? Nonetheless, it proves an excellent showcase for Lennon, whose vocals drift from drowsy and defeated to impassioned and desperate. Some outstanding session players bring the song to life as well, including Jesse Ed Davis on lead guitar, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Klaus Voorman on bass, and Jim Keltner on drums. Lennon didn’t choose to release it as a single, perhaps because of its personal nature. But it feels like if more people knew it, it would be justly celebrated as one of his major works.
The Meaning of “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out)”
Lennon manages to do a lot with his lyrics on this song. These are obviously the laments of a lonely, hurting man: Every time I put my finger on it, it slips away, he sings in an effort to sum up his feelings, this after he was asked, Do I love you? His frustrations with his separation from Ono are evident.
And yet, the song also manages to address how Lennon was viewed by his fans and his press. No longer untouchable as when he was a Beatle, he struggles to please everyone. I’ve shown you everything, I got nothing to hide, he complains. All I can tell you is, it’s all show biz, he shrugs, which could refer to either his music or to the false faces one shows when a relationship is crumbling.
In the final verse, Lennon indulges in a bit of gallows humor to sum up his feelings about the unfairness of life: Everybody’s hollering about their own birthday / Everybody loves you when you’re six feet in the ground. It’s hard to listen to that last line now, knowing Lennon’s eventual fate. The consolation is all the wonderful stuff he left behind, especially when, as on “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” he dug extra-deep.
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Photo by Steve Morley/Redferns
