John Lennon once stormed out of a radio studio when the DJ played a song that was created as a parody of The Beatles.
The late singer, who was assassinated in New York City in 1980, became furious during a guest appearance with his wife, Yoko Ono, and left the room as he didn’t see the humor in the music track. The song that infuriated Lennon was Magical Misery Tour – it was written by comedians Tony Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue and was part of Radio Dinner, the very first album release by magazine National Lampoon, which came out in 1972, just years after The Beatles broke up.
The track satirized Lennon, using inspiration from an interview he gave to Rolling Stone in 1970, and didn’t paint the singer in a positive light, featuring swearing from him and also the proclamation that he was a genius. But making fun of Lennon’s voice, Hendra delivered lines such as “I resent performing for you f—–s tell me what do you know?” and “I don’t owe you f—–s anything, and all I got to say is f–k you, the sky.”
It also exaggerated Lennon’s ego and his attitude towards his former bandmates, with lyrics such as, “I was the walrus, Paul wasn’t the walrus. I was just saying that to be nice, but I was actually the walrus.” Radio Dinner was a great success for the magazine and led to other album releases for the publication, but it didn’t go down well with Lennon, comedian Hendra, who died in 2021, wrote in his 1987 book Going Too Far.
The comedian wrote that Lennon was so annoyed with his portrayal within the parody song that when a DJ played it during a radio show, he stormed out of the studio. The title of the song – Magical Misery Tour – recalled a record by The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, that came out in 1967.
Yesterday, we revealed that a song from the legendary rock group was so hated by members of the band it led to a sound engineer quitting. The White Album was mired by in-fighting between the Fab Four, with drummer Ringo Starr departing the group and Lennon voicing his disgust at “granny music” written by Paul McCartney. Though the recording was fraught with issues between the group and the engineering team producing the album, it is regarded as one of the best-ever releases from The Beatles.
A post to Reddit shared some of the behind-the-scenes issues the band were dealing with, including “perfectionist” McCartney lashing out at fellow bandmate George Harrison. The song in question is still played by McCartney, most recently on the Got Back tour. The post reads, “John Lennon hated The Beatles’ song Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, calling it more of Paul’s ‘granny music s–t’. When George Martin offered McCartney, a perfectionist, vocal tips, McCartney responded, ‘Well you come down and sing it,’ causing Martin to get really upset. Recording engineer Geoff Emerick quit the next day.”
Emerick’s departure from the sessions is, according to one fan, because he had to deal with The Beatles at their “most unhinged”. One user wrote, “He was also dealing with The Beatles at perhaps their most unhinged. The whole reason he came up with the Leslie amp for vocals technique was because John said he wanted to hang himself upside down and spinning so his voice sounded like it was coming from a mountain top, and Emerick was like ‘no…'” Others say the “general animosity” in the studio at the time of recording was heightened by comments made after the band split up.
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