John Lennon actually was sued by Chuck Berry over this song, due to a supposed resemblance between it and Come Together. Personally I never thought the songs sounded very similar, and I have a hard time believing that Chuck Berry was personally responsible for lodging the suit, cantankerous though he can be.
As part of the settlement, Lennon agreed to record a version of You Can’t Catch Me, and is version, ironically enough, does sound a lot like Come Together…considerably slowed down from the benzedrine beat of the original.
Spectre-very accurate opinion. The late Morris Levy-NYC music “writer” & publisher sued Lennon. The story about Levy is enough for a book- see Hit Men- Levy was the notorious thug who stole from all he could-died while awaiting trial on extortion. If not Jewish,he would have been in the Mafia, but still worked closely w/ them in the NYC music business.
This thread is interesting. It’s my unsupported opinion that each verse is about one of the Beatles themselves and it has no deeper meaning than this; four verses, four Beatles. Obviously John Lennon could be said, obliquely, to have an “Ono sideboard,” to wit, an attachment always on his side.
Harrison, the guitar-player, could be said to have “monkey fingers”: though I don’t know if Harrison had comparatively long fingers, those are useful for a guitar-player. Shooting Coca-cola? I dunno. Maybe he drank it a lot. Maybe there’s a personal story involved there.
Ringo would be the one with ju-ju eyeballs. Well, look at him.
McCartney, the “cute one,” would be the one about whom was written “got to be good lookin’ 'cause he’s so hard to see.” He might also have “Muddy Waters” as a musical influence.
The other lines in each verse could refer to other obscure personal habits. “Spinal cracker” could just be someone who, you know, flexes his spine until it pops. I do that. Maybe I’m a spinal cracker.
I admit that I’ve never heard anything definitive, though. When you’ve got a band that can write a song like “Helter-Skelter” and it’s actually about playground equipment, maybe the answer is more playful than interpretive. Four verses; four Beatles. That’s my guess and I’m sticking to it until I think of something else.
Reeve’s facts are incorrect. The college newspaper article that originated the UL was date September 17 (and an August date seems extremely unlikely – colleges never had classes in August back then).
A second article is dated September 23. Abbey Road was released on September 26; it is not unlikely that the newspapers involved had advance copies of it. Even the earliest of these is well after the song would have been recorded.
The UL was just a campus joke (no one thought the articles were remotely true) until DJ Russel Gibb repeated them in October, in part, mentioning Abbey Road as part of the “evidence.”
I read that the term "monkey finger’ was about the idea that he had referred to Yoko as his monkey (Everybody’s got Something to Hide Except for me and my Monkey) and that which Paul had referred to in Penny Lane as “fish and finger pie”.
Whether I have all my “clues” straight or not about the “Paul is dead hoax” makes no difference. The point is, decades after some rock ‘n’ roll songs came out people are still familiar with the music, the words, the practical joke … the whole she-bang!
And the biggest joke is on all of us for even getting into this discussion decades after the songs were written & released!
Remember John said when the Beatles broke up:
“It’s not the end of the world. It’s just a rock ‘n’ roll band.”
In other words … there is no “deep meaning” in any of this stuff, there never was supposed to be.
And the final word for me on this topic is this:
There probably never was a practical joke engineered into the words and music by the Beatles. Someone just looked a bit too long and deep into the “tea leaves” so to speak – and saw something that just wasn’t there!
A lot of other people bought into it because … in some way or another most of us seem to hope we WILL find some deep meaning or surprise in the “tea leaves”, in the pumpkin patch on Halloween, at Roswell, on the roof at Christmas … or in the words & music of four talented guys who grew up in a blue collar town called Liverpool a few years after World War Two.
So … If you want to hear good rock ‘n’ roll… listen to the old Beatles tunes, those of their British & American contemporaries … and enjoy!
If you want something deep, meaningful & important … go to your church, synagogue or whatever.
From John & Yoko’s benefit concert in NYC (1972, later released as “John Lennon Live in New York City”) John remarks after playing “Come Together”: “I have to stop writing those daft words, man. I dunno what I’m saying”.
