“I wanted to ask you, John, about something that’s always charmed me about the way the Beatles make a distinction between lovers and friends.”
“In what sense?” John asked.
“Well, there’s the ‘baby’ who can drive your car, but in ‘We Can Work It Out,’ the song says that life’s very short and there’s no time for ‘fussing and fighting, my friend.’ And in ‘All Together Now,’ it’s not ‘baby let me follow you down’ but rather ‘A, B, C, D, can I bring my friend to tea?’ ”
“I know what you mean,” John said, “but I don’t know why. It’s Paul’s bit, that—‘Buy you a diamond ring, my friend’—it’s an alternative to ‘baby.’ You can take it logically the way you took it. See, I don’t know really. Yours is as true a way of looking at as any other way. In ‘Baby You’re a Rich Man,’ the point was: Stop moaning, you’re a rich man and we’re all rich men, heh heh, baby!”
“It’s also a bit of a mocking song, isn’t it?”
“Well, they all get like that ’cause there is all that in them,” he explained, “and that’s the point. Because as we sing them, that happens. In different takes, just the intonation of your voice will change the meaning of the lyrics. And that’s why it’s after we’ve done them that we really see what it was, because by that time the weight’s on them.”
Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by Jonathan Cott
