Chart Week: February 25, 1984
Song: “Nobody Told Me” – John Lennon
Chart Position: #7, 6th week on the chart. Peaked at #5 the week of March 3.

I’ve been thinking about songs by dead people lately. There’s no mathematical way to quantify it, yet I keep trying to isolate the effect an artist’s death has on new music released after they pass. Do songs get more popular because of our morbid fascination with death, and thus become bigger hits? Or do they perform pretty much the same as if the artist lived?

This has been on my mind because of a couple songs I’ve run across recently.

For the first time in ages I heard “Mighty KC,” a 1995 track by the band For Squirrels. It was about Kurt Cobain – Mighty KC, get it? – so it already had a Dead Artist connection, which may have been enough for it to crack the modern rock chart.[1] Just before For Squirrels released their debut album, the band was involved in an auto accident that took the lives of lead singer Jack Vigliatura and bass player Bill White. The song got a lot of airplay on alt-rock radio, and it seemed like DJs always referenced that double-tracked death angle.

Whether it was the Cobain reference, the band’s own tragedy, or a combination, something propelled this song by an unknown group up to #15 on the alternative rock chart.

After not hearing “Mighty KC” since sometime in the Nineties, I’ve heard it twice in the past month. The Music Gods were pushing me down a path.

I’ve also heard a couple countdowns from early 1984 recently, both of which included the final hit of John Lennon’s solo career.

The former Beatle retreated from the public eye in the mid-Seventies, and spent several years in semi-seclusion. He was cleaning himself up from heroin, rededicating himself to his wife Yoko Ono, and delighting in being a father to his son Sean.

By 1980 he was ready to start making music and show his face to the world again. Late in the year he released the Double Fantasy album. The week of December 6 his comeback single, “(Just Like) Starting Over,” was #6 in just its sixth week on the Billboard Hot 100.[2]

On the evening of December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a mentally ill fan, shot and killed Lennon outside his New York apartment.

Three weeks later, “(Just Like) Starting Over” began a five-week stay at #1.

If we could have somehow skipped over December 8, or if Chapman had been arrested, or if his addled brain had just told him to be satisfied with the autograph he got from Lennon earlier that day, would the song still have hit #1? Based on its trajectory and the fact it was the first new Lennon song in five years, the answer is pretty clearly yes. Would it have spent as long at the top of chart? No tidy formula can answer that for us.

While Lennon was recording Double Fantasy, he dug up a demo made in 1976 called “Everybody’s Talkin’, Nobody’s Talkin’.” He brushed it up a bit, changing the piano to guitar. He also renamed it “Nobody Told Me.” However, he didn’t think it was a fit for Double Fantasy. Instead, he decided to pass it along to Ringo Starr for his next solo album. With that in mind, Lennon recorded a proper demo to use as a guide when he and Ringo got together. They had booked studio time on January 14, 1981 to take a run at it.

In the wake of Lennon’s death, Starr was too devastated to attempt to sing his friend’s composition. Thus “Nobody Told Me” sat unused until 1983 when Ono sifted through the music her husband left behind. The track was finished with studio musicians and became the lead single for the Milk and Honey album, which included six tracks written by Lennon.

The single did pretty well, peaking at #5 during a 12-week run on the Hot 100. Again it is impossible to know how much of its success was because listeners figured it might be the final, new John Lennon song.

I hear a looseness in the track that is consistent with other unfinished songs released by the estates of dead artists. There is also a roughness that feels as though it would have been tightened and smoothed with more attention. Had Lennon lived and gone into the studio with Starr, I think the final product would have been much more polished. I doubt it would have been as good, though, as Ringo wasn’t near the singer that John was.

Lennon sounds relaxed and playful on his version. When I listen to “Nobody Told Me,” I always imagine him singing with a smile on his face, happily swaying from side-to-side as he strummed his guitar. I can see him winking at the people around him during the line about UFOs over New York. I love the little “Three, four…” count in to begin the song, and the “Most peculiar mamma, roll…” ad lib near the end. I hear him shrugging off everything he went through during the Seventies and realizing that life shouldn’t be taken so seriously. I hear the joy making music again brought him.

Lennon did not leave behind a massive trove of completed or in-process songs, so there’s never been a slow trickle of “new” posthumous music like there was with Tupac, Prince, or others. After Milk and Honey was released, there were just bits of a few songs left on a collection of cassette tapes, more sketches than proper demos.[3] Rather than giving them the “Nobody Told Me” treatment, Ono passed them along to the surviving Beatles. They were turned into “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love,” released as part of the 1995 The Beatles Anthology collection, and “Now and Then,” released last fall.

I like “Nobody Told Me” far more than those “Beatles” tracks. It wasn’t shoehorned into some Beatles Nostalgia motif. No matter how respectful Paul McCartney was of Lennon’s lyrics and intent, John did not get an equal say in how those songs turned out. In “Nobody “Told Me,” the true spirit of John Lennon lives on. 7/10