Chart Week: February 25, 1984
\nSong: \u201cNobody Told Me\u201d – John Lennon
\nChart Position: #7, 6th week on the chart. Peaked at #5 the week of March 3.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about songs by dead people lately. There\u2019s no mathematical way to quantify it, yet I keep trying to isolate the effect an artist\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n
This has been on my mind because of a couple songs I\u2019ve run across recently.<\/p>\n
For the first time in ages I heard \u201cMighty KC,\u201d<\/a> a 1995 track by the band For Squirrels<\/a>. 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]<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Whether it was the Cobain reference, the band\u2019s own tragedy, or a combination, something propelled this song by an unknown group up to #15 on the alternative rock chart.<\/p>\n After not hearing \u201cMighty KC\u201d since sometime in the Nineties, I\u2019ve heard it twice in the past month. The Music Gods were pushing me down a path.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve also heard a couple countdowns from early 1984 recently, both of which included the final hit of John Lennon\u2019s solo career.<\/p>\n The former Beatle retreated from the public eye in the mid-Seventies<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> album<\/a>. The week of December 6 his comeback single, \u201c(Just Like) Starting Over,\u201d<\/a> was #6 in just its sixth week on the Billboard Hot 100.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n On the evening of December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman<\/a>, a mentally ill fan, shot and killed Lennon outside his New York apartment.<\/p>\n Three weeks later, \u201c(Just Like) Starting Over\u201d began a five-week stay at #1.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While Lennon was recording Double Fantasy<\/em>, he dug up a demo made in 1976 called \u201cEverybody\u2019s Talkin\u2019, Nobody\u2019s Talkin\u2019.\u201d He brushed it up a bit, changing the piano to guitar. He also renamed it \u201cNobody Told Me.\u201d However, he didn\u2019t think it was a fit for Double Fantasy<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n In the wake of Lennon\u2019s death, Starr was too devastated to attempt to sing his friend\u2019s composition. Thus \u201cNobody Told Me\u201d 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<\/a><\/em> album, which included six tracks written by Lennon.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t near the singer that John was.<\/p>\n Lennon sounds relaxed and playful on his version. When I listen to \u201cNobody Told Me,\u201d 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 \u201cThree, four\u2026\u201d count in to begin the song, and the \u201cMost peculiar mamma, roll\u2026\u201d ad lib near the end. I hear him shrugging off everything he went through during the Seventies and realizing that life shouldn\u2019t be taken so seriously. I hear the joy making music again brought him.<\/p>\n Lennon did not leave behind a massive trove of completed or in-process songs, so there\u2019s never been a slow trickle of \u201cnew\u201d posthumous music like there was with Tupac, Prince, or others. After Milk and Honey<\/em> was released, there were just bits of a few songs left on a collection of cassette tapes, more sketches than proper demos.[3]<\/a> Rather than giving them the \u201cNobody Told Me\u201d treatment, Ono passed them along to the surviving Beatles. They were turned into \u201cFree As A Bird\u201d and \u201cReal Love,\u201d released as part of the 1995 The Beatles Anthology<\/em> collection<\/a>, and \u201cNow and Then<\/a>,\u201d released last fall.<\/p>\n I like \u201cNobody Told Me\u201d far more than those \u201cBeatles\u201d tracks. It wasn\u2019t shoehorned into some Beatles Nostalgia motif. No matter how respectful Paul McCartney was of Lennon\u2019s lyrics and intent, John did not get an equal say in how those songs turned out. In \u201cNobody \u201cTold Me,\u201d the true spirit of John Lennon lives on. 7\/10<\/strong><\/p>\n