John Lennon was never known to be the most patient artist in the world when it came to his music. He needed to make sure that everything was done right, but as long as it sounded honest, that was enough for him to get the ball rolling. Every song was meant to be a document of how he felt, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t go through all hell to make sure that a song ended up exactly how he wanted it.
Then again, that attention to detail may have been making up for lost time in The Beatles. He had always felt that Paul McCartney was subconsciously sabotaging many of the songs he was working on, so something that should have had more thought and care put into it was often left by the wayside as far as he could tell. At the same time, it’s hard to take Lennon’s critiques at face value, either.
Many of his greatest songs were nothing but garbage as far as he was concerned, and even when listening back to legitimate masterpieces like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’, he was often left cold by what he heard half the time. But if there was one time he could be honest, it was after going through the nightmare that was primal scream therapy.
Although Plastic Ono Banddocumented many of the horrific sides of his psyche talking about his family issues and breaking away from the Fab Four, ‘Working Class Hero’ is another story entirely. This was about him trying to capture the perfect take to comment on the class struggle in England, but having something be that earnest with an acoustic guitar and voice is a lot harder than it looks.
When putting together the record, engineer Andy Stephens remembered Lennon getting out of control when things were going haywire in the studio, saying, “If the mix in his headphones wasn’t exactly what he wanted, he would take them off and slam them into the wall. He wouldn’t say, ‘Can I have a bit more guitar?’ He would literally rip the cans off his head and smash them into the wall, then walk out of the studio.”
This could easily be chalked up to Lennon’s rage that everyone talks about, but that’s far from the only problem here. He was emotionally frail after those therapy sessions, so being able to finally get the right take and not having everything together was bound to get tiresome after a while.
Some of that rage even shows up on the final take. Lennon might be singing in an almost monotone voice throughout the entire poiece, but by the time he reaches the final seconds of the tune, hearing him hit that final E note at the end of the tune is much more aggressive, almost lik he was actively trying to pull the string off the guitar when he played.
But it’s not like Lennon was intentionally trying to sabotage his own recording at the end. This was him trying as hard as he could to take people to task for being absolute savages to those at the bottom, and if people weren’t turned off by him singing lines about people being “so fucking crazy”, they would get an extra jolt when he hit the final chord.
