Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon certainly could not agree on much of anything. In fact, even the meaning of songs in which the two both leant a hand in creating could not even be agreed upon. The song that we’ll be diving into today is a niche track from ‘The White Album’… Paul McCartney Leaks Bold Elvis Presley Secret.
The often sleeper of a track, “Everyone’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey” was originally said to be about the love shared between John and Yoko. John stated many moons ago: “That was just a sort of nice line that I made into a song. It was about me and Yoko. Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love. Everything is clear and open when you’re in love.”
John continued: “Everybody was sort of tense around us, you know? ‘What is she doing here at the session? Why is she with him?’ All this sort of madness is going on around us because we just happened to want to be together all the time.” According to the book ‘The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Write.’
While John never openly admitted that he may have been wrong on the perception of the track, years after writing “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” Lennon mentioned heroin in connection to it. During an interview with Rolling Stone, Jonathan Cott told John the song was great. John responded angrily by trashing the critical reception to the track.
John: “Right, but what did the critics say? ‘A bit simplistic, no imagery in it,’ perhaps I should have said, ‘Your inside is like a whale juice dripping from the fermented foam of the teeny-boppers’ VD in Times Square as I injected my white clown face with heroin and performed in red-leather knickers.’ Maybe then they’d like it, right?” John said his proposed rewrite of the lyrics was inspired by the avant-garde poems of Allen Ginsberg. Sadly, we’ll never know whether he mentioned heroin because the song was about heroin or because he was trying to write the sort of surreal lyrics critics liked.
Was John right or what Paul right? We’ll never know.
