You Must Remember Diss: Songs Throwing Shade

Paul McCartney recalled he felt he was “looking in a mirror” when he and John Lennon composed together.  Lennon said they were “eyeball to eyeball, both playing into each other’s noses.” But in their later solo work, they stopped throwing around ideas and threw brickbats at each other via derisive lyrics in their songs.

John famously trashed his co-writer’s output (“The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’) and Paul pointedly pointed out Lennon’s propensity for telling others how to live (“Too many people preaching practices”).  Paul Simon agreed with Paul, citing John’s “Power to the People” tune was “condescending and a poor record.”

Donald Fagan and Walter Becker also didn’t look kindly on several Lennon lyrics, where he imagined having no possessions — while having more than enough money to live in the Dakota in New York City. Steely Dan’s disgust at Lennon’s definition of utopia resulted in “Only a Fool Would Say That,” where they called the Beatle out for:

“Talking ‘bout a world where all is free/It just couldn’t be/ And only a fool would say that.”

It wasn’t the first time that John’s lyrics rubbed a singer the wrong way. Marianne Faithfull, who was Mick Jagger’s then-paramour, believed that the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing” was John’s way of slagging her to Mick.

Three years later, Mick still lived rent-free in Lennon’s head. In “I Dig a Pony,” where John gibed: “I roll a stoney/ Well, you can imitate everyone you know.”

Lennon had long thought that the Stones copied the Beatles.  He let his disgust gush out in a series of Rolling Stone interviews: “I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every f*ckin’ album. Every f*ckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same. They are not in the same class, music-wise or power-wise. Never were!”

John was never shy about taking potshots, but couldn’t stand being the target.  Writer/comedian Michael O’Donahue and Tony Hendra (who played Ian Faith, the manager in Spinal Tap), cherry-picked scathing lines from Lennon’s Rolling Stone diatribes and created “Magical Misery Tour,” a song that appeared on National Lampoon’s Radio Dinner album. It featured Hendra’s spot-on, screaming John impression, arranged by Christopher Guest.

In Hendra’s 1987 memoir Going Too Far, he stated that John and Yoko visited an LA radio station where a DJ played the parody for the couple; they left the station.

Twenty-two years later, Smashing Pumpkins’ leader Billy Corgan had a similar experience when he heard Pavement’s lyrics in their song “Range Life:”

“Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins/Nature kids, I,

They don’t have no function/I don’t understand what they mean.”

An irate Corgan used his star power to boot the songwriter, Stephen Malkmus, and his group off of the 1994 Lollapalooza tour.

Among other lyrical disses, Bob Dylan wrote “Fourth Time Around” in response to Lennon “doing Dylan” on “Norwegian Wood.” Lynyrd Skynyrd famously name-checked Neil Young in “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Joe Tex was another who called out a singer—and was nearly killed for it.  While recording on the same label as Joe, James Brown fell in love with singer Bea Ford, who happened to be Tex’s ex-wife.  After Bea and James sang on “You’ve Got the Power,” James sent her packing, then sent a mocking letter to Tex saying he could take his ex back.

For his part, Tex accused Brown of stealing his microphone shtick (which consisted of kicking a standing microphone then catching it before it falls).  Tex answered Brown in his “You Keep Her,” which featured Joe singing a poison reply:

“James, I got your letter/It came to me today…So you keep her, you keep her/Because now she belongs to you.”

James saw red again while sharing a 1963 bill with Joe in Macon, GA.  Trumpeter Newt Collier, who later played with Sam and Dave, recalled: “You know how James came out with the cape? Joe had one made up out of a raggedy blanket, with holes all in it. You know how James would fall on his knees? Joe fell on his knees, and all of a sudden, he grabbed his back. He had the cape on and got all tangled up in it, and he was fighting to get out, singing, ‘Please, please, please, get me out of this cape!’”

James personally put a hit on Tex.  After the show, Brown (and two shotguns) went to Club 15, an after-hours club where Joe Tex was enjoying Otis Redding’s early band. On seeing James’ itchy trigger fingers, he escaped, but some patrons weren’t so lucky.

Guitarist Johnny Jenkins remembered: “Seven people got shot. Me and Otis, we were hiding behind a piano. A guy went around later, and I think he gave each one of the injured $100 apiece not to carry it no further. And that just quieted it down.”

Apparently, some songs should come with a warning label.

-Mark Daponte

Photo: James Brown (Heinrich Klaffs, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)