Ever wonder what inspired some of your favorite songs? The answers may surprise you.
The Artist: The Beatles
The Song: “Come Together” (1969)
The Story: In 1969 Timothy Leary intended to run for governor of California against a B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan. One of Leary’s battle cries was “Come together,” and he asked his friend John Lennon to write a song based on it for the campaign. By the time Lennon got around to it, Leary’s campaign was dead (he had to drop out when he was convicted of marijuana possession).
Lennon liked the phrase, though, and decided to build a song around it anyway. He loosely based it on the old Chuck Berry tune, “You Can’t Catch Me.” He even left in the line, “Here come old flat-top.” Other than that, it’s nothing like the Berry song, but because Lennon admitted to borrowing the line, Berry’s publisher sued him. The settlement: Lennon agreed to record two Chuck Berry songs on his 1975 solo album, Rock N Roll. Written and recorded in a single session at the studio, “Come Together” was one of Lennon’s favorites: “It’s funky, it’s bluesy. You can dance to it. I’ll buy it!”
The Artist: Sheryl Crow
The Song: “All I Wanna Do” (1993)
The Story: After years of trying to break into the Los Angeles music scene—including singing backup on Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour—Crow finally got a record deal in 1991.
During a recording session, Crow wrote what she thought was a pretty good song…musically, anyway; she hated the words. She was stuck, so her producer ran across the street to a bookstore and bought 10 books of poetry, selected at random. He gave them to Crow, locked her in the bathroom, and told her to come out when she had something. Crow picked a poem entitled “Fun” and started singing the words, taking out some of the poet’s lines and adding her own. “‘All I Wanna Do’ was the throwaway track of the album. It was one that wasn’t going to go on the record,” she recalled. Good thing it did—after A&M released it, the song won a Grammy and propelled Crow to superstardom. Meanwhile, an English teacher in Vermont named Wyn Cooper began receiving royalty checks for a poem he’d written 10 years earlier.
Number of languages spoken in India: about 845.
The Artist: Led Zeppelin
The Song: “Whole Lotta Love” (1969)
The Story: While recording their second album, guitarist Jimmy Page came up with a bluesy riff and the rest of the band started jamming around it. Singer Robert Plant “improvised” some words, but they weren’t really his. He borrowed them from a song called “You Need Love” written by blues legend Willie Dixon. And although Led Zeppelin had credited Dixon for two songs on their first album, they kept the writing credit on “Whole Lotta Love” for themselves. Why? “We decided that it was so far away in time,” explained Plant. (Actually, it had only been seven years since Dixon wrote it.) “Whole Lotta Love” became the only Zeppelin song ever to reach the top 10 in the United States.
Fifteen years later, Dixon heard the song for the first time and noticed the resemblance. Dixon sued the band and settled out of court in 1987. He used the proceeds to set up the Blues Heaven Foundation to promote awareness of the blues.
The Artist: Little Richard
The Song: “ Tutti Frutti” (1955)
The Story: After a long, unproductive recording session in 1955, Little Richard couldn’t get the sound his producer, “Bumps” Blackwell, wanted. Exasperated, they took a lunch break and went to the local dive, the Dew Drop Inn. The place had a piano, so Richard started banging on it and wailing out some nonsense words: “Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop a-Good Goddam…Tutti Frutti, Good Booty!” It was the sound Blackwell was looking for.
Richard had actually written the song while he was washing dishes at a bus station in Macon, Georgia. “I couldn’t talk back to the boss,” he said. “So instead of saying bad words, I’d say, ‘Wop-Bop-a-Loo-Bop-a-Lop-Bam-Boom,’ so he wouldn’t know what I was thinking.” Blackwell cleaned up the lyrics (“good booty” became “aw rootie”), and they recorded it that day. The single reached #17 on the pop charts. (Believe it or not, Pat Boone covered the song and it outdid Richard’s version on the hit parade.)
Old news: By the year 2050, the world’s elderly will outnumber the young for the first time.