83. Dig a Pony

John & Paul: A Love Story in Song

This is probably the most ramshackle song in the entire official Beatles discography: recorded live on the rooftop, in the freezing cold, with lyrics that were barely finished. And really, the final version is probably only ‘final’ because the rooftop performance was so good. If it hadn’t been, they’d have just used one of the earlier studio takes.¹ But the rooftop version crushed, so it’s the one we got. In all of its messy glory.

And it is glorious.

It’s sometimes fashionable to laud imperfections, to rhapsodize over songs that feel like they were recorded by human beings, to look down on the fussiness of studio recordings. I try to avoid that sort of thing, since I think it can very easily fall into the rockist trap of treating ‘authenticity’ as the global reserve currency of music. Still, when you listen to Dig a Pony, you can’t help but give into the urge. This track exudes an incredible presence that would certainly have been lost on a more polished recording.

The guitar sound is phenomenal while the bass establishes a beautiful melodic line of its own. The drumming is admittedly much less precise than you’d usually expect from Ringo, but I think that actually serves the song very well. The openness of the percussion matches the feel of the performance, keeping everything loose and joyous. Paul’s harmonies are great. It’s the sound of the best band in the world setting everything aside and just going hard for four minutes.

There’s also a magical synergy between the tenor of the performance and the bones of the song itself. Specifically the lyrics which feel barely-written at all. It’s one of those classic Lennon ‘nonsense’ songs which seem to be entirely about the texture of the words, with barely any concern for their meaning.

This is actually a significant plot point in the Imagine film, when an obsessive fan shows up at John’s house trying to get him to explain the real meaning of the song (“Remember that one, ‘You can radiate everything you are, you can penetrate anywhere you go, syndicate...?’ You weren’t thinking of anyone in particular when you were singing all of that?”).

I remember watching it as a kid and feeling this horrible sense of dread as a delusional fan intruded into his life, knowing full well what would happen a decade later. But in the moment, John is remarkably empathetic. Surely some of that is down to his awareness of the cameras filming everything, but still, he tries to explain that songs can take on all sorts of meanings for people, but that he as a writer had just been playing with sounds:

I was just having fun with words. It was literally a nonsense song. I mean Dylan does that; anybody does it. You just take words and you stick them together, and see if they have any meaning. Some of them do and some of them don’t…I’m singing about me and my life, y’know, and if it’s relevant for other people’s lives, that’s all right.

Still, I don’t think this disproves the idea of meaning in the song. It’s just that the meaning is shrouded in mystery, often even from the songwriter himself. John was fascinated with wordplay his whole life, from his books of bizarre poetry to his incredible wit on stage and in person to his songs. And it’s quite interesting to think about what reveals itself through the process. And specifically to think about it as part of his very complicated relationship with Paul.

Because this sort of word association songwriting is an important difference between the two of them. Not an absolute difference. After all, Paul certainly has some of the same tendency to let the sound of the word dictate the lyric and to allow whatever nonsense word first arrived as placeholder to stick around forever.² But I suspect that this is partly something that rubbed off from John in their early sessions. And it’s also clearly somewhat at odds with his perfectionism about other elements of the songwriting craft. Where he will fixate on the song, and work for days or weeks to get it right. For him “everything has got to be just like you want it to.”

John, especially in this period, hated that aspect of Paul’s craft. He wanted songs to flow out easily or not at all. You knock it out, and then you’re done. And if it needs any tweaking or reworking, it’s not something that you carefully analyze or diagram. You just have to let the thing be what it needs to be and get out of the way. That’s part of what made him such an unbelievably good songwriter—his ability to chip away at a stone a few times and reveal the perfection within. But I also think it was a bit of a defense mechanism.

Despite all of his incredible success and obvious otherworldly talent, he seems to have been constantly gnawed by anxiety and doubts. And constantly afraid that if he invested too much of himself in his songs, people would judge the songs and therefore also judge him. Which is maybe why you get such a clear bifurcation during this period. On the one hand, the nonsense songs which he’d prefer to characterize as little bursts of creative ephemera (Dig a Pony, Cry Baby Cry, Glass Onion, his pieces to the Abbey Road medley). On the other hand, songs which ripped apart his defenses and laid bare all his pain and fear (Don’t Let Me Down, I Want You, Julia, Yer Blues).

But I think that’s also a bit of self-narrativization on his part. The notion of this separation, the idea that his free association songs are just simulacra, is itself part of his larger effort to mythologize himself. And I further think that you see little flashes of the ‘real’ John in the midst of Dig a Pony, just as clearly as you can see him on the more soul-rending tracks.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of reading every Lennon/McCartney song as secretly about the other one. But it sure seems like this one is about Paul.³ Think about the verbs. Sure, he’s picking them because of the sound, but also they describe Paul quite well. His many singing voices (“you can imitate everyone you know”). His optimism and enthusiasm to create (“you can radiate everything you are”), which is particularly notable in late 1968 and early 1969, when songs are pouring out of him and John is writing very little. His status as John’s partner and confidant for many years, (“I pick a moondog” – a reference to a brief name for the early Beatles: Johnny and Moondogs).

And it’s even clearer in the chorus, where both of John’s deep and overwhelming feelings at the moment get jammed together:

All I want is you
Everything has got to be just like you want it to

It’s almost like he’s arguing with himself about Paul. All I want is you. My best friend, the person who helps to complete me as an artist. The person who I can already feel is starting to drift away. Whole books have been written about the cause of that interpersonal drift. Maybe it’s because John himself is moving away, with Yoko. Maybe it’s because Paul is settling down with Linda. Or maybe John and Paul went looking for Yoko and Linda because they had already started to drift.⁴ And a big part of the tension seems to have been that Paul’s insistence on getting everything right is so incredibly infuriating.

I’m not trying to say that John was specifically thinking about any of this. I’m quite sure that he wasn’t. But that doesn’t make it wrong. That’s the key thing about John’s ‘nonsense’ songs. Precisely because he disassociates himself from the responsibility of giving them meaning, they sometimes can offer a less distorted window into what’s really driving him in the moment.

And I think makes the album order feel particularly poignant, with Dig a Pony directly following Two of Us—another song that is supposedly ‘not about John and Paul’ but which is obviously about John and Paul. Hearing both of those songs together now, so many years later—knowing how little time they had left together, and how much they would squander so much of what they did have—leaves me with a heavy heart. But also makes me happy, because I can hear and see just how much they enjoyed playing together on that rooftop, appreciating the way they sounded together. Not trying to make it perfect. Just trying to do good together.

1. And if Glyn Johns had gotten his way, that’s what would have happened anyway, since he was planning to use a (clearly inferior imo) recording from the previous week.

2. I think Paul did this a lot more in his later career. Partly because he no longer had anyone around to tell him to fix the crap lyrics. Partly because he probably missed this part of writing with John, where the muse would tell them the words and you just accept them. And I think very specifically because of his own memory of Hey Jude—the story about the ‘movement you need is on your shoulder’ line which he has told ten thousand times, where John insisted that he keep a lyric he had been planning to toss—has convinced him to write in this way.

3. It’s also obviously about some other stuff. Yoko. The Stones. The counterculture. Drugs.

4. This is the thesis of Ian Leslie’s beautiful John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, which perhaps asserts a bit more than can really be proven, but which spins a very powerful narrative nonetheless, and is one of the best Beatles books I’ve ever read precisely because it isn’t afraid to imagine.