One day during The Beatles’ 1968 visit to Rishikesh in India to study Transcendental Meditation, John Lennon and Paul McCartney attended a lecture about nature. It inspired Lennon and McCartney to each write a song.
The lecture was given by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru in whose ashram they were staying and whose teachings had so influenced George Harrison in particular.
The ashram was positioned on top of a 150-ft high cliff, amid lush riverbank forest in the foothills of the Himalayas, overlooking the sacred River Ganges.
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Afterwards, McCartney duly penned Mother Nature’s Son, which appeared on the 1968 album The Beatles, or as it became better known, ‘The White Album’. Lennon, meanwhile, wrote a song called Child Of Nature, and both his and McCartney’s compositions were demoed at Harrison’s house in Esher, Surrey on their return to the UK.
Lennon revisited Child Of Nature when The Beatles were jamming and trying out song ideas on the Get Back/Let It Be sessions in January 1969. By then he had jettisoned the opening line “On the road to Rishikesh” and replaced it with the line “On the road to Marrakesh”, which also became the song’s new title. He probably did this due to his growing disillusionment with the Maharishi.
Opinions vary about the precise dates The Beatles ran through the song but it seems likely that they tried it first at Twickenham Studios on 2 January 1969 and then in a full band jam on 24 January at their newly-created Apple Studio, in the basement of the Apple Corps offices in London’s Savile Row.
Lennon then reportedly made a final, brief attempt to run through the track on 28 January, during the day’s warm-ups and jams. But by then, it was clear that the song really wasn’t working for The Beatles.
While Lennon liked the melody of the song, he disliked the lyrics and scrapped it. “The words were silly, anyway,” he is quoted as saying on the official John Lennon website. “I sang it to Yoko, Phil Spector and a few people and they always winced. I decided to change it – and with Yoko’s help, I did.”
It would be three years before the abandoned composition reappeared in a whole different guise, as the song Jealous Guy, re-crafted during the 1971 sessions for Lennon’s second solo album, Imagine.
Jealous Guy is widely regarded as one of Lennon’s greatest post-Beatles songs, a raw confessional piano ballad about his own deep personal insecurities, possessiveness and the fear of losing his partner, Yoko Ono.
55 years after it appeared as the third track on side one of the Imagine album, Jealous Guy remains one of the most honest and heartfelt songs in Lennon’s peerless back catalogue.
Much has been written over the years about the complexities and contradictions of Lennon’s emotional make-up. On Jealous Guy, he goes some way to addressing what he perceived as his flaws, particularly in terms of his relationship with women.
“The lyrics explain themselves clearly,” Lennon told journalist David Sheff in September 1980. “I was a very jealous, possessive guy. Toward everything. A very insecure male. A guy who wants to put his woman in a little box, lock her up, and just bring her out when he feels like playing with her. She’s not allowed to communicate with the outside world – outside of me – because it makes me feel insecure.”
It has been suggested that Jealous Guy is actually about Paul McCartney. In a 1985 interview with Playgirl magazine, McCartney reportedly said that Lennon wrote it with him in mind.
“He used to say, ‘Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon’,” McCartney is reported as saying. “He wrote ‘I’m just a Jealous Guy’, and he said that the song was about me. So I think it was just some kind of jealousy.”
Jealous Guy was certainly written and recorded at the same time that Lennon was making his most brutal and direct swipes at McCartney in the song How Do You Sleep? But there are seemingly no instances of Lennon having said the song is about McCartney.
Lennon always said the lyrics to Jealous Guy focused on his insecurities and possessiveness over women and the song feels more like a public apology and pained tribute to Yoko Ono.
Lennon worked up the song as he began sessions for the Imagine album at Ascot Sound studio, his small home recording facility on his estate at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire.
Jealous Guy was recorded in the second set of sessions, which took place from 24 May to 5 July 1971.
Musicians on the Jealous Guy sessions included bassist Klaus Voormann, a close friend of The Beatles from the Hamburg days who played a pivotal role in the Beatles’ backstory and who created the artwork for the cover of the Revolver album.
Voorman’s steady, subtle style and melodic prowess made him the bassist of choice for Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr as well as artists such as James Taylor, Eric Clapton, Harry Nilsson and Carly Simon in the years that followed.
The drummer on Jealous Guy was Oklahoma-born Jim Keltner, a revered session player whose unique loose groove, deep musical sensitivity and ability to enhance a song without overplaying made him a go-to choice for numerous artists.
The vibraphone on Jealous Guy was played by Alan White, a drummer with the Plastic Ono Band who played drums on the song Imagine and who would go on to be the drummer with Yes for almost five decades.
And on piano was Nicky Hopkins, a hugely in-demand session musician who blended classical training with an intuitive gospel feel, and whose playing could often transform even the rawest demo into something sublime.
Hopkins had an innate ability of knowing what notes a song needed. He also possessed that rarest of attributes in the music industry – no ego.
Bolstering Lennon’s rhythm guitar on acoustics were Joey Molland and Tom Evans of Badfinger.
“John came into the studio and played us Jealous Guy,” recalled Molland on JohnLennon.com “We had brought our acoustics; mine a Gibson J50 and Tommy Evans’ a Martin D41. We ran through the song once or twice, all very simple and natural. Tommy suggested a significant chord – a minor 9th or 6th. Yoko suggested it needed an intro, which Nicky played so beautifully.”
In many ways, Jealous Guy pre-empts the same mature, confessional, acoustic soft-rock style of Lennon’s later work on Double Fantasy.
There’s a beautiful directness and openness to the song, which begins with Nicky Hopkins’ cascading piano intro, a tender, rolling accompaniment that immediately draws the listener in.
“Nicky Hopkins’ playing on Jealous Guy is so melodic and beautiful that it still makes everyone cry, even now,” said Yoko Ono on the official John Lennon website.
At 0:16, Lennon’s vocals enter the mix. “I was dreaming of the past…”. There is a raw purity to his delivery and it is a masterclass in restraint. Lennon resists the temptation to increase the level of his voice. Instead, it is his quiet vulnerability that gives the song its power.
Part of the strength of Lennon’s vocal performance on Jealous Guy is that he embraces imperfections, allowing slight pitch inflections and breath noise to stay in. He doesn’t lock in rigidly to the beat either. Instead, he delays and stretches certain words.
Understatement is key, as is evident on the lines: “I didn’t mean to hurt you/I’m sorry that I made you cry/Oh no, I didn’t want to hurt you/I’m just a jealous guy.”
At 2:06, in the instrumental break, Lennon begins whistling the top line melody through to 2:30. This was an improvised vocal fill during recording, which he liked and simply decided to keep in.
For the musicians in Ascot Sound studio back in 1971, the recording of Jealous Guy would be an experience they would never forget.
“When I think of those sessions, I always think of Jealous Guy,” said Klaus Voorman on the official John Lennon website. “I’m sitting there. I don’t even know what key I’m in. I have no idea. I just play. It just goes like a dream, you know? It’s such a beautiful song and it just flows. I close my eyes and listen to John, and just play. And then those notes come where there is space for them, or when I think they should be played at that particular moment.
Jealous Guy was released on the album Imagine on 9 September 1971 in the UK and October 1971 in the US. The album topped the charts in the UK, US, Norway, Japan, Italy, Holland and Australia.
Orchestral string overdubs were added on 4 July 1971 at the Record Plant in New York City, by a group of classical players from the New York Philharmonic, who called themselves the Flux Fiddlers.
The addition of Phil Spector’s trademark strings undoubtedly helped give Jealous Guy commercial appeal. But it arguably tempers the raw and honest themes of the lyrics.
Critically, the Imagine album was widely acclaimed. Some publications, such as Rolling Stone, concluded the album was uneven but all agreed that Jealous Guy was one of its standout songs.
Legendary soul singer Donny Hathaway performed an inspired version of Jealous Guy on his 1972 album Live, which was ranked at No 48 on Rolling Stone’s list of 50 Greatest Live Albums Of All Time.
The most famous cover of the song was by Roxy Music, released in February 1981, two months after Lennon’s tragic killing. This elegant version of the track received some criticism for its polished sound.
Queen drummer Roger Taylor has also recorded Jealous Guy on his forthcoming solo album Violence Insane In A Beautiful World, released on 18 September. Taylor recently claimed in MOJO magazine that Roxy Music’s version of the song “didn’t do it justice.”
In November 1985, Lennon’s recording of Jealous Guy was finally released as a single, but reached only No 65 in the UK chart.
In the decades that have followed, Jealous Guy has become recognised as one of John Lennon’s finest songs.
In a poll of 100 greatest songs of all time in MOJO magazine in 2000, Jealous Guy was ranked No 69.
In a review of the song on the BBC website in 2010, writer Gary Mulholland concluded: “If you only know Jealous Guy as Roxy Music’s worst-ever record, then the original, with its courageous and accurate portrayal of male neediness and insecurity, will be a tear-jerking shock.”
For drummer Jim Keltner, like Klaus Voormann, the recording of Jealous Guy remained a fond and abiding memory.
“Playing on Jealous Guy was like being in a dream,” Keltner said on the JohnLennon.com website. “Nobody in the world ever played piano like Nicky Hopkins, and Klaus has such a tremendous deep feel on the bass. Having John’s voice in your headphones, glancing up and seeing him at the microphone – 1971, fresh from the Beatles and such a tremendous musician and songwriter – singing this beautiful, haunting little song. You only have a few of those moments in your life as a musician and that was one of them.”
