The Beatles - Come Together

[El]

Come Together, the lead song on The Beatles' Abbey Road album, was conceived by John Lennon as a political rallying cry for the writer, psychologist and pro-drugs activist Timothy Leary.

It's a funky record. It's one of my favorite Beatle tracks or one of my favourite Lennon tracks, I'd say. It's funky, it's bluesy and I'm singing pretty well. I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it. I'd buy it.

John Lennon
Playboy, 1980

The song was composed for Timothy Leary's campaign to stand against Ronald Reagan as governor of California. Leary and his wife Rosemary had traveled to Montreal for John and Yoko's bed-in for peace, which took place on 1 June 1969. The Learys participated in the recording of Lennon's Give Peace A Chance, and were both namechecked in the lyrics.

Everybody's talking about:
John and Yoko, Timmy Leary, Rosemary,
Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper,
Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg, Hare Krishna
Hare Hare Krishna

Give Peace A Chance

The following day Lennon offered to help Leary's campaign. His slogan was 'Come together, join the party'. Lennon sent Leary a demo tape of song ideas. However, when Leary was imprisoned for cannabis possession the campaign ended, enabling Lennon to record the song with The Beatles.

The thing was created in the studio. The lyrics are gobbledygook and Come Together was an expression that Leary had come up with when he was running for president. They'd asked me to write them a campaign song. I tried and tried and tried and couldn't come up with it. But I came up with this Come Together, which would have been no good for them. They couldn't have had a campaign song like that, right? But Leary attacked me years later, saying I ripped him off. Well, I had written another little thing called [singing] "Come together and join the party..." It never got further than that. And they never came back to ask for the song. I didn't rip him off. I had the song there waiting for him.

John Lennon
Playboy, 1980

Leary was bemused when he came to hear The Beatles' recording of the song.

Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way... When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.

Timothy Leary
A Hard Day's Write, Steve Turner

Come Together was Lennon's last politicised stance in The Beatles, although much of it was shrouded in imagery: the song lampooned the hippy figureheads who would seek followers among the dropouts of society.

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