When The Beatles’ catalogue went on streaming services on Christmas Eve 2015, there was a peculiar surge to the top. The song everyone wanted to listen to, in the US at least, was not one of the beefy, beaty pop hits of the early 1960s, nor one of the psychedelic swirls from 1966 and 1967, nor was it one of the grand anthems that prefigured the arena-rock age. What Americans wanted to listen to was “Come Together”, which instantly became the most streamed Beatles track in the US (six years on, it remains the second most streamed Beatles song worldwide on Spotify, behind “Here Comes the Sun”).
“Come Together” owes a big chunk of its ubiquity to the most reviled Beatles-related event in history, the 1978 movie Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, conceived by producer Robert Stigwood as a star vehicle for the Bee Gees, following their success supplying the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever— another Stigwood production — the year before.
The Boston hard rock band Aerosmith were cast in Sgt Pepper’s as Future Villain Band, “the evil force that would poison young minds, pollute the environment, and subvert the democratic process”, an outcome to be achieved by performing “Come Together” while singer Steven Tyler — watched by comedian Frankie Howerd and before being wrestled by Peter Frampton — fondled the female lead, naturally.
What Aerosmith did was take the music of The Beatles to America’s classic rock radio format, a place it had never quite fitted before. Their version of “Come Together” reached into the heart of US rock culture: released as a single, it reached number 23 in the US in 1978, Aerosmith’s last hit until their late-1980s revival, and became a staple of their greatest hits albums and their stage show. Their version wasn’t a million miles from The Beatles’ original, though Tyler’s leering vocal and Joe Perry’s interjected slashes of guitar gave it a groove that hard rock fans would feel very comfortable with.
The original version had opened the Abbey Road album in 1969 and was something of a statement piece. It was based on an old Chuck Berry single, “You Can’t Catch Me”, though Paul McCartney suggested slowing its pace to reduce the similarity (Lennon left in the line “here come old flat-top” from the Berry song, which later resulted in a court settlement in Berry’s favour). It was that pace that gave the song its power: the lyrics might have been doggerel, by and large, but its sound captured its meaning. It was a song both unsettled and unsettling — one that captured an inchoate spirit of change and a grasping for unity.
Or, as Ian MacDonald put it in Revolution in the Head, the best of all Beatles books, somewhat ambivalently: “‘Come Together’ is the key song of the turn of the decade, isolating a pivotal moment when the free world’s coming generation rejected established wisdom, knowledge, ethics, and behaviour for a drug-inspired relativism which has since undermined the intellectual foundations of western culture.”
Those thoughts probably did not run through the heads of those who have covered “Come Together”: few groups could claim, like The Beatles, to have an electrical connection to the very pulse of the culture. Nevertheless, Ike and Tina Turner’s version from later in 1969 is pretty creditable — recreating the pattering percussion that was so noticeable on the original — and Tina’s voice conveying not command but desperation. (The Supremes’ recording, a year later, is amazing, certainly for a Motown record, etiolated and blank. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear they were heroically stoned.)
John Lennon recorded himself playing it live in 1972 — later released on the posthumous album Live in New York City. You probably had to be there: “Come Together” is an odd song, and it needs either menace or power. Lennon’s version had neither.
That very oddness continues to attract unlikely people. Michael Jackson’s 1986 cover ended up sounding sterile. Meat Loaf’s attempt is best shuffled one to side and never mentioned so long as there’s company round. The blues singer/guitarist Gary Clark Jr had a bash with the Dutch dance producer Junkie XL, in a version for a superhero movie soundtrack that never quite had the courage of its conviction: if you want “Come Together” to be metallic, just go for an actual metal band, like Godsmack. If you want it just as it always was, go to the Arctic Monkeys, who performed it at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.
For something a little different, go to Paul Weller, who knew how to take just enough risks. First, he recorded it with Paul McCartney and Noel Gallagher — as the Smokin’ Mojo Filters — for charity in 1995. That version is funky, fun and loose. He tried it again in 2004, as spiky garage rock, and the song sounded more alive than it had at any time since 1969: not reverent, not Beatlesy, but a living, breathing song — and definitely not classic rock.
What are your memories of ‘Come Together’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Apple; Columbia; Universal; Capitol; Motown; Sony; EMI; War Child; Solid Bond Productions