Throughout his time with The Beatles and as a solo artist, John Lennon was always focused on making something more than a catchy tune. Although his partnership with Paul McCartney yielded a handful of songs that were nothing more than fluff, Lennon wanted to make songs that spoke from the heart rather than writing for audiences who could care less about his words. While he may have been hard at work creating standalone pieces of art, he also had the idea of bringing his songs to the stage.
Then again, The Beatles making a musical was never out of the question. Throughout their time in the spotlight, the band were known to indulge in the occasional show tune whenever they got the chance, eventually turning in one ballad on record with Paul McCartney’s take on ‘Til There Was You’ from The Music Man.
There were even various tribute musicals that ran rampant without The Beatles’ supervision, with the production Beatlemania coming to fruition with different takes on the best tunes the Fab Four had to offer. By the time of the band’s split, though, Lennon was looking to make something more straightforward than anything with a storyline.
Having undergone primal therapy and having to work through the darkest depths of his soul, Lennon was creatively naked on Plastic Ono Band, showcasing his best and worst traits across songs like ‘Love’ and ‘Mother’. By the time he had gotten back into the swing of things with Imagine, though, Lennon was confident in moving in a bold new direction for his next album, Some Time In New York City.
While the eventual album was an overwhelming flop with both fans and critics, Lennon thought that the idea of putting a story together based on what he had seen in the newspaper was still a novel idea. Despite falling on deaf ears, Yoko Ono remembered Lennon still having the idea of fleshing out the idea for a musical later down the road.
When speaking to Guitar World, Ono would eventually say that Lennon was in the works of putting together some sort of musical, saying, “John was constantly getting involved in new media. So he said, ‘How about a musical?’ and the title was The Ballad of John and Yoko. He had ideas like, ‘The first scene should be like this, and the second scene like that’. ‘Real Love’ was going to be the scene where we first meet. Just really corny stuff, you know?”.
While Lennon may have been able to flesh out material for a stage musical, his life took a different turn once his son Sean was born. Leaving the music world for years, Lennon would turn himself into a house husband before finally finding time to make a record with Ono on 1980’s Double Fantasy.
Compared to the musical idea, the album plays out like a mini-opera, with both Lennon and Ono singing songs back to each other as if in dialogue with each other. Then again, that creative spirit would ultimately be snuffed out far too soon, with Lennon being murdered only a few weeks after the album hit stores.
Even though the musical idea was scrapped, ‘Real Love’ eventually did find its way to the mainstream, bringing the surviving Beatles back together for The Beatles Anthology. If ‘Real Love’ had been the start of the musical, though, one could only imagine the musical tour de force Lennon had in store for the rest of the production.
