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A few additional later Lennon-related jukebox items:
1969's Abbey Road opener, Come Together is a little like Lennon's 1965 jukebox song, Short Fat Fanny and Bye Bye, Baby, the B-side to Johnny Otis' Good Golly (one of Ringo's jukebox favorites, see, below) in that it references other songs. And unlike Glass Onion, these aren't all Beatles' songs.
- Most famously Come Together opens with "Here come old flat-top" near enough to "Here come a flat-top" in Chuck Berry's 1956 You Can't Catch Me/Havana Moon that it led to an out-of-court settlement that included Lennon recording the Berry song and others owned by the publisher in 1975. Also, the dropped 's'es at the ends of words are a Lennon attempt at sounding like some black, American singer, maybe Chuck Berry.
- Come Together is stylized blues; Alan Pollack calls it an ironic updating of an old style with painfully obvious ... antecedent musical elements.
- According to Ian MacDonald's Revolution In The Head (p.359), juju eyeball suggests the cover of Dr John's ... Gris Gris released in 1968 and a big hit in Britain's student/underground circles. (Is there meaning in the singularity of "eyeball"? It sings better that way, but Lennon's 1974, Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out speaks of a one-eyed witch doctor leading the blind. Is it a phallic reference like Shake Rattle and Roll's one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store? Was Lennon gobbledygook-edly calling the subject of either song [or both] sexually corrupt?) Also in '74 Lennon gave the song Goodnight Vienna to Ringo Starr which has a butcher with her jujus alight (which may mean marijuana cigarettes, and not fiery talismans, but I really avant garde a clue! Do you?)
- And Lennon said in the 1970 Jann Wenner Rolling Stone interview that the phrase "over me" was supposed to be a campy reference to Elvis Presley, perhaps the 1956 I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You)/I'll Never Let You Go (Little Darling) (in the Lennon Anthology concert Lennon sings one chorus, "over you").
- In the 1969 Get Back sessions, Lennon led the Beatles through a song idea known as Watching Rainbows in A and a bluesier version in E. In the song fragments are elements of Hey Bulldog, Everyone Had A Hard Year which became I've Got A Feeling and the lyrics, standing in the garden waiting for the English sun and shoot me, the latter of which ends up in the final version of Come Together. The former line is a riff on the line sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun from 1967's I Am The Walrus. The only reference to that song to make the final cut on Abbey Road is the word, walrus. Lennon had revisited the walrus in 1968's Glass Onion and would visit the word again in 1970's God. In the 1980 Playboy interview, Lennon says he adopted the walrus persona from Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter (was he also the carpenter? [From the same interview: Later, I ... realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story ... I picked the wrong guy. I should have said I am the carpenter] who but a carpenter makes Glass Onion's dovetail joints [while calling Paul the walrus]?).
- Connected to the key of E Watching Rainbows, in which the Come Together riff is being developed, Lennon repeatedly sings, "you better move on", derived from one of Lennon's 1965 jukebox 45s (#25 on the list) (A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues/You Better Move On, 1962, UK, London American Recordings HLD 9523).
- Given the blues basis of the music, and the lyric's references to Chess recording artists, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, hold you in his armchair brings to mind Lennon's comments in the 1970 Wenner interview, the blues is a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair. It is the first chair. An armchair that conveys dis-ease is an ornamented-sick deviation from that simple, foundational chair for sitting on.
- Come Together contains the phrase "Muddy Water, he got mojo filter", which refers to the 1960 Muddy Waters Chess single Got My Mojo Working/Woman Wanted. (The singular "Water" and the "filter" may be Lennon self-references, as he barely stuck with the "chair", the blues, but made something other from its elements.)
The Februray 1974 Ringo Starr jukebox discussion with Brian Matthew (the tracklist). Because this was 1974, the height of post-Beatle connection for the former Beatles, including Ringo sharing a home with Lennon in Los Angeles, a case can be made that these tracks may have also been significant to the other former Beatles. Working with Lennon is brought up explicitly in connection with the Lee Dorsey single, Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On); Starr comments that Lennon played the Dorsey song repeatedly to help the musicians understand how to approach their playing on what would become a single from the Plastic Ono Band album, ammended by Brian Matthew (after the Dorsey record was played) to the non-LP single, Cold Turkey.
John Lennon's mid-late-'70s interest in the work of record producer, Mike Chapman