When artists have been around long enough, there comes a point where they start critiquing their old work. Regardless of how much potential they had in their early years, it’s always easier to point out the flaws now that they had more years under their belt and made their classics. Most people would argue that The Beatles had very few flaws in their records, but John Lennon thought that the era of the harmonica was one of the cringiest aspects of their first few singles.
But there was nothing necessarily wrong with playing the harmonica in the group’s early days. If anything, it gave them character. Regardless of the number of people who just got by playing loud rock music with guitars, hearing Lennon blowing away on his mouth organ made people’s ears perk up when they heard songs like ‘Love Me Do’ for the first time.
That’s not to say that it didn’t have its drawbacks as well. Even though Lennon was far from John Popper on the harmonica, it was easy to tell when he was phoning it in, like on the breakdown of ‘Little Child’ where he just blows into it with no real rhyme or reason. That may have been to cover up what was otherwise a weak song, but playing a mediocre harmonica part over the bridge doesn’t automatically make it good.
In Rolling Stone, Lennon eventually said he couldn’t bear to listen to that sound anymore, saying, “The first gimmick was the harmonica. We started using it on ‘Love Me Do’, just for arrangement, because we used to work out arrangements. And then we stuck it on ‘Please Please Me’, and then we stuck it on ‘From Me To You’, like that. It went on and on, it got to be a gimmick, and we dropped it. It got embarrassing.”
Then again, any musician who wants to branch out would probably be a little self-conscious about that, too. Since ‘Love Me Do’ put them on the map, hearing ‘From Me To You’ directly afterwards which copied the exact same formula made them look like a one-trick pony for people who had never heard them before.
That kind of schtick got even worse on the actual album. Although not every song on the record had a bluesy harmonica thrown on for the hell of it, going through the hits and then hearing them cover a song like ‘Chains’ with the same thing could have come off like a cheap version of a bar band had they not taken more chances on songs like ‘Ask Me Why’ or ‘A Taste of Honey’.
Even though Lennon didn’t have time to play the harmonica nearly as much in his later years, it did still creep up on the rare occasion. Since Paul McCartney had written ‘Rocky Raccoon’ as an Americanised folk tune, Lennon’s performance fits the moment much better, and hearing it closing out his album Imagine on ‘Oh Yoko!’ feels more like an emotional outlet than anything flashy.
But maybe by that point, Lennon started to see the merit in using the harmonica. It’s understandable that he wanted to get as far away from the instrument as possible at first, but if you consciously limit your instrument choices, it’s bound to kneecap the sound of the song after a while.
