Run for Your Life

While yesterday's song gave us an early listen to an angry, resentful John, "Run for Your Life" is the ultimate Angry John song. It lets its misogyny flag fly, this one does. As such, it's a very polarizing song-- I know plenty of people who hate it, and I kind of respect that, since I most likely wouldn't love a song that threatens death as a reasonable retaliation for infidelity if it were by a band that I loved less than the Beatles. But since this is the Beatles, I dig this one, creepy undertones and all.

That line that offends so many people from the get-go, though, that "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man," is lifted almost verbatim from an Elvis song, "Baby Let's Play House." In Elvis's song, the line is a little more of a throwaway, and in the context of the song it comes across as almost playful. You can hear it for yourself below, which I recommend because this song is freaking awesome and doesn't get nearly as much radio play as a lot of other lamer Elvis songs.

So anyway, it feels as if John took that Elvis line as a starting point and then decided to try to see how far he could push it, to see how much violence a pop song could really handle. If he had undertaken it as a conscious challenge to himself ("how evil can I make this song sound?") he couldn't have done a more effective job of it. Of course, the Lennon armchair psychologists take "Run for Your Life" as a naked expression of John's issues of abandonment by females (see any Lennon biography for more on this if you're not familiar with his family history), which I guess is likely true. John himself later said that he hated "Run for Your Life," calling it his least favorite Beatles song, and admitted to, in hindsight, being kind of appalled by his own sexism; this was all said in the '70s, some years after he'd shacked up with a feminist artist and about the time he was getting involved in radical leftist politics and releasing feminist protest songs like "Woman is the Nigger of the World," so he probably considered it kind of embarrassing.

And yet "Run for Your Life" is a great song, I think-- it holds up as well as any other track on Rubber Soul. (And it certainly holds up better than "Woman is the Nigger of the World," for what that's worth.) Actually, there's a secondary quibble about "Run for Your Life" that I've read, which is that, whatever one thinks of the misogyny, it's just a weak song in the context of Rubber Soul, with all that album's groundbreaking tracks like "Norwegian Wood" and "I'm Looking through You" and "In My Life" and yada yada. And, you know, maybe that's a fair case too. But I still think it's more musically interesting than, say, "Wait" or "What Goes On."

In general, though, since the contents of "Run for Your Life"'s lyrics tend to dominate discussions, I don't think people have given the music itself a fair shake. This one's got a really pleasant country-fried feel, what with Paul playing the bopping one-five-one bass line and Ringo's spirited tambourine, but especially in George's guitar part, which is great. I mean, have you guys listened to George on this song? Check out that solo! It does Carl Perkins proud and more. It's kind of a short solo, and beautifully unshowy, but he's playing as resonantly and brightly as a mid-period Beatles fan could hope for, which gives the violent sentiments here an almost cheerful edge. I love those little punctuative riffs George is playing between verses, too, that syncopated downward scale line. There's a ton of energy in all of this-- it's as if you can hear that George really loves this song. (Hey, George, I do too!)

And then there's the singing. As usual for him, John sings the hell out of the verses, his voice (for once) devoid of that sardonic grin that characterizes so much of his singing and instead dripping with something like real rage. It's a cold rage, though, a kind of narrow-eyed hostility that's going to bubble up at any moment. On the last verse, when John sings "you won't know where I am" there's just the smallest, the smallest crack in his voice on the word "am," which is all you hear of the real turmoil he's suffering. It's my favorite part of the whole song, and it's funny, because it probably wasn't at all intentional.

But then there's the chorus to distract us from John's agonies with its sheer awesomeness. I, for one, think it's kind of funny that the Beatles saved some of their coolest three-part harmonies for a death threat song, but they did. George and Paul join John in admonition that we should run for our lives in a harmonic part that's very sweet, but also so dense and thick that it's one of the few vocal moments in a Beatles song that I'm still not quite able to parse out exactly. In most other songs, I can sing along with George, Paul, or John just about flawlessly, but this one stumps me a little bit. Still, though, that falsetto is so tight that it is, indeed, almost scary-- it does rather make one want to run. Or else it makes one wish she were the girl who could finally get John to calm down and be a little happier. Siiiigh. The Beatles are just dreamy even when they're threatening to kill me, is the thing. Does that sound weird, like I'm enjoying being a victim or something? Well, I mean, in this case-- I guess I am.

"Run for Your Life," released in the U.K. side B track 7 of Rubber Soul, December 3, 1965; in the U.S. side B track 6 of Capitol's inferior Rubber Soul, December 6, 1965.