Instant Karma!

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John Lennon woke up on the 27th of January 1970 with the beginnings of a song already forming in his mind. Two days earlier he had returned to London from Denmark, where he had spent New Year talking with his wife Yoko Ono, her former husband Tony Cox, and Cox's partner Melinde Kendall about a philosophical idea: that the consequences of one's actions are felt immediately, not deferred across a lifetime. Lennon sat down at a piano and worked through the idea. He finished writing in an hour. Then he picked up the phone.

  By evening, he was in EMI Studios in north-west London with George Harrison, Klaus Voormann, Alan White, and Billy Preston. The session ran that same night. Within ten days of that morning, "Instant Karma!" was in British record stores. It would go on to become the first solo single by any Beatle to sell a million copies in the United States, and its chorus would later give Stephen King the title for his 1977 novel The Shining. How a song got from a piano in Lennon's home to a place in rock history so fast is a story about inspiration, a producer's comeback, and a partnership that was about to reshape the Beatles' own legacy.

• 2. The Denmark Conversations

  ›

  Lennon and Ono spent the start of 1970 in Aalborg, Denmark, in an unlikely gathering. They were there to build a relationship with Cox and his partner Kendall, and to visit Cox's and Ono's daughter Kyoko. The trip also coincided with what Lennon called "Year 1 AP" - After Peace - a symbolic break from the heavily publicised Bed-Ins and peace campaigns that had defined 1969.

  On the 20th of January, the couple marked the new era by shaving off their shoulder-length hair. Britain's Daily Mirror called it "the most sensational scalpings since the Red Indians went out of business." Having been named Rolling Stone magazine's Man of the Year for 1969, Lennon told the press he cut his hair to "stop being hyped by revolutionary image and long hair." Five days earlier, on the 5th of January, the couple had announced they would donate all future royalties from their recordings to the peace movement.

  The conversations in Denmark about karma were the seed for the song. Author Philip Norman describes the concept's pull as quintessentially Lennon: the ancient Buddhist law of cause and effect reframed as something "as modern and synthetic as instant coffee." When Lennon woke up two days after returning to Britain with a melody in his head, those conversations had become a composition. The pledge about royalties, it would later emerge, was quietly abandoned.

• 3. Phil Spector's Return

  ›

  Lennon's phone call on the morning of the 27th of January went to George Harrison, and to an American producer named Phil Spector who was already in London. Spector was there at the invitation of Allen Klein, the manager of the Beatles' Apple Corps organisation. According to Lennon's own recollection, he told Spector: "Come over to Apple quick, I've just written a monster."

  Spector's presence in London was significant. He had imposed a self-retirement from producing after the commercial failure of Ike and Tina Turner's 1966 single "River Deep - Mountain High" in America. That failure had devastated him. The "Instant Karma!" session was his return.

  Spector arrived at EMI Studios late that evening, after Harrison had tracked him down at Apple's office and persuaded him to come. Lennon later recalled asking Spector how he wanted the song to sound, to which Lennon answered his own question: "1950s." According to Lennon, Spector played the result back and it was exactly right. The song uses a similar level of echo to recordings made at Sun Records in the 1950s, and Spector applied his signature Wall of Sound approach to build what his biographer Mark Ribowsky called a "four-man Wall of Sound" production. Lennon and Harrison were impressed enough with the results to ask Spector to take on the Beatles' unfinished Let It Be tapes, and then to produce their respective 1970 solo albums. "Instant Karma!" was, as Beatles Forever author Nicholas Schaffner put it, Spector's way of passing the audition.

• 4. One Night in the Studio

  ›

  The basic track recorded on the evening of the 27th of January featured Lennon on vocals and acoustic guitar, Harrison on electric guitar, Billy Preston on organ, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Alan White on drums. All five had performed together the previous month at the December 1969 Peace for Christmas Concert as part of the Plastic Ono Supergroup. The recording engineer was EMI mainstay Phil McDonald.

  The musicians ran through ten takes; the last was chosen for overdubbing. Lennon added grand piano, Harrison and White shared another piano, Voormann moved to electric piano. Beatles aide Mal Evans overdubbed chimes and a second muffled drum part. Over the third verse, rather than an instrumental solo, Lennon vocalised a series of what authors Ben Urish and Kenneth Bielen describe as "grunts and moans."

  When Lennon felt the chorus was missing something, Preston and Evans were sent to a nearby nightclub to bring in people off the street. Those strangers, plus all the musicians and Allen Klein, then joined in the chorus vocals, with Harrison directing the singing. Spector biographer Richard Williams wrote in 1972 that no Beatles record had ever possessed such a unique sound: Spector had used echo to make the drums reverberate "like someone slapping a wet fish on a marble slab." Lennon and Spector disagreed on the bass sound, and Spector wanted to add strings in Los Angeles afterward, but Lennon declared the recording complete. White's drums ended up positioned as a lead instrument in the final mix.

• 5. Ten Days to the Shops

  ›

  Apple Records ran a trade advertisement for the single with the tagline: "Ritten, Recorded, Remixed 27th Jan 1970." Lennon told the press he "wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we're putting it out for dinner." Apple issued the single in Britain on the 6th of February 1970, credited to the Plastic Ono Band, and in America on the 20th of February, where it was retitled "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)" and credited to John Ono Lennon. Spector remixed it for the American release without Lennon's knowledge.

  The B-side, continuing the Plastic Ono Band's practice from "Give Peace a Chance" and "Cold Turkey", was an Ono composition: "Who Has Seen the Wind?" The A-side label on the Apple Records single carried the instruction "PLAY LOUD" in both Britain and America, while the B-side label read "PLAY QUIET" in the UK or "PLAY SOFT" in the US.

  On the 4th of February, a week before the BBC filming, Lennon and Ono staged a publicity stunt at the Black Centre in north London. They donated a bag of their shorn hair, along with a poster for the single, to black power activist Michael X - in exchange for a pair of Muhammad Ali's bloodstained boxing shorts. Apple press officer Derek Taylor had worried that the couple had exhausted the media's appetite for their stunts. The event drew a large press turnout, and yet, as Taylor noted, nobody printed anything.

• 6. Top of the Pops

  ›

  On the 11th of February, Lennon and Ono filmed an appearance on BBC Television's Top of the Pops, accompanied by White, Voormann, Evans, and BP Fallon. While the other musicians mimed, Lennon sang a live vocal over an instrumental mix prepared by EMI engineer Geoff Emerick. It was the first appearance on the programme by any Beatle since 1966, and the public debut of the couple's newly cropped hair.

  Two separate versions were taped, known as the "knitting" and "cue card" clips, which aired on the 12th and the 19th of February respectively. In the "knitting" version, Lennon wears a black polo-neck jumper while Ono sits beside his piano, blindfolded and knitting. In the "cue card" version, Lennon wears a flower-pattern shirt under a denim jacket; Ono, seated on a stool, holds up cards reading "Smile", "Hope", and "Peace", though she is again blindfolded and the words she speaks cannot be heard. For the later broadcast, Lennon's vocal was treated with additional echo.

  Ono later explained the blindfold, saying: "everybody in the world is like blind... and everybody's sitting on the grove blindfolded and trying their best." Media analyst Michael Frontani wrote that Lennon's appearance was "a stark picture, one at odds with his Beatles past" - ragged and unglamorous where the Beatles had been polished, and deliberately so. The "cue card" performance is preserved on The John Lennon Video Collection, released in October 1992.

• 7. Chart Peaks and Critical Legacy

  ›

  "Instant Karma!" reached number 3 on America's Billboard Hot 100, number 2 in Canada, and number 5 on the UK Singles Chart. It competed on the US chart with the Beatles' own penultimate single "Let It Be", produced by George Martin, which appeared two months before Paul McCartney publicly announced the band's break-up. "Instant Karma!" earned gold certification from the Recording Industry Association of America on the 14th of December 1970, making it the first solo Beatle single to reach a million US sales. Until Lennon's death in December 1980, it remained his only RIAA-certified gold single.

  Chris Welch of Melody Maker wrote on release that Lennon was "singing better than ever." Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called it Lennon's "best political song." Writing in the NME in 1975, Charles Shaar Murray gave it the word "classic" and added that he could not recall "anybody else who put out two such utter killers in a row" - referring to "Cold Turkey" and "Instant Karma!" In 1981, NME critic Bob Woffinden praised its "magically catchy" refrain. Stereogum contributors Timothy and Elizabeth Bracy rated it Lennon's greatest solo song.

  In 1989, Rolling Stone ranked it the 79th best single of the previous 25 years. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included it among its "500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll." In 2007, Amnesty International used the song's title for a multi-artist album of Lennon covers raising awareness of the crisis in Darfur, for which U2 recorded a version. Lennon's last full-length concert performance of the song took place at Madison Square Garden on the 30th of August 1972, as part of the One to One benefit shows.