Welcome to the Beatles Rarity of the Week. This is “take 2″ of One Of The Boys, an acoustic demo of John Lennon’s recorded in his Dakota apartment sometime in either December 1977 or January 1978. Like Free As A Bird or Real Love, it is a song he apparently never had a chance to complete. With no more than the chords and lyrics for a verse and a middle eight section that he was apparently still trying to work out, John did as he often did at home, and just turned on the cassette recorder and began playing and singing to work it out as he went. After repeating the first verse, he moves into just using vocalizations instead of singing actual words, just to get the pattern down. He alternates between the line It doesn’t matter how old you are, as young as you feel right now and It doesn’t matter how old you are, as dumb as you feel right now. He repeats lines when he messes up and at one point considers brass instrumentation and vocalizes that too. Although you may conclude that it needs some work at this point, it’s good to hear some of the ideas he was trying to get out, as these ideas often prove to be the nucleus of something special by the time they mature. In the case of this one, we’ll never know.

John Lennon, circa 1977

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