Composition
One of Lennon's semi-autobiographical songs, "You Can't Do That," "contradicted the genial tone with its tense threats, sexual paranoia and nagging, dragging groove," according to Robert Sandall. The song's jealousy theme was re-visited in other Lennon compositions, such as "Run for Your Life" and "Jealous Guy". Lennon played the guitar solo, which he also conceived. Influenced by the then relatively unknown Wilson Pickett the song is rooted in the twelve-bar blues form, with Lennon introducing a discordant Sharp 9th (F) on the D7th chord, pointedly emphasising "…I told you before…" and then pushing this note for the exasperated "Oh!" before resolving to the song's key of G. The song reflected Lennon's love for hard-edged American R&B — "a cowbell going four in the bar and the chord going chatoong!" as he put it.
With filming due to begin on A Hard Day's Night film director Dick Lester needed the Beatles to provide him with original material ahead of production and "You Can't Do That" was selected as part of the Scala Theatre "live performance" scene in the film, but was dropped for the final cut along with "I'll Cry Instead" and "I Call Your Name." The recording took nine takes to complete, and was considered for the A-side of their next single until McCartney wrote "Can't Buy Me Love."
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Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)