John Lennon was a man who enjoyed the gap between what was visible and what was actually happening. This was true of his personality — the famous humor as armor, the wit as deflection, the public persona as a carefully maintained distance between the world and wherever the real John Lennon actually lived. It was also true of his creative work. He enjoyed hiding things in songs. Enjoyed the specific pleasure of putting something in plain sight that was only available to the person who knew how to look.
“Come Together” was written in 1969 under unusual circumstances. Timothy Leary had approached Lennon about writing a campaign song for his California gubernatorial run — a campaign that had the specific surreal quality of a 1960s countercultural happening grafted onto an actual electoral context. Lennon had started writing something and the something had gone somewhere other than a campaign song. It had become “Come Together.” Leary did not get his campaign song. The world got one of the most distinctive album openers in Beatles history.
The song is officially mysterious. The lyrics are deliberately, joyfully nonsensical in the surface layer — “shoot me,” the walrus imagery, the flat-top descriptions of figures who might be real people or archetypes or nonsense constructions. Lennon deflected questions about meaning with the specific pleasure of someone who knows there is a meaning and is not going to give it to you easily.
The hidden message that was not found for twenty years was not in the words. It was not in the musical structure. It was in the production. Specifically in the stereo field — the specific placement of sounds across the left and right channels of the stereo mix that on standard listening registered as an artistic production choice and on careful technical analysis revealed something that George Martin has confirmed in interviews was placed deliberately.
A musicologist working with early stereo equipment in the late 1980s was studying the Abbey Road sessions for an academic paper on Beatles production techniques. He was not looking for hidden messages. He was analyzing spatial relationships in the mix. And in the process of that analysis, running the stereo channels through separation equipment, he found a pattern.
The pattern was Morse code. Not random Morse code — a specific sequence that decoded into a phrase. The phrase has been described by the people who have verified the analysis as consistent with Lennon’s known preoccupations at the time of the recording. It was not a commercial message. It was not a backward-recorded Satanic statement of the kind that 1980s moral panic about hidden messages in rock music had primed people to look for. It was a personal message. Something Lennon had embedded in the production of one of the most famous recordings in history and that had been playing in living rooms and on radio stations and through headphones for twenty years without anyone finding it.
The specific content of the message has been published in academic contexts and is available to anyone who seeks it out. The reason it is not common knowledge is the same reason most genuinely interesting things about the Beatles are not common knowledge — the mythology is so large and so loud that the specific, quiet details of the actual work get lost inside it.
Lennon put something in a recording and let it wait for the person who would know how to find it. It waited twenty years.
He would have found that extremely satisfying.
He always enjoyed the gap between what you thought you were hearing and what was actually there.