Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey

The Zoo Crew has got a real live wire on the turntable, Zoo Freaks, and it is one of those White Album numbers that still feels like it might jump the groove. Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey, from the double album The Beatles, is John Lennon at full tilt, with Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr right there in the racket. If you have been riding with us over at THE ZOO, you already know we like the deep cuts that smell like a late-sixties session rather than a tidy single. This one is the longest title the band ever put on a record, and it sounds exactly as restless as that mouthful looks on the sleeve.

Lennon later told David Sheff, in the interviews that became All We Are Saying, that the line was just a nice phrase he turned into a song, and that the whole thing was about him and Yoko Ono. Everybody else seemed paranoid, he said, while the two of them were in the glow of love. Everything is clear and open when you are in love, he figured, and the room around them was tense: what is she doing here at the session, why is she with him. He remembered that sort of madness going on because they simply wanted to be together. Years on, in one of the last interviews he gave, he came at the same title from another angle and said a person cannot be absolutely himself in public, because being in public forces some kind of defence. Both readings sit in the same restless little record.

Paul heard it differently, and he said so plainly. In his telling, John had started talking about fixes and monkeys, a harder slang than the mild, sideways nods to pot or acid the rest of the band had used. Paul said the others were not into that terminology, and that they were disappointed John was getting into heroin, because they did not see how they could help him. They hoped it would not go too far. A monkey on the back was old jazz talk for that habit, and lines like the deeper you go, the higher you fly got read that way by plenty of listeners. Lennon pushed back on the drug reading more than once, so the song still sits in that split. The writers did not agree, and the Zoo Crew is not about to settle a family argument that started in 1968.

There is a third trail, and it runs through India. The come on, come on, it is such a joy, take it easy, take it as it comes business echoes things the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said while the band was studying with him. Paul has recalled that the Maharishi talked about everybody having something to hide, and that John took the idea and stuck the monkey on the end. The working title, before it grew into that marathon, was simply Come On, Come On. So the lyric is part love letter, part argument with the room, part leftover mantra, and part whatever John felt like owning on a given day. He once mocked the critics who called it simplistic and short on imagery, and offered a ridiculous fake rewrite full of whale juice and red leather, the sort of thing he figured the papers might have praised. He was having fun with them. The song did not need the costume.

The track itself was cut at Abbey Road in late June 1968, during the long, fractious White Album sessions, and it landed on side three of the double album that November, right after Mother Nature's Son and before Sexy Sadie. They loaded it with handclaps, extra percussion, and a bell, and then sped the backing up so the whole thing sprints. It clocks in around two and a half minutes and never sits still. John takes the lead vocal. Paul is on bass and that bell. George and Ringo lock in, and everybody claps. An early acoustic pass from the Esher demos survives, looser and less frantic, which makes the finished take feel even more like a band that had decided to lean into the chaos instead of sanding it down. Fats Domino later cut his own version, and Lennon said he really loved it. That is a fine bit of company for a Liverpool rock and roll kid who had grown up on American records.

Before any of that White Album heat, the band was four kids and a borrowed name in Liverpool. John Lennon started a skiffle outfit at Quarry Bank School around 1956, with a washboard, a tea-chest bass, and a banjo, and they called themselves the Quarrymen after the school. On 6 July 1957, at the St Peter's Church fete in Woolton, a mutual friend introduced him to Paul McCartney, then fifteen. Paul knew the words, could tune a guitar, and looked like someone who would raise the level, so John asked him in. George Harrison, younger still, came aboard in 1958 after Paul brought him around. They scraped together seventeen shillings and sixpence for a session at Percy Phillips' little studio and cut That'll Be the Day plus an original, In Spite of All the Danger. The name wandered through Silver Beetles and a few other spellings, a nod to Buddy Holly and the Crickets, before it settled on the Beatles. Stuart Sutcliffe joined on bass. Pete Best took the drum stool so they could make the boat to Hamburg. In August 1960 they opened at the Indra Club in the red-light district, tired and hungry, playing to a thin crowd and learning how to hold a room for hours. Ringo Starr came in later. Brian Epstein cleaned up the look. George Martin opened the door at EMI. By the time Monkey was on tape, they had already rewritten what a rock and roll band could be, and they were arguing about what came next.

That is the stretch we like to sit with on the air. A church-fete skiffle group, a Hamburg apprenticeship, a double album that refused to behave, and a two-minute sprint with the longest title in the book. If you want the catalog straight from the source, the band's own house is thebeatles.com, and the song page there still carries the lyric and the White Album credit. Their official rooms are on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Apple Corps and Universal also keep an official fan group on Facebook for folks who want to talk records without the noise. For session notes and the old interviews laid out song by song, the long-running fan site Beatles Bible has the Monkey entry, personnel and all. Spin it again if you want. The bell is still ringing, and the four of them are still clapping like the take might get away from them.