‘Stand By Me’ was released on 17 February 1975, with B-Side ‘Move Over Ms. L.’ (originally written during the making of ‘Walls and Bridges‘), it is a cover of Ben E. King’s 1961 classic written by Ben E. King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

Hello Julian! I’d like to say hallo to all the folks in England. How you doing, folks? Well, here I am in New York, singing to ya!

[ad libs from John’s performance of ‘Stand By Me’ for BBC TV’s Old Grey Whistle Test, above]

John: Well, the Rock’n’Roll album, folks, started in ‘73 after I’d finished Mind Games and spanned many eons. I was really in the middle of that, ‘What’s going on? Mother! Life! Help!’ and I’d just done Mind Games and I thought, ‘how can I have some fun instead of all this writing my feelings in these songs, being the writer and the artist’ and I thought, ‘what can I do to break that regime, writing the song – John Lennon writes a new song. Is it about him or is it about Paul? – or, you know, whatever.’ so I thought, ‘I know!’

Every time I make an album, whether it was a Beatles’ album or one of my own, I jam on oldies to warm up. We’d always break into ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ or jam those songs. We’d do these numbers to break the ice in case we were getting too uptight about a song. If it wasn’t a twelve-bar, it’d be something like ‘Stand By Me’, which everybody knew. There must be tons of tapes around with me doing songs like this, just to get the feel of being in the studio. And those are my favourite songs, a lot of them.

With the Beatles, we covered a lot of rock ‘n’ roll on the early albums, but we really were loath to do it on record because we always thought the originals were so great we couldn’t touch them. We did them because they were our numbers on stage and we didn’t have enough material of our own. We had no choice but to record ‘Twist And Shout’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’ and all those things. We had a sacred English thing about rock and roll. ‘Stand by Me’ was one of my big songs in the dance halls in Liverpool. That was a Ben E. King number. The same goes for ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ – I’ve been playing ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ on stage since I was 15. I also used to sing all the early Buddy Holly stuff—in fact I was Buddy Holly for a period, what with the glasses, even though I didn’t wear them on stage.

I never did them because I admire the originals so much, I didn’t dare touch them. But now people are ruining everything, so I thought, ‘Why can’t I do it?’ They’re all doing it, so what the hell!

I thought, ‘I know, who shall I use? The great Phil Spector!’ I’d used him before but I’d always controlled it and been co-producer, but this one it took me three weeks to talk him into being the producer. I said, ‘Look, I’m Ronnie on this one, alright? I just want to sing, I don’t want to know nothing about nothing!’

So we started the sessions and they went well and then they gradually collapsed into mania – is one way of putting it – but it definitely got crazy. There were twenty-eight guys playing a night and fifteen of them were out of their minds, including me, and a lot of them out of tune which is too much, even for rock and roll.

The sessions broke down, we broke them down pretty well, me and Phil. They got really barmy. Some of it was ridiculous and that’s the first time I ever let an album out of my control since the first Beatles albums, I’ll never do it again. I don’t like to tell tales out of school but I do know there was an awful loud noise in the toilet of the Record Plant West.

I think I was suicidal on some kind of subconscious level – night and day drinking or taking Librium or whatever. The goal was to obliterate the mind so that I wouldn’t be conscious. I didn’t want to see or feel anything. Part of me can’t believe I would self-destruct – the youthful part that feels invincible, yet another part realizes that I could have died.

I was consuming at least a bottle of vodka a day, and a half a bottle or more of brandy. Also I did things like jumping out of cars. It was a crazy kind of teenage game I had: telling myself, ‘I wasn’t meant to die at this moment so I can jump out of the car.’ What I was ignoring, of course, was that the next car after us could have run over me.

The next minute I didn’t have the tapes and Phil had apparently had a car accident – only he knows whether he did or didn’t – but that’s all I heard. I waited eight months in L.A., waiting for him to recover. Phil works in such mysterious ways, his woodwork to perform, my dear. He’s a great artist but like all artists it’s… you know. Anyway, all I knew, I was sitting around in L.A. waiting for the tapes to finish the album, right? That’s how I ended up doing Harry [Nillson’s Pussycats album].

We had a lot of fun – there was Keith Moon, Harry, Me, Ringo, all living together in a house and we had some moments, folks, but it got a little near the knuckle. All we were doing was getting drunk and waking up sick. That’s when I straightened out, in the middle of that album.

So that’s when I said to Harry, ‘Forget this, let’s do something.’ So I came home to New York and by then I had straightened myself out and was ready to do Walls And Bridges. I was straight –no drink – and I was ready to record. And the day before I go in to record, I got the tapes back. We finally made a deal. There was about eight tracks, half of them you couldn’t use for one reason or the other, like if you’ve got ten people playing out of tune and the other, like that ‘Angel Baby’ is a phenomenal track, so I sorted out what I thought was the best of the Spector stuff and I decided the best way to finish it was to just go in and finish it. So I did the rest of it by myself, using the basic unit that I usually use, of about eight guys. And I did it in about five days. We did about three tracks a night. I just thought, ‘Rock ’n’ Roll!, you know, Rock!’

I’d rehearsed them a couple of days beforehand so that they were loose, then we just went in and did, ‘Take 1 – “Stand By Me”; Take 2 – “Be-Bop-A-Lula”’, you know, the opposite of what was going on down in the west coast. And this was a year later.

I like ‘Stand By Me’, and ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ is one of my all-time favourites.

My one problem was whether it’d sound weird going from the Spector sound to my sound, from twenty-eight guys down to eight. But they match pretty well, I think. So there it was, I suddenly had an album.

I did that after Walls And Bridges. I took a couple of weeks off and then, it was a choice of either just leaving it forever and never putting it out or trying to find some format for four or five Spector tracks which I didn’t think were singles – they might be – I couldn’t tell. I was so sick of the whole thing, so I thought, ‘now what do I do? Just leave it in the can?’ I hate leaving stuff in the can.

I thought, ‘OK, finish it off, see what it is’. So I finished it off and I played it round to a few people that weren’t me. I played it to the record company. I didn’t know what to do with it, I was saying, ‘I don’t know whether to release it, even. I’ve got it off my chest, I’ve finished it’. And they all said, ‘It’s alright! It’s alright! Let’s put it out!’ I said, ‘It’s alright, is it? OK, we’ll put it out!’

And then once it went out, I felt, ‘Great! It’s out!’, because I’ve never been so long on an album in my life. It was longer than ‘Sgt. Pepper’. I normally take eight weeks to make an album from start to finish and out in shops, you know, otherwise I get bored and this had been nine months, off and on!

The day after the ‘Stand By Me’ single came out in America, we found out that Yoko was pregnant with Sean.