The Joyful Insanity of Open Love in a World of Secrets
Ah, a magnificent choice, indeed! To speak of Fats Domino is to invoke the very spirit of New Orleans, the foundational rumble of rock and roll that echoed across the decades. But to speak of his interpretation of “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey” is to witness a beautiful moment of musical convergence—a true circle of influence coming to a glorious, unexpected close.
Let’s get the essential details squared away right at the start. The song itself was originally a track from The Beatles’ sprawling 1968 masterpiece, The Beatles (known universally as the White Album). As a track from an album, it was not released as a single and therefore had no separate chart position of its own at the time of the album’s initial release. However, the White Album itself was an absolute commercial giant, topping the charts worldwide—it hit Number 1 on both the US Billboard Top LPs chart and the UK Official Albums Chart. Fats Domino’s brilliant cover, recorded in 1969 and included on his album Sweet Patootie: Complete Reprise Recordings (and occasionally a track on other later compilations like Fats Is Back), was a wonderful moment of an icon paying homage to his musical progeny. Like the original, Domino’s rendition was not a charting single.
The genesis of the song is pure John Lennon eccentricity, mixed with a very real, very charged personal story. Lennon wrote it around the time The Beatles returned from Rishikesh, India, where they had studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. According to Lennon, the title phrase itself was one of the Maharishi’s favorite sayings—a mantra of sorts—which Lennon then appropriated and adapted. The final, strange inclusion of the “monkey” was, Lennon claimed in later years, a direct reference to his new love, Yoko Ono.
The true, deeper meaning of the song, as Lennon himself explained, was a declaration of love and freedom in the face of widespread paranoia and disapproval. It was his defiant statement about the intense scrutiny and judgment he and Yoko were facing from the outside world—and, perhaps more painfully, from some of his own bandmates—as their romance blossomed. “Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love,” he recalled. When you are truly, madly in love, your world becomes an open book, a fortress of honesty, where all the petty secrets and anxieties of the world melt away. “The deeper you go, the higher you fly,” as the lyric goes—a profound statement on transcendence, whether through spiritual awakening or, as some have controversially suggested (notably Paul McCartney, referencing the common drug slang of a “monkey on your back”), through other means.
Now, imagine that song—a raw, chaotic blast of late-60s rock—being taken up by the gentle giant of New Orleans R&B, Fats Domino. The sheer joy of his version! Domino’s cover is not a copy; it’s a translation. He swaps the Beatles’ frenetic, almost unhinged energy for a rolling, infectious, distinctly New Orleans swamp-rock feel, complete with that trademark, instantly recognizable piano boogie. It closes the circle, for it was Domino who had inspired the lads from Liverpool in the first place—John Lennon’s first song on the piano was Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame.” To hear Fats take on a late-period Lennon rocker, smoothing out the angular edges with his genial warmth, making it roll instead of roar, is a nostalgic balm. It reminds us that the best music, no matter its origin, is a universal language, capable of being sung in any accent, from Liverpool to the bayou. It’s a classic rocker re-imagined by one of the masters who wrote the rulebook on rock itself.