John Lennon Instagram – I FEEL FINE. 🔴 I wrote it the same time as we recorded it. I wrote it around a riff. I didn’t really bother with the words. That’s me completely, including the guitar lick and the record with the first feedback on it anywhere. I defy anybody to find a record, unless it’s some old blues record in 1922. The first pop record where I had this electric acoustic guitar and it would feedback. I mean, everybody played with feedback in between takes and onstage and then the Jimi Hendrix stuff was going on long before. In fact, the punk stuff is only what people were doing in the clubs, but now it’s at Madison Square Garden, as it were. Well, everybody was doing feedback and far out stuff but never putting it on record. And the little intro was (humming) mmm da da da is the first feedback. I claim it for the Beatles. Before Hendrix, before The Who, before anybody. George and I play the same bit on guitar together – that’s the bit that’ll set your feet a-tapping, as the reviews say. I suppose it has a bit of a country and western feel about it, but then so have a lot of our songs. The middle eight is the most tuneful part, to me, because it’s a typical Beatles bit. I wrote ‘I Feel Fine’ around the riff which is going on in the background. I tried to get that effect into practically every song on the LP, but the others wouldn’t have it. I told them that I’d write a song specially for this riff. So they said, ‘Yes, you go away and do that,’ knowing that we’d almost finished the album. Anyway, going into the studio one morning, I said to Ringo, ‘I’ve written this song, but it’s lousy.’ But we tried it, complete with riff, and it sounded like an a-side, so we decided to release it just like that. With ‘I Feel Fine’, we were ready to get to number five at first go, and I suppose if we’d have done that, we’d have been written off. Nobody would have remembered that The Beatles had had six number ones on the trot before ‘I Feel Fine’… Coming in at number one was great, because, well, we weren’t sure we’d do it.