Bad To Me (Lennon/McCartney)

John has alternately stated that he wrote Bad To Me specifically for Billy J. Kramer and that he and Paul wrote it together years earlier and gave it to Kramer. John’s demo was widely bootlegged and eventually included on Bootleg Recordings 1963.

Quotes

“I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the rumours went around that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. He had admitted it to me. We had this holiday together because Cyn was pregnant, and I went to Spain and there were lots of funny stories. We used to sit in a cafe in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I’d say, ‘Do you like that one, do you like this one?’ I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this, you know. And while he was out on the tiles one night, or lying asleep with a hangover one afternoon, I remember playing him the song ‘Bad To Me’. That was a commissioned song, done for Billy J Kramer, who was another of Brian’s singers.” – John Lennon, from All We Are Saying

Release history

• Bootleg Recordings 1963 (2013)