All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here.
“Everyone’s here. No one’s gone.”1 — Kris Delmhorst
Welcome to this week’s Rabbit Hole. Per our usual disclaimer, Rabbit Holes are short and scruffy, and this one is especially scruffy.
This week, we’re going to consider the convention of dividing Lennon/McCartney songs into “John songs” and “Paul songs.” This is different from the “JohnandPaul songs” that we talked about in the main episode — those are songs written to or about one another. I’m talking here about the convention of dividing Lennon/McCartney songs in ‘John songs’ and ‘Paul songs,’ depending on who was the primary composer.
In this Rabbit Hole, I’m going to offer the heretical suggestion that there may not actually be such a thing as a “Paul song” or a “John song,” at least during their Beatles years — and in some ways, maybe not even after.
This ‘John song/Paul song’ convention is used throughout the world of Beatles writing, and unfortunately, sometimes even by John and Paul themselves. And it’s a convention I occasionally use as well to denote authorship — even though in an important way, it’s not an accurate one.
During the Beatles’ years, John and Paul didn’t split up their songs this way. While the world did figure out that whoever sang the lead on a song was likely its primary composer, the music of The Beatles nonetheless wasn’t experienced as ‘John songs’ vs ‘Paul songs.’ If you read or listen to virtually any interview with them during the Beatles years — up to and including their promotional interviews for Abbey Road — both Paul and John are true to the spirit of their partnership. They talk about Lennon/McCartney songs as just that — Lennon/McCartney songs, regardless of who wrote what. And because John and Paul made it clear that all of the songs were their songs, not his songs and my songs, journalists didn’t ask who wrote what. Beatles music was simply Beatles music.
That changed after the breakup — almost certainly because of John having said in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview that we talked about at length in a prior episode that he and Paul had always written separately. And although John retracted that statement virtually as soon as he said it, after that interview, the press began to... well, press both of them to be specific about who wrote what on each song.
This is, of course, more fallout from journalists believing John’s false breakup narrative. It’s also another step in the stripping of the lovers possibility out of the story — yet another wall that the press put up between them, twisting the story from Lennon/McCartney, John and Paul, into Lennon vs. McCartney. John vs. Paul.
The reasons why journalists did this may be more complex than just reacting to John’s comment — and we’ll get to those reasons in a future episode.
For now, what matters is that in the years following the breakup, prodded by the press and probably by their creative egos and mutual insecurities, John and Paul each separately broke the covenant of Lennon/McCartney, and instead began to share the details of who wrote what, and began to talk about their songs as “my song” and “his song.”
This splitting of Lennon/McCartney into ‘John songs’ and ‘Paul songs’ based on who wrote the majority of the song happened most dramatically when John and Paul each did separate, extensive interviews in which they went through every Lennon/McCartney song and talked about their individual contributions to those songs — John in 1980 with interviewer David Sheff, and Paul in 1997 in Many Years From Now, his quasi-memoir written by Sixties countercultural leader Barry Miles.
We’ll eventually talk a lot more about these twin interviews — because though it’s probably not yet clear why, they are, among other things, a key part of understanding why the ethics of restoring the lovers possibility to the story of The Beatles is more complicated than it seems.
But for now, in John and Paul’s recounting of who wrote what, two things stand out—
One is that in except in two cases — “In My Life” and “Eleanor Rigby” — they both agreed in broad strokes on their individual contributions to every song, a remarkable demonstration of matching memories, especially given the impermanence of memory, creative ego, the possibility of mind-altering drugs when those songs were being written, the sheer number of songs in their catalogue, and the tendency for both of them to be unreliable narrators.
Even more significant is that John and Paul’s matching memories make it clear that the vast majority of their songs were indeed co-written — and were remembered as such by both John and Paul.
This mutual agreement doesn’t seem to be either Paul or John distorting the narrative to align with the other. This is the two of them in separate interviews, nearly two decades apart, in near-perfect alignment. Not only is there no reason to doubt them on this, it’s a testament to how important their writing partnership was to both of them, that the memories of writing together are still so clear and so consistent.
Despite frequent claims to the contrary by people who weren’t actually there — and of course, by Breakup John — Paul and John also both agree that their collaboration continued right up until the breakup of the band, long past the point where even those around them insisted that they no longer wrote together.
John and Paul wrote together at the ashram in India, for example, and Paul Saltzman’s iconic photograph shows them doing just that. And Paul frequently tells the story of playing “Hey Jude” for John to get his input before they recorded it.
During the White Album sessions, the two of them worked together in Paul’s garden at Cavendish to finish “Glass Onion.”2 During the Get Back sessions, we saw with our very own eyeballs Paul and John co-writing “Get Back” and “I’ve Got A Feeling.”3 They collaborated on Abbey Road — the medley is, of course, a combination of song fragments from both of them combined into a musical suite.
And it might come as a surprise to you — it certainly did to me — that Paul helped John finish writing “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” even before they famously recorded it together, just the two of them.4
Here’s John Dunbar, a mutual friend of John and Paul’s—
“...John would often play through Paul's new songs when Paul was not there, running through them, making sure there was nothing more he could do to help. They relied upon each other to finish off a song, even as late as 'The Ballad of John and Yoko', which John brought round for Paul to check before they recorded it in April 1969.”5
And while we’re on the subject of “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” if John and Paul were in fact lovers, the two of them finishing and recording that song is an even more fraught situation to contemplate than it already was — demonstrating once again that the lovers possibility makes the story more complex, not less.
Despite all of this readily available information, most of it from John and Paul themselves, to this day, writers continue to perpetuate the fiction that John and Paul stopped writing together in the later years of their partnership. This is, of course, yet another example of Grail-phobic journalists and biographers twisting the narrative away from love (not to mention truth) and towards the angry, divisive breakup narrative.
But as with most things in this story, it’s also a bit more complex than that.
In this Rabbit Hole, I want to share with you another less obvious, but more important, way in which the notion of ‘Paul songs’ and ‘John songs’ is a fiction. And that even that handful of songs they supposedly wrote entirely separately, in a very real way were not written entirely separately. And yes, including "Yesterday.”
The failure to understand this less obvious way in which they wrote together might be part of what’s confusing all those journalists and biographers — and even sometimes John and Paul themselves. And as usual for Beautiful Possibility, this concept is tricky to describe — because once again, it’s something our culture doesn't value and thus we don’t have words for it.
To try to explain it, I want to tell you a parable of two trees.
Imagine that two acorns have landed on the ground next to one another. And that through just the right combination of sun and light and the ineffable conditions required for life, both acorns sprout.
They grow, side by side, each tree with its own root system, trunk and leaves. But eventually, as the years pass and the space between them narrows, the two trees begin to grow so closely together that their trunks and branches start to form around one another — each taking part of its shape from its partner tree.
Because the two trees sprouted and grew next to one another — and then intertwined with one another — each tree grows up acquiring a different shape and character than it would have had if it had sprouted and grown up separately. Each tree is, in a very real sense, a different tree than it would have been on its own.
Obviously, the partner trees are a metaphor for Lennon and McCartney. But they're also a metaphor for my own creative life — because one of the great blessings in my life is that I’m one half of that kind of long-time creative (not romantic) partnership — though obviously on a much smaller scale.
My creative partner and I wrote together for many years similarly to the way John and Paul describe writing — eye to eye, in the same room, in real time. We don’t do that very often anymore — like John and Paul, our creative lives began to diverge, and we mostly work separately these days. He’s not “writing” this series with me, for example, in the way “writing” is usually meant — although he has been invaluable in its creation, and Beautiful Possibility would not be half what it hopefully is without his input, and it’s likely it wouldn't exist at all.
But after so many years of close collaboration, whether we’re literally writing together at the keyboard or not, my partner’s creative voice is inevitably part of my own voice, usually without me consciously realising it — in the same way that the two trees take part of their shape from one another, even as they maintain their own separate identities.
Just as each tree grows into a different shape than it would have grown into on its own, because of being intertwined with its partner tree, I write differently than I would have had our partnership not happened. In this sense, the partnership has left its permanent imprint on my creative style and voice, and on the work that results from it. And that imprint is there whether I consciously call it up or not, whether we’re working literally together or not. It soaks into my creative process in ways that have become so much part of who I am as an artist that it’s not possible any longer to separate out my voice from my partner’s, whether we’re writing together or not.
Nick Cave calls this kind of intimate, long-term collaboration in which the voices become indistinguishable from one another even as they keep their separate identity an “entangled form.”6 And it’s because of this “entangled form” that, in a very real sense, everything I write is “co-written” with my creative partner, whether or not we’re literally working on it together.
This kind of deep mutual influence is rare. It certainly doesn’t apply to all creative partnerships or collaborations, even if they’re long-term.7 But I know for a fact that it applies to mine.
And given the intimacy and intensity of Paul and John’s bond — even absent the lovers possibility — it obviously applies to Lennon/McCartney, and probably even more so, because John and Paul would have had a far stronger bond than I do with my creative partner, because of how early John and Paul’s creative partnership began.
Paul was 15 and John was 17 when they first met. They were two teenagers who came of age together, not just literally, but also creatively. When they met, both of them had only just barely started to write songs. They learned how to make music together — working out the chords, learning the lyrics, learning guitar. They learned to write songs together, sagging off school, the two of them hiding out at Paul’s house on Forthlin Road, listening, writing, playing, dreaming of the toppermost.
Paul talked about this bond in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, when he’s asked if he’s ever found that creative connection with anyone besides John. He answers—
“No. I don’t think it could be. At some point, you have to realize, some things just can’t be. John and me, we were kids growing up together, in the same environment with the same influences: He knows the records I know, I know the records he knows. You’re writing your first little innocent songs together. Then you’re writing something that gets recorded. Each year goes by, and you get the cooler clothes. Then you write the cooler song to go with the cooler clothes. We were on the same escalator – on the same step of the escalator, all the way. It’s irreplaceable – that time, friendship and bonding.“8
And as the years passed and Paul and John continued to write together, their creative “trees” grew more and more intertwined, until each was — as Paul has often described it — a mirror image of the other, “dissolving into each other,”9 becoming what’s perhaps the most intense, intimate and exclusionary partnership in history. And if they were indeed lovers, then obviously even more so.
The intertwining of John and Paul’s creative “trees" meant that — as with my creative partner and myself, only more so — John and Paul became different writers than they otherwise would have been, because they wrote so intimately with one another and from such a formative age. And that was true whether they were physically writing together or whether they were writing separately.
George Martin described this intertwined tree situation by saying, “I think that “Eleanor Rigby” was Paul’s lyric writing. But I doubt if he would have written that unless he’d met John. And I doubt that John would have written something like “Imagine” without Paul’s influence.”10
This extraordinarily deep bond between them seems to have given them a kind of creative telepathy — which again, is something I’ve had a bit of experience with as well, with my creative partner. Sometimes we’ll write the same line at the same time, because after so many years, we know each other’s creative voice so well.
Ken Mansfield, a former Apple Records executive, wrote in his 2007 memoir that both John and Paul told him “they considered each other, [in 1968], such an integral part of each other’s influences that they were in some ethereal way writing songs together though apart.”11
That creative telepathy means that when they did write together, it would be virtually impossible to sort out who wrote what. There’d be no way to know where which idea came from — all of it ultimately coming from both of them, “no matter in which body the music first landed,”12 as a friend in the Beatles studies counterculture once put it. And that means there’s no useful distinction between a ‘written by John song’ or a ‘written by Paul song.’ And that’s true even of a song like “Yesterday.”
As most of us know, Paul composed the music for “Yesterday” in a dream. But that dream was a product of Paul’s subconscious, and that subconscious was shaped in large part by his partnership with John.13 John wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever” on his own while he was in Spain filming How I Won The War, but his memories of that time are intertwined with his childhood memories of Paul, and it’s Paul’s melody and harmony he knows will support his words and he shapes them accordingly.
Even when they’re writing separately — and by that I mean — only one of them is putting words on a page and chords and melodies to those words — they’re still writing together. The other partner is still “in the room” in a very real and very tangible way — “writing songs together, though apart.”
And that symbiotic, intertwined creative relationship extends even beyond their Beatles years. However estranged they were, there’s simply no way around that.
Going back to our parable, imagine that someone came along and separated the two partner trees, but somehow still managed to preserve the exact contours of their roots, trunks and branches — maybe with a teleporter, like on Star Trek — and then replanted each tree in a different place.
Putting aside that this would be a cruel and barbaric thing to do, and assuming both trees survived the transplant, each would continue to grow separately. But even though the trees were no longer physically intertwined, their individual growth would still follow the contours of their original intertwining, the shape they grew into when they were side-by-side and physically intertwined with one another. The new growth would continue to be influenced by the now-absent shape of the missing partner tree. The imprint — the echo, the negative space — of the missing partner tree would still be visible in the shape of each tree, even on its own.
Put another way, remove one tree, and the shape of the other tree is still visible in the empty spaces around the remaining tree. And because that shape was so deep and so fundamental to both trees’ growth right from the start, that shape is going to be permanent. Both trees will forever carry with them the “shape” of their absent partner.
And that means that even in John and Paul’s solo work — and in even Paul’s solo work up to today — they’re still in a very real way writing together. Because they each write differently than they would have without their partnership.
Paul talks about this explicitly in a 2021 interview with Uncut. The interviewer asks him if he still mentally consults with John when he’s writing. Paul’s answer is—
“Yeah, often. We collaborated for so long, I think, ‘OK, what would he think of this? What would he say now?’ We’d both agree that this new song I’m talking about is going nowhere. So instead of sitting around, we’d destroy it and remake it. I started that process yesterday in the studio. I took the vocal off it and decided to write a new vocal. I think it’s heading in a better direction now.”14
Of course, this effect fades a bit after a long time of not writing with someone, in the same way that the imprint of the partner tree would become less visible after decades of growing on its own. After forty years of writing solo, Paul has had to develop ways of writing that don’t rely on his partnership with John. But because his partnership with John left such a deep impact on him, it’s clear that “voice in my head” of his “partner tree” has never completely gone away.
Here he is in 2022 in The Lyrics—
“As I continue to write my own songs, I’m still very conscious that I don’t have [John] around, but I still have him whispering in my ear after all these years. I’m often second-guessing what John would have thought – ‘This is too soppy’ – or what he would have said differently, so I sometimes change it.”15
And here’s Paul in 2023 on his Life in Lyrics podcast—
“If anyone asks me, ‘What was it like to work with John?’ The fact was it was easier, much easier, because there were two minds at work. And that interplay was nothing short of miraculous...(sic) Now I’m conscious that I don’t have him, very much. And you know, often we’ll sort of refer to, ‘What would John say to this? Is this too soppy? He would’ve said da da da, so I’ll change it.' But my songs have to reflect me, and you don’t have this opposing element so much. I have to do that myself these days.”16
In 1984, Paul was asked in an interview with Playboy magazine if he was actively looking for a new creative partner—
"I'm not looking...(sic) I'm not, because I didn't look for John, either. But I think if I happened to fall into a situation where I felt comfortable writing with someone, I definitely wouldn't say no to it. I like collaboration, but the collaboration I had with John...(sic) it's difficult to imagine anyone else coming up to that standard. Because he was no slouch, that boy. He was pretty hot stuff, you know. I mean, I can't imagine anybody being there when I go," (sings) "'It's getting better all the time.' I just can't imagine anybody who could chime in," (sings) "'It couldn't get much worse.'"17
And here he is again in 2016 in Rolling Stone, when he’s asked if there’s anyone he can turn to, creatively, when he’s writing. His answer—
“In music, no. I rely on the experience and knowledge of what would have happened if I’d brought it to The Beatles. That is the best gauge. I have some very good friends. Lorne Michaels and I are pretty close. I can always go for a drink with him – we can talk pretty genuinely. I have relatives, my brother and my wife. Nancy is very strong that way. But music, no. It’s very difficult. You can’t top John. And John couldn’t top Paul.”18
I don’t think Paul’s talking here about ‘John vs. Paul’ in the way quotes like this are usually taken. What he’s talking about is, of course, that there is no replacement in each of their creative lives for the other.
John’s creative insecurity meant he didn’t talk as much about this intertwined relationship with Paul, and of course, the years in which he might have done so were stolen from him, and from Paul, and from all of us on that December day in 1980.
John did once observe in an interview that both he and Paul write differently because of their partnership than they would have had they not met. But remember how I said this Rabbit Hole is especially scruffy? Well, that’s in part because I cannot for the life of me find that interview back. I know I have it somewhere, but I’ve run out of time to find it before I had to record this Rabbit Hole. So when I find that quote, I’ll drop it in here.19
Anyroad, all of this means that, in a very real way, John and Paul have never stopped writing together, and in a very real sense, not even after John’s murder.
Because of the intimacy and strength and depth of their creative bond, every song Paul writes even today is to some extent a Lennon/McCartney song — though perhaps McCartney/Lennon would at this point be the more appropriate credit order for those.
This beautiful, permanent imprint of John on Paul’s music is one of the ways in which we very much still have John’s creative voice in the world, intertwined forever with Paul’s. And it’s another reason, beyond the obvious, why it’s so deeply unfortunate and sad that so many Beatles people — including many music writers —aren’t as familiar with much of Paul’s post-1980 work. And I’m going to do what I can to fix that in a future Rabbit Hole.
It might be hard to understand how all of this could be, especially if you’ve never been part of that kind of long-term, intense creative partnership — which, of course, is the case for the vast majority of people, including journalists and biographers. And perhaps especially journalists and biographers, because those are creative fields in which those kinds of long-term intimate partnerships are especially rare.
And unless you have this kind of felt experience of being a “partner tree” with someone else, it’s likely impossible to understand in any kind of meaningful way how it influences the work of each partner, together and separately — or even to recognise it when it’s happening. And this is, I suspect, why even outside observers who were there at the time claim with such certainty that John and Paul didn’t write together as much in the later years of the partnership, erroneously believing that “who wrote what” is as simple as who wrote the lines down on the page — when the dance of intimate creative partnership is so much more complex and beautiful and profound than that.
We’ll talk a lot more in a future episode about the ultimately catastrophic damage done to the mythological riverbed of our world, when the Grail-phobic press split the story of Lennon/McCartney into two separate entities.
For now, this is yet another example of how a lack of fluency in the Grail keeps people from being able to recognise the more beautiful and complex truth of this story. And another of the many ways the love and connection between John and Paul has been minimized or erased altogether, making the story and the music much less profound and much less life-affirming than it more truly is.
Even beyond the lovers possibility, it’s simply not possible to understand Lennon/McCartney — or to have any kind of useful opinion on “who wrote what” — without an understanding of how this kind of intimate, long-term creative partnership works. Understanding it requires an understanding of the subtle, delicate ways in which two creative spirits intertwine with one another — and that’s just not something that either the blunt force tools of music journalism or history are equipped to do.
And that concludes this week’s Rabbit Hole.
As a reminder, if you have questions that you’d like answered, relative to anything in this series feel free to email them to my fab research assistant Robyn. You can find her email on my website at faithcurrent.com. Robyn is collecting questions, and if there are enough of them, I could possibly be talked into doing a Q&A after the final episode of part 1. And you will also find the backup episodes of Beautiful Possibility there, in case of substack technical difficulties or shenanigans.
Finally, if you are moved in some way by Beautiful Possibility, please consider sharing it with someone whom you think might also respond to it. I have an extremely limited capacity for self-promotion, so the only way this is going to make a difference is if y’all share it — one person at a time, heart to heart.
In the next full episode, we’ll continue our exploration of the traces of the lovers possibility in the songs of Lennon/McCartney by turning our attention to John’s songs. And we’ll see that there may be far more going on in his solo work than most people realise.
Until then, peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith
Kris Delmhorst, “Ghosts in the Garden”
Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H.Holt, 1997.
“He and Yoko came round to Cavendish Avenue and John and I went out into the garden for half an hour, because there were a couple of things he needed me to finish up, but it was his song, his idea, and he worked on the arrangement with George Martin. It was a particularly good arrangement, I think. It was a nice song of John's. We had a fun moment when we were working on the bit, I've got news for you all, the walrus was Paul.' Because, although we'd never planned it, people read into our songs and little legends grew up about every item of so-called significance, so on this occasion we decided to plant one.”
and here,
“Although John and I were very competitive, we liked each other's stuff, we wouldn't have recorded it so readily if we didn't. We still worked together, even on a song like 'Glass Onion' where many people think there wouldn't be any collaboration. Another is 'Ballad of John and Yoko', which John brought around to Cavendish Avenue for me to help finish the last verse he was having a bit of trouble with. He knew he could always leave a couple of sentences out, come and see me and we knew we would always finish them. It was a guaranteed solution.”
“Just as Paul had an inclusion in the middle of 'A Day in the Life', so John had one in the middle of Paul's 'I've Got a Feeling'. John's part- the 'Everybody had a...' section - was a quite separately written song fragment, but it had the same tempo and was so well matched that they were able to link them together. John brought his section round to Cavendish Avenue and they finished the song together as an equal 50-50 collaboration. There is a myth that by this point in their career, Paul and John were no longer working together; it is true that they no longer got together as they used to for songwriting sessions, but they were certainly very supportive of each other's songs and still checked them with each other. ‘I've Got a Feeling' is a good example of their continuing partnership.
Barry Miles, Many Years From Now, H. Holt, 1997.
NOTE: Since Many Years From Now is in fact Paul’s quasi-memoir, and he signed off on the finished draft (per my email conversion with author Barry Miles), we can take whatever Miles writes in the second person as coming from Paul, even if it's not directly quoted.
And while we’re on the subject of Sgt Pepper, Beatles hairdresser Leslie Cavendish, who according to his memoir, occasionally visited the control room at Abbey Road/EMI when The Beatles recorded, has some beautiful memories of watching Paul and John work together on recording the orchestral track for “She’s Leaving Home” — a song that John claimed in his breakup interviews that he didn't like because it was too soft. Here are a few samples from Cavendish’s book—
“I watched Paul and John move their arms about excitedly as they spoke to the string section. It reminded me of my father's antics in front of the telly during classical music concerts on the BBC. And the group of musicians, I noticed, had siles on their faces. Of course... (sic) they were as awed to be here, playing with the world-famous Beatles, as I was. Playing, in fact, was the word, because the two wannabe conductors were in a very playful spirit, interrupting and contradicting each other all the time.”
“Both of them sat down at the controls [in the control room] while they sent George Martin downstairs.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn't do,” George [Martin] warned, as he left the room.
Paul and John laughed maniacally and clawed their hands over the mixing board in a mock-threatening way.”
“The classical musicians all seemed very patient as they repeated the score again and again for several hours, while Paul and John gave them directions from the booth and tried different effects.”
“Aside from my first visit, much of the sessions I witnessed were a bit more conventional, with one or more of the Beatles wearing headphones and singing what actually sounded like pop songs, or play8ing instruments normally found in rock bands. What perhaps wasn’t so conventional was the way in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney would always be fiddling around with the controls, having figured out that the recording studio was a kind of instrument in itself.
“You don't want to do that,” George Marti would protest.
“We just want to hear how it sounds, you know,” Pau would then explain.
“It’ll sound awful,” George [Martin] would say.
“Good! John would reply mischievously. “We just want to hear how awful it sounds.”
Leslie Cavendish, The Cutting Edge: The Story of the Beatles’ Hairdresser Who Defined An Era, Alma Books, 2017.
full quote: “There is a persistent idea that John and Paul only really wrote together in the very early days, but this is not true. They both valued their songwriting partnership highly. It was artistically fulfilling as well as a very valuable commercial asset and it was not something that either of them took lightly. John Dunbar, who was a frequent visitor to Kenwood in 1965-66, remembers that John would often play through Paul's new songs when Paul was not there, running through them, making sure there was nothing more he could do to help. They relied upon each other to finish off a song, even as late as 'The Ballad of John and Yoko', which John brought round for Paul to check before they recorded it in April 1969.”
Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H.Holt, 1997.
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.
Nick Cave quoted in, Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022.
Another pairing where this intertwined trees/entangled form effect seems to apply is the partnership between Bakersfield sound innovator Buck Owens and his creative partner Don Rich. Unlike Lennon/McCartney, the bond between Owens and Rich seems to have been strictly platonic/brotherly. But as with John and Paul, the partnership ended tragically, when Don Rich was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1974, and Buck Owens was never the same afterwards.
Here’s Buck Owens in his autobiography, Buck ‘Em (Buck Owens and Randy Poe, Backbeat Books, 2013) about his first meeting with Don Rich:
“I started to sing the song again, and Don started sing-ing right along with me. I couldn't believe my ears. Our voices blended and matched perfectly. Somehow, he knew exactly the way I was going to sing every word. He came in at exactly the right times. If I slurred a word, he slurred the same word in harmony with me. He had the great-est ability to anticipate that I'd ever heard in my life. I swear to you, somehow he could tell even that very first time we sang together-what I was going to sing and how I was going to sing it.”
and later in the same passage—
“When me and Don finished singing ‘Above and Beyond,’ I knew right then and there that I had found the sound I’d been searching for. I knew ‘Above and Beyond’ was going to be a hit. I knew Don was going to be my musical partner for life. I knew that the two of us would be having hit records together for years to come.”
Buck Owens and Don Rich are also an example of a deep, intimate (seemingly at least) platonic/brotherly friendship of the kind people often ascribe to John and Paul.
While it’s certainly true that a relationship between two men can be intimate and intense without being erotic and/or romantic, the two kinds of relationships present dramatically differently — and the difference between John and Paul vs Buck Owens and Don Rich seems to be a textbook example of this.
Buck Owens talked about Don Rich completely differently from the way John and Paul talk about one another. Buck Owens didn’t , for example, use sexual and romantic metaphor to describe his partnership with Don Rich. And Buck Owens and Don Rich did not look at each other in the overtly erotic way in which John and Paul did (as discussed in both episode 1:4 and the Rabbit Hole on Beatlemania), nor did Buck Owens and Don Rich seek out physical contact with one another in the same way John and Paul did. Buck Owens did not spend two weeks with Don Rich in a little hotel in Paris, nor did he ever get within light years of saying that he looked back fondly on sharing a bed with Don Rich. And as far as I can tell, though he mourned Don Rich’s death all of his life, Buck Owens never wrote a love song for him, either.
There’s an excellent episode of Cocaine & Rhinestones about Buck Owens and Don Rich that I highly recommend — https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/buck-owens-don-rich-open-up-your-heart
“Innocent” is an unusual word to apply to a song. (See Rabbit Hole: The Nerk Twins)
Paul McCartney Looks Back,” Rolling Stone, August 10, 2016.
Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H.Holt, 1997.
full quote: “Me and John, we'd known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other's eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling. You dissolve into each other. But that's what we did, round about that time, that's what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You're looking into each other's eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn't, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.”
George Martin, https://www.pauldunoyer.com/george-martin-interviews/
full quote [re:”John/edgy, Paul/melodic”]: “That is true to a certain extent but it’s a little bit bland. The thing that irritates me the most is [the false duality] that John was the rocker and Paul was the ballad man. But then you listen to Helter Skelter and what the hell’s that about? Then you listen to something like Julia or Imagine or Because, what the hell’s that about? I think it’s true to say that Paul had a stronger sense of melody and harmony that appealed to the main mass of the public more, and John had a kookier way of dealing with lyrics, but they did influence each other enormously, so I think that Eleanor Rigby was Paul’s lyric writing but I doubt if he would have written that unless he’d met John. And I doubt that John would have written something like Imagine without Paul’s influence.”
Ken Mansfield, The White Book, Thomas Nelson Press, 2007.
full quote: “I was surprised to see the songs listed as Lennon/McCartney compositions because to my knowledge John had nothing to do with them. It was several years later before it was clear to music lovers that the “Lennon/McCartney” credit was only occasionally accurate and in reality more of a showbiz PR device. Although the public was still mostly unaware of the unique nature of the world-famous Lennon/McCartney songwriting team, it was then that I was vaguely able to grasp the unspoken part of the intangible structure of their business, as well as their musical and personal friendship. They told me that they considered each other, at that time, such an integral part of each other’s influences that they were in some ethereal way writing songs together though apart.”
NOTE that at the beginning of the quote, Mansfield initially falls for the breakup “we always wrote separately” fiction, because he sees Paul working on “Ob La Di Ob La Da” on his own, without John. Now as it happens, we know John and Paul co-wrote “Ob La Di” because Paul Saltzman photographed them at the ashram in India as they were working on it and wrote in his book about hearing them write it together. (The Beatles In Rishikesh, Viking Studio, 2000.) But even if they hadn’t physically written it together, everything we’re talking about in this Rabbit Hole still applies — as Mansfield, to his credit, eventually figured out.
Again, I can’t offer credit to the writer of this gorgeous turn of phrase because they publish anonymously. But if they would like to be credited, please contact me and I’ll happily include the full credit.
For more on the mysteries of “Yesterday”: https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/unscrambling-yesterday
“Dare To Experiment: Paul McCartney goes far out,” Uncut magazine, January 2021.
Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.
Paul McCartney interviewed by poet Paul Muldoon, McCartney: A Life In Lyrics, Pushkin Industries, 2023.
Interview with Paul and Linda McCartney, Playboy magazine, January 1,1984.
NOTE: Elvis Costello probably could have supplied the “couldn’t get much worse”-- if Paul had allowed him to. He and Paul collaborated together in 1987 on a shimmering collection of demos that probably got as close to Lennon/McCartney in tone as anything Paul’s ever done without John.
“I had said to Elvis that I kind of missed the way John and I used to write, which was sitting across from each other, with an acoustic guitar each. And I’d explain to him that the fun thing for me was, with John being right-handed and me being left-handed it kind of looked like it was in a mirror. So I said we should do the same thing. He just came down to my studio in Sussex and we used that same process.” — Paul McCartney quoted on PaulMcCartney.com.
But Paul ended the collaboration. It’s not 100% clear why, but based on things Paul has said, it may have been because working with Costello reminded him a little too much of working with John (presumably without the erotic charge) —
“I felt he was the nearest to John and I get a lot of journalists asking me this. Yeah, there are similarities between them...’ (sic) But I got pissed off after a while and I ended up answering, ‘yeah, they both wore glasses.’ No matter how anyone reminds me of John, they're not John.”
Paul McCartney quoted in Conversations with McCartney, Paul Du Noyer, Turabian, 2016.
If Paul and John were lovers, then there is an additional layer of pain and poignancy here — in Paul's desire not to erase his sense memories of writing with John
The McCartney/Costello demos were released in 2017 as part of the Archive Collection of Flowers in the Dirt. They’re an example of why it’s unfortunate that so many people aren’t familiar with much of Paul’s post-1980 solo work beyond the singles. Here are those demos on a playlist—
Interview with Paul and Linda McCartney, Playboy magazine, January 1,1984.
NOTE: Elvis Costello probably could have supplied the “couldn’t get much worse”-- if Paul had allowed him to. He and Paul collaborated together in 1987 on a shimmering collection of demos that probably got as close to Lennon/McCartney in tone as anything Paul’s ever done without John.
“I had said to Elvis that I kind of missed the way John and I used to write, which was sitting across from each other, with an acoustic guitar each. And I’d explain to him that the fun thing for me was, with John being right-handed and me being left-handed it kind of looked like it was in a mirror. So I said we should do the same thing. He just came down to my studio in Sussex and we used that same process.” — Paul McCartney quoted on PaulMcCartney.com.
But Paul ended the collaboration. It’s not 100% clear why, but based on things Paul has said, it may have been because working with Costello reminded him a little too much of working with John (presumably without the erotic charge) —
“I felt he was the nearest to John and I get a lot of journalists asking me this. Yeah, there are similarities between them...’ (sic) But I got pissed off after a while and I ended up answering, ‘yeah, they both wore glasses.’ No matter how anyone reminds me of John, they're not John.”
Paul McCartney quoted in Conversations with McCartney, Paul Du Noyer, Turabian, 2016.
If Paul and John were lovers, then there is an additional layer of pain and poignancy here — in Paul's desire not to erase his sense memories of writing with John
The McCartney/Costello demos were released in 2017 as part of the Archive Collection of Flowers in the Dirt. They’re an example of why it’s unfortunate that so many people aren’t familiar with much of Paul’s post-1980 solo work beyond the singles. Here are those demos on a playlist—
“Paul McCartney Looks Back,” Rolling Stone, August 10, 2016.
