John Lennon Had to Beg Paul McCartney to Turn on His Father and Rejoin The Beatles
After The Beatles left Hamburg, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Stuart Sutcliffe, and Pete Best went their separate ways. While exhilarating, Hamburg had also been an exhausting experience, and they didn’t contact one another for a time. At his father’s urging, McCartney got a job before the band got back together. In order to get him back in the band, Lennon had to convince him to go against his father’s wishes.
John Lennon convinced Paul McCartney to rejoin The Beatles
When The Beatles returned from their time in Hamburg, they avoided one another for several weeks. They were all exhausted, embarrassed, and reconsidering their music careers. McCartney wanted to get back to making music, but he got a job as he waited on his bandmates.
“I started working at a coil-winding factory called Massey and Coggins,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “My dad had told me to go out and get a job. I’d said, ‘I’ve got a job, I’m in a band.’ But after a couple of weeks of doing nothing with the band it was, ‘No, you have got to get a proper job.’ He virtually chucked me out of the house: ‘Get a job or don’t come back.’ So I went to the employment office and said, ‘Can I have a job? Just give me anything.’ I said, ‘I’ll have whatever is on the top of that little pile there.’ And the first job was sweeping the yard at Massey and Coggins. I took it.”
When Lennon and Harrison tried to bring him back to the band, McCartney shook them off. He was making good money.
“One day John and George showed up in the yard that I should have been sweeping and told me we had a gig at the Cavern,” he recalled. “I said, ‘No. I’ve got a steady job here and it pays £7 14s a week: They are training me here. That’s pretty good, I can’t expect more.’ And I was quite serious about this.”
The band wasn’t sure they would get back together after Hamburg
McCartney was not the only one who wasn’t sure he wanted to return to the band. Harrison, who was the youngest, avoided his bandmates out of embarrassment. Lennon wasn’t sure he wanted to return to music at all.
“I just withdrew to think whether it was worth going on with,” he said. “I thought, ‘Is this what I want to do?’ I was always a sort of poet or painter and I thought, ‘Is this it? Nightclubs and seedy scenes, being deported, and weird people in clubs?’ Nowadays they call it decadence but those days it was just in Hamburg, in clubs that groups played at, strip clubs. I thought hard about whether I should continue.”
John Lennon said Paul McCartney wasn’t much of an influence on him
Though Lennon knew he needed McCartney to get The Beatles going, he didn’t think his bandmate taught him all that much. He worked closely with McCartney but claimed he never felt a loss when they stopped writing together.
“I never actually felt a loss,” he told Playboy. “I don’t want it to sound negative, like I didn’t need Paul, because when he was there, obviously, it worked. But I can’t — it’s easier to say what my contribution was to him than what he gave to me. And he’d say the same.”
Still, several people who knew both Beatles said McCartney was a key part of Lennon’s success.
