Paul McCartney Was the Only Person Who Could Tell John Lennon When He Went ‘Too Far’
Paul McCartney and John Lennon were close collaborators in The Beatles. Despite their differences, the pair were good friends and wrote many of The Beatles’ hits together. According to Beatles audio engineer Geoff Emerick, the respect that McCartney and Lennon had for each other made them perfect partners. McCartney was the only person who could call Lennon out when he behaved badly.
Paul McCartney could call out John Lennon when other people couldn’t
Emerick worked in close quarters with The Beatles for years. As a result, he gained an understanding of McCartney and Lennon’s relationship dynamic.
“Many people’s view of the Lennon/McCartney collaboration is a simplistic one: that Lennon was the rough and ready rocker, while McCartney was the soft sentimentalist,” he wrote in his book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. “While that might have been partially true, their relationship went a lot deeper than that.”
They trusted and respected one another enough to critique one another in ways no one else could.
“[P]aul was the only person who could look John in the eye and say, ‘You’ve gone too far,'” Emerick wrote. “They were usually diplomatic with each other — Paul might say to John, ‘Oh I think you can do better than that,’ or something similar — but that’s what it came down to.”
Paul McCartney sometimes let John Lennon’s anger improve songs
Sometimes, particularly in the latter half of the 1960s, their critiques grew harsher and less measured. Still, they listened to each other.
Once, after spending a frustrating amount of time on McCartney’s song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” Lennon left and got high. When he returned, he angrily began playing the song’s opening chords on the piano to show McCartney how the song should go.
“‘Okay, then, John,’ he said in short, clipped words staring his deranged bandmate straight in his eye. ‘Let’s do it your way.’ As angry as he was, I think that deep down inside Paul was flattered his longtime collaborator had given the song any thought at all … even though he had obviously done so while getting out of his skull.”
The Beatles bandmates still got into vicious fights
While McCartney and Lennon understood each other, they still had intense arguments. While recording The White Album, McCartney let loose pent-up resentment toward his longtime bandmate.
“I could hear them going at it in the hall and it was terrifying,” an EMI employee recalled, per the book The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz. “Paul was positively livid, accusing John of being reckless, childish, sabotaging the group.”
Lennon was unreceptive of his bandmate’s feelings. After The Beatles broke up, their relationship also hit a particularly low point. McCartney said that they struggled to understand one another, mainly when they had to talk about business.
“I would ring him when I went to New York and he would say, ‘Yeah, what d’you want?’ ‘I just thought we might meet?’ ‘Yeah, what the f*** d’you want, man?’ I used actually to have some very frightening phone calls,” McCartney said, per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “Thank God they’re not in my life anymore. I went through a period when I would be so nervous to ring him and so insecure in myself that I actually felt like I was in the wrong. It was all very acrimonious and bitter.”
