Paul McCartney Said It Was an Illusion That John Lennon Was More ‘Deep’ Than Him
After The Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney noticed a difference in the way the public perceived himself and John Lennon. He believed that traits people thought of as marks of creative genius in Lennon were seen as flaws in himself. McCartney also noted that people thought of Lennon as a deep thinker but didn’t think of him the same way. He didn’t believe that Lennon was a more profound thinker than him.
Paul McCartney didn’t like the way people portrayed John Lennon after his death
Lennon was murdered in 1980, and McCartney believes that fans rewrote history to make his contributions to The Beatles seem more substantial.
“The minute John died, there started to be a revisionism,” McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2001. “There were some strange quotes, like, ‘John was the only one in the Beatles.’ Or ‘Paul booked the studio’ — I don’t want to get into who said what, but that was attributed to someone who very much knew better. ‘John was the Mozart; Paul was the Salieri.’ Like, John was the real genius, and I was just the guy who sang ‘Yesterday’ — and I got lucky to do that.”
McCartney said that he tried to ignore this, but he couldn’t help but feel hurt by it.
“I tried to ignore it, but it built into an insecurity,” he said. “People would say, ‘Paul, people know.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but what about fifty years in the future?’ If this revisionism gets around, a lot of kids will be like, ‘Did he have a group before Wings?’ There may come a time when people won’t know.”
Paul McCartney said he was not less deep than John Lennon
McCartney said that because people reinvented Lennon as the creative genius behind The Beatles, he became known as a deep thinker. McCartney didn’t see Lennon as a deeper thinker.
“John was no more deep than I am,” McCartney told The Washington Post in 1984. “You look at John’s upbringing and my upbringing, mine made me into a very different kind of person. Mine was a warm, comfortable childhood, not a rich upbringing. His was richer than mine. Nobody knows that. John made himself out to be the big working class hero, but he was the least working class in the group. John had an auntie who gave him a hundred pounds one birthday; that’s still something I wouldn’t give my kids.”
McCartney wondered if he was seen as less intelligent because he was a warmer public figure.
“I’m just happy and friendly, I don’t want to be drippy,” he said. “I’m as intelligent as John was. I know where he was at, I know what he read and I know what we talked about. But you’re stuck with yourself.”
He wrote a song about his late friend
Though McCartney had some problems with the quasi-deification of Lennon after his death, he mourned the loss of his friend and bandmate. He wrote the song “Here Today” about the late musician. In the song, he references a bonding moment between the two of them where they spoke about losing their mothers.
“And at some point early in the morning, I think we must have touched on some points that were really emotional, and we ended up crying, which was very unusual for us, because we — members of a band and young guys, we didn’t do that kind of thing,” he told NPR. “So I always remembered it as a sort of important emotional landmark.”
