3 Times The Beatles’ Paul McCartney Made Some Not-So-Nice Comments About John Lennon
The Beatles‘ Paul McCartney and John Lennon were best friends who were highly competitive with each other. This nature pushed the best out of each of the men as singers and songwriters. It also tinged their relationship. Often, they brought out the worst in each other. Here is three times Paul McCartney made some not-so-nice comments about John Lennon.
Paul McCartney claimed John Lennon ‘stopped being himself’
In an interview with Playboy, Paul McCartney believed that John Lennon “stopped being himself” when he moved to New York in the 1970s with his wife, Yoko Ono. He admitted that the man he knew as his teenage pal in Liverpool, England, had changed from the person he once was.
The Playboy interview was reposted by the website Beatles Interviews. Paul said, “I think that probably is the biggest criticism, that John stopped being himself. I used to b**** at him for that.”
He continued, “On the phone with me in the later years; he’d get very New York if we were arguing. New York accent ‘Awright, goddamn it!’ I called him Kojak once because he was really laying New York street hip on me. Oh, come off it!”
The Beatles bassist ‘turned his missiles’ after John Lennon’s ‘cruel’ tracks
Paul McCartney told BBC Radio he “turned his missiles” on John Lennon after what he believed were “cruel” tracks about him, released after The Beatles breakup. He discussed his rebuttal, “Too Many People,” from his 1971 LP Ram.
“This song was written [at a time] when John was firing missiles at me with his songs. One or two of them were quite cruel,” McCartney admitted. “I don’t know what he hoped to gain other than punching me in the face; the whole thing really annoyed me. I decided to turn my missiles on him too.”
He continued, “It was the 1970s equivalent of what might today [be] called a diss track. The idea of too many people preaching practices is definitely aimed at John telling everyone what they ought to do. Fed up with being told what to do, so I wrote this song.”
“I had been able to accept Yoko in the studio, sitting on a blanket in front of my amp,” McCartney claimed. “Worked hard to come to terms with that, but when we broke up, and everyone was flailing around, John turned nasty. I don’t understand why. Maybe because we grew up in Liverpool, where it was always good to get the first punch in the fight.”
McCartney called one of Lennon’s beliefs in the early 1970s ‘crap’
During Paul McCartney’s reading of excerpts from The Lyrics: 1956 To The Present for a BBC Radio series, he touched on many of Lennon’s ideals of the early 1970s. The book explored the backstories of songs McCartney had written across a nearly eight-decade-long career.
McCartney shared his views on Lennon and Ono’s beliefs at the time. He said, “The thing is, so much they held to be the truth was crap.”
“‘War is over,’ well, no, it isn’t. ‘If enough people want the war to be over, it’ll be over. I’m not sure that’s entirely true,” he said. “But it’s a great sentiment.”
John Lennon and Paul McCartney eventually made peace with their long relationship before Lennon’s death in Dec. 1980. He told Sean Lennon, John’s son, during an interview for NME, “It really, really would have been a heartache to me if we hadn’t reunited. It was so lovely too that we did, and it gives me strength to know that.”
