This excellent article is part of a series on creative pairs. You can find it online at Slate.com
"I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' "—John Lennon
Part One
How did John Lennon and Paul McCartney make magic together? On the surface, it seems simple—they covered for each other's deficits and created outlets for each other's strengths. Paul's melodic sunshine smoothed out John's bluesy growls, while John's soulful depth gave ballast to Paul and kept him from floating away.
These points are true so far as they go. John and Paul did balance and complement each other magnificently, and we can pile example on example. When they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There," Paul offered this opening verse:
"She was just seventeen
Never been a beauty queen."
"You're joking about that line," John shot back, "aren't you?" He offered this revision:
"She was just seventeen
You know what I mean"
There it is: Innocence meets sin—an inviting, simple image takes a lusty, poetic leap.
Lennon and McCartney did, to use the precious phrase, complete each other. "Paul's presence did serve to keep John from drifting too far into obscurity and self-indulgence," said Pete Shotton, a Liverpool boy who stayed in the Beatles' circle, "just as John's influence held in check the more facile and sentimental aspects of Paul's songwriting."
But images of completion and balance miss an essential energy between Lennon and McCartney—the potential energy of creative partnerships that they, as much as any pair in history, exemplify and illustrate. We tend to think of them in terms of arithmetic: Two people added together yield magnificence. This is the idea of partnership as chocolate and peanut butter—tasty, obvious, easy.
But Lennon and McCartney were more like an oyster and a grain of sand. Their power together didn't derive simply from individual ingredients but from a dynamic of constant mutual influence. Indeed, even "influence" understates the case, as it suggests two distinct actors operating on each other. Lennon and McCartney did affect each other, change each other, goad, inspire, madden, and wound each other. But they also each contributed to something that went beyond either individual, a charged, mutual space of creation—those pearls your ear probably recognizes and leans toward as much as to your parents' voices.
On a warm, humid July day in 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney came around to see a local band called the Quarry Men play in the fields behind St. Peter's Church in the suburbs of Liverpool, England.
John Lennon, who was 20 months older, fronted the six-piece band. He had his glasses off as usual—he was vain like that, though his vision was lousy. His hair was piled up and greased back in the style of post-Elvis "Teddy Boys." He played banjo chords on his guitar, ignoring the two bottom strings. For much of the set—part rock and part "skiffle" (a flavor of 1950s folk)—he passed over chord changes he didn't know and made up lyrics as he went along. When he did the Del-Vikings doo-wop "Come Go With Me," he threw in an image from the blues: "Come and go with me ... down to the penitentiary."
McCartney thought it was ingenious.
The Silver Beetles audition session: Stuart Sutcliffe, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Johnny Hutchinson, and George Harrison, May 1960
Afterward, in the church social hall, Paul picked up a guitar himself, flipped it over to play left-handed and showed off the songs he knew—Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, Little Richard. He had the lyrics down (including the complete lines to Cochran's "Twenty Flight Rock," a song others had a hard time even deciphering) and knocked off the chords perfectly (including a quick and delicate shift from a G to an F chord that made jaws drop). Then he went over to the piano and pounded out some Jerry Lee Lewis. The boy had polish and heat. He wore a white jacket with silver threads—he looked like Elvis, John thought. "Right off, I could see John checking this kid out," said Shotton (who played the washboards for the Quarry Men). Another friend said that John and Paul "circled each other like cats."
Clearly, these two boys had chemistry—that ineffable quality of attraction that feels like a primal, physical force and that often descends like a lightning strike.
As with the passion of love, or the nature of creativity itself, science has struggled to account for chemistry. Humans may, or may not, have pheromones that affect connection (though smell does demonstrably play a role in sexual attraction). Mirror neurons may, or may not, play a role in empathy and rapport. In their new book, Click , Ori and Rom Brafman offer many powerful stories of what chemistry looks like, but when it comes to analyzing it, their first adjective is "magical." Hardly the stuff of white coats and laboratories.
Of course, we celebrate, even venerate, these "chemical" connections—and for good reason. They give us a big kick. MRIs show the brain region responsible for dopamine absorption lights up in couples that say they are in love, comparable to the influence of narcotics. By contrast, social disconnection provokes activity in the region responsible for physical pain.
But intense connection also brings a peculiar discomfort. People "madly" in love show symptoms directly comparable to mania, depression, anorexia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Serotonin levels actually fall in passionate love (which, not incidentally, has a short lifespan, as opposed to the mellower, longer lasting "companionate love").
The behavior in passion also carries profound psychological risk. Arthur and Elaine Aron's experiments on what they call self-expansion show that people literally lose a sense of distinction between themselves and a close other. And as the psychologist Sandra Murray has shown, love wouldn't work at all without "cognitive restructuring," or helpful illusions that dispel the inherent fear of rejection and pain.
John Lennon saw the two sides of his attraction to Paul McCartney quickly and clearly. "I dug him," he said, and he wanted him in the band.
But he had his concerns. "I half thought to myself, 'He's as good as me,'" he told the journalist Hunter Davies in 1967. "I'd been kingpin up to then. Now, I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' " (In one sense, Lennon obviously meant: "If I invite him to join the group." But the double meaning of "take him on" is worth noticing.) In a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner, Lennon described his dilemma even more plainly: "I had a group. I was the singer and the leader; then I met Paul, and I had to make a decision: Was it better to have a guy who was better than the guy I had in? To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger?"
With hindsight, it's clear that it wasn't an either/or. Bringing Paul aboard made the group much stronger and it made John much stronger. It gave him part ownership of a priceless enterprise. That math adds up to infinite value.
But we're missing the point if we look at Lennon's thinking as a mistake. Actually, he put his finger right on the core emotional dynamic. What Paul represented to John—for good and for ill, for excitement and for fear—was a loss of control. All through his relationship with McCartney, the power between them would be fluid—a charged, creative exchange that fueled them and frustrated them, leading to creative peaks and valleys of recrimination and estrangement.
And it can all be traced to their first encounter. "The decision was made to make the group stronger," Lennon told Wenner. Had he decided to keep the power all to himself, he probably would have forsaken his power entirely.
In a 1995 interview, Mick Jagger was asked how he and Keith Richards lasted so long as songwriting partners, when Lennon and McCartney split. His answer was simple: A team needs a leader. (He didn't go so far as to explicitly identify himself as that leader, but he made it perfectly clear.)
By contrast, John and Paul, Jagger said, "seemed to be very competitive over leadership of the band. ... If there are 10 things, they both wanted to be in charge of nine of them. You're not gonna make a relationship like that work, are you?"
Jaggers point sounds like an M.B.A. case study—fitting, maybe, from a rock and roller who studied at the London School of Economics.
But successful creative pairs suggest that power roles are often murky. The domineering and dynamic Gertrude Stein seemed to run over her mousy, housekeeping partner Alice B. Toklas. Stein literally appropriated her partner's identity—wrote in her name—to create a self-serving portrait of herself. But close observers often saw Toklas take Stein by the lapel, directing her as deftly and surely as an actor onstage. In many ways, Stein's creative life began when Toklas recognized her—when, in Stein's words, Toklas said "yes" to her work.
Sometimes, apparently rigid power roles actually facilitate something more open. Quayle Hodek and Kris Lotlikar, co-founders of a leading renewable energy firm, decided at the start that one of them would be CEO and have the final say. This, Hodek told me, allows them to operate without fear of paralyzing conflict. The irony, he says, is that his ostensible deputy calls many more shots day-to-day.
Even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at times operated more fluidly than Jagger claimed. The masterpiece Exile on Main Street was recorded in Richards' house in the south of France, and on the terms he preferred (a loose arrangement, edging into chaos, built on jams and endless takes). Many consider this album the team's masterpiece.
But no pair illustrates the fluidity of power—and the power of fluidity—better than John and Paul. At its worst, theirs was an alienating, enervating struggle. But at its best, the dynamic was playful and organic. Jagger is probably right that it led to their split. But who said you measure the strength of a collaboration by its longevity?
The tension between Lennon and McCartney was rooted in their distinct styles and personalities. As a boy, the precocious and creative John Lennon always needed, he said, "a little gang of guys who would play various roles in my life, supportive and, you know, subservient." "I wanted everybody to do what I told them to do," he said, "to laugh at my jokes and let me be the boss." He needed both to connect and to dominate. "Though I have yet to encounter a personality as strong and individual as John's," said his friend Pete Shotton, "he always had to have a partner." (John so entwined himself with Pete that he called them "Shennon and Lotton.")
When John put a band together, he brought his mates in—often simply because they were his mates—but left no doubt about his status. Shotton, for example, didn't have a particular talent for music and didn't like it much. When he told Lennon he needed out of the band, John broke Pete's washboard over his head. It's not likely we could find a clearer display of power with primates on the savannah.
For some time after Paul joined, John stayed out front. Among the band's many early names were "Johnny and the Moondogs" and "Long John and the Silver Beetles." When "The Beatles" went to Hamburg, Germany, the contract named John as the payee. In the late 1950s, Paul pitched a journalist on the band; he began his description of the boys with John, "who leads the group ... " But the letter itself—a piece of Paul's relentless promotion—speaks to his own power style. He was more social, more affable, more outwardly and consistently energetic. Where John oscillated between intense shyness and raw aggression (he beat his girlfriend, for example), Paul had a knack for working people that was savvy as it was sweet.
From the start, Paul looked up to John—"posing and strutting with his hair slicked back," remembered Cynthia Lennon, "to prove that he was cool." But he also took the microphone and worked the crowd. In Hamburg, "most people among the fans looked upon [Paul] as the leader," said Astrid Kirchherr, a German student who befriended the band. "John of course was the leader," Astrid continued. "He was far and away the strongest."
What's interesting, though, isn't the question of who ran the show, but the subtlety of strength itself, the many ways power can be exercised between partners.
Consider the moment Paul's brother Michael cited as an illustration of his "innate sense of diplomacy." It was in Paris in 1963. The Beatles' producer George Martin had arranged for them to record "She Loves You" in German. When the band missed their studio appointment, Martin came around to their suite at the George V hotel. They played slapstick and dived under the tables to avoid him.
"Are you coming to do it or not?" Martin said.
"No," Lennon said. George and Ringo echoed him. Paul said nothing, and they went back to eating.
"Then a bit later," Michael said, "Paul suddenly turned to John and said, 'Heh, you know that so and so line, what if we did it this way? John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said, 'Yeah, that's it.' And they headed to the studio."
How would we chart the lines of authority for this decision? You could say Lennon made the call to refuse the recording session, then reversed himself—the band following him both times. But it was actually Paul who shaped the course the band took. His move to avoid a direct confrontation—to let John stay nominally in control—only underscores his operational strength.
Just as shorter people are more aware of height, Paul seems to have noticed the power dynamic more acutely. In a 1967 conversation about the band's Hamburg days, Lennon said that Paul had just recently told him about fights they had over who led the band. "I can't remember them," Lennon said. "It had stopped mattering by then. I wasn't so determined to be the leader at all costs." This is crucial. He had decided he didn't need to be the leader at all costs—itself a leadership claim. As the band rocketed to success, Lennon would increasingly acquiesce to Paul's ideas, much as a king in tumultuous times will defer to his counsel. But he never gave up the idea that he could, when he wanted, return straight to his throne.
End Part One
Intermission
Part Two
"The tension between the two of them made for the bond." —George Martin
George Martin with Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the recording studio
To the public, Lennon and McCartney famously declared themselves a fused pair. As soon as they began to write together, they decided to share credit regardless of individual contribution. At the top of their music sheets, they would write, "Another Lennon/McCartney original." They collapsed the space between them—not even an "and" would divide their names, just a slash.
But the joint credit also served as balm on the cuts of a constant, intense—though often joyful—competition. "Imagine two people pulling on a rope," said George Martin, "smiling at each other and pulling all the time with all their might. The tension between the two of them made for the bond."
Martin's image is perfect. John and Paul constantly pulled away from each other—and moved closer at the same time. Their competition actually enhanced their individual differences, even as it brought them into a relationship that was itself a third entity, the space where two circles overlap.
Even in their early years, when, as John said, they wrote "nose to nose" and "eyeball to eyeball" Lennon/McCartney songs clearly bore the stamp of their primary creators—John usually dwelling on betrayal and loneliness ("Tell me why you cried/ And why you lied to me") and Paul on devotion and connection ("There's really nothing else I'd rather do/ 'Cause I'm happy just to dance with you").
At the same time, the songs clearly evolved through a shared vision—at first, for engaging, infectious, emotionally direct pop, later for more ambitious, far-reaching ideas and sounds. Their harmonies make the chemistry and connection palpable, along with an implicit communication that extended to the whole band— "just being able to sort of blink," Lennon said, "or make a certain noise and I know they'll all know where we are going."
The nature of John and Paul's intimacy evolved over the years. In the early days, the partners were hardly ever apart. In Hamburg, the Beatles famously played for hours at a time (adding up, as Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, to the famous 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice" that Anders Ericsson has determined leads to true mastery.) Paul and John essentially lived together on the road; even on days off, they got together to write.
After August 1966, when they stopped touring, their lives were more separate. John lived in a mansion in the suburbs of London with his wife and son. Paul lived in London, first with his girlfriend Jane Asher's family, and then in a townhouse not far from the EMI studios on Abbey Road.
In part because each man grew as an artist, in part because they marinated in wild, innovative scenes, in part because they turned so much of their ferocious energy into a meticulous, relentless and inventive use of studio technology, the songs, beginning with the album Revolver , began to take on new color and oddity and elegance. Lennon wrote the lyrics for "Tomorrow Never Knows"after reading The Psychedelic Experience and following its instructions on an LSD trip: "Turn off your mind relax and float downstream." When it came time to record the song, he told George Martin that he wanted the sound of a hundred chanting Tibetan monks. He also suggested that he be suspended from a rope, get a good push and sing while spinning around the mike.
McCartney, meanwhile, edged into an almost operatic narrative style with "Eleanor Rigby," and his infectious pop developed new layers as with "Got To Get You Into My Life."
According to the conventional wisdom, their drift apart had begun. But the increased distance sometimes functioned like the space between boxers in a ring—giving more room for a powerful shot. "He'd write 'Strawberry fields,' I'd go away and write 'Penny Lane,' " McCartney said. "If I'd write 'I'm Down,' he'd go away and write something similar to that. To compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition because we were both going to share in the rewards anyway."
Friendly, but with a sharp edge. "I would bring in a song and you could sort of see John stiffen a bit," Paul said. "Next day he'd bring in a song and I'd sort of stiffen. And it was like, 'Oh, you're going to do that, are you? Right. You wait till I come up with something tomorrow.' "
The favorite back-and-forth—who was the real genius in the pair?—looks to set one on a pedestal. But when we look closely at the back and forth, that debate's most cherished assumptions come into question—for example, that John charged ahead with the musical avant-garde while Paul nurtured traditional elements of melody and symmetry. It's true that John tended to stick his finger in the audience's eye while Paul usually preferred to coo to them. John's "Revolution 9" may be the oddest, most dissonant thing ever laid down on a big pop album and Paul's "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude" set a standard for sweetness and formal perfection.
But in some ways, it was Paul who forged the frontier and John who raced to catch and exceed him. From 1966 to '68, John lived a weird, sleepy, deeply interior life. He spent days on end dropping acid and watching television. Paul, meanwhile, threw himself into the London art world and its "happenings"—performances that blurred the boundary between artist and audience. In 1965, their music publisher Dick James gave them each a Brenell Mark 5 tape recorder. While John used his to record rough demos, Paul, immersed in the experimental work of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, jiggered the machine to disable the erase head and make tape loops of layered sounds. He brought these to the Beatles sessions to create the sound for "Tomorrow Never Knows," the famous "John" song.
I lived a very urbane life in London," McCartney remembered. "John used to come in from Weybridge ... and I'd tell him what I'd been doing: 'Last night I saw a Bertolucci film and I went down the Open Space, they're doing a new play there.' "
Paul said John would reply: "God man, I really envy you."
In 1966, a far-out artist named Yoko Ono moved to London from New York City. Paul not only met her first; he had helped create the Indica Gallery where she and Lennon met. Though it took several years to ripen, Lennon eventually threw himself into the relationship—he literally asked people to consider them JohnandYoko. (Yoko made for the third person, following Pete Shotton and Paul McCartney, with whom he collapsed his name.)
Joined with her, John left no doubt who would be master of the avant garde. Where Paul had merely attended happenings, John and Yoko staged them. Where Paul used his tape loops to extend the pop form and kept his wildest, most experimental recordings in the can, John insisted that "Revolution 9" go on a Beatles record.
The point here isn't to identify whether John or Paul was the "real" edge, but to underscore how keenly they watched each other. Indeed, Paul's dive into the London art scene may itself have been a reaction to his image as the "cute" Beatle, compared with John, the "smart" one.
This constant give and take took a decisive shift in August 1967, when the band's manager Brian Epstein died. For some time, Epstein had been more figurehead than real leader—and it is telling that, by the mid-1960s at least, he deferred to Paul far more than to the others. But in a tenuous democracy led in strange fashion by two principals, he gave cover, the way even a weak parent will for squabbling boys.
Paul had asserted control before Epstein's death, when he conceived Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and dominated the sessions. With Brian gone, Paul's role as a de facto manager became far more obvious—and far more threatening to John's own sense of control. "Paul had a tendency to come along and say well he's written these ten songs, let's record now," John said, claiming that he and George became "side men for Paul." But this bitter language came later. And for a long while, he acquiesced. He was too checked out to do much of anything else.
The traditional story is that John withdrew from the band even further when he took up with Yoko. She is cast as usurper—provoking rifts that led to the band's demise. But on closer look, we have to ask whether John actually used her to assert his dominance—to claim his rightful, incontestable leadership. To the others, John's insistence that Yoko be treated as an equal seemed preposterous. But for John—however aware of his audaciousness—it all still fit: It was his band. He could bring in new members the same way he'd brought in Pete Shotton, the way he replaced Bill Smith with Len Garry—the way he brought in Paul. As strange as it might sound, even John's dramatic break with the band can be seen as a power move—a backhanded form of engagement. In September 1969, as Paul urged that the Beatles get back to their roots and play live shows, John shot back, in the account given by biographer Bob Spitz, "I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you, but I'm breaking the group up."
The language is key. John's leaving the band would mean its dissolution. He later made the claim explicit: "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that."
But the break was hardly simple. It's not even clear that Lennon wanted a final break. For all his bluster in the band meeting, he never made his decision public—which is to say, he never made it real. To the contrary, just months after he told Paul he wanted a "divorce," he talked publicly about the band recording again and even touring. "It'll probably be a rebirth, you know, for all of us," he said. Perhaps John needed to believe he could end the band in order to stick with it.
At first, Paul showed signs that he would step back and let John get what he needed. He saw the choice, he said later, to accept Yoko or to lose John, and he chose the former: "When you find yourself in times of trouble ... let it be."
But now, at a moment of great turmoil, two new factors came into play. For years, George Harrison had been the "quiet Beatle" at the side. Literally, as John and Paul faced the crowd side-to-side in performance, he stood far off facing them. But as he grew into his own—writing songs like "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun"—he bristled at Paul's bossiness and grew positively indignant at taking instructions from John's wife. At one point, according to George Martin, he and Lennon even came to blows. His energy made the tenuous balance between John and Paul much less stable.
Meanwhile, the Beatles, as a business, were in such a freefall that John predicted they could go completely broke. Someone needed to take control at Apple Corps, a wildly ambitious holding company that had turned to chaos. Paul wanted his new bride Linda's father and brother, Lee and John Eastman, to run Apple. But in another impetuous power move, John summarily signed with Allen Klein, a brash manager with a reputation for bullying record companies for higher royalties. (Klein was also a questionable character; he basically stole ownership of the Rolling Stones' catalog and later went to jail for tax fraud.)
George and Ringo followed John and signed with Klein. Paul held out. But for all his defiance, his vulnerability came strongly into play, as well. He had never yielded his essential devotion to John—and the rejections devastated him. "John's in love with Yoko," he said. "He's no longer in love with us."
As Paul wrote in "Let It Be," the light always shined on him, even on cloudy nights. But now, as a storm raged, he fell into a profound depression. He stayed in bed and drank through the day. "Boy, you're going to carry that weight a long time"—this grew out of his despair, he said. But he also wrote, in what seems a plea to his partner, "You and I have memories, longer than the road that stretches up ahead."
In the spring of 1970, with tensions among the four Beatles still at a fever pitch, Paul released a solo album and included a short Q&A that he authored with his publicist. It included this exchange.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
PAUL: No.
Q: Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?
PAUL: Time will tell. Being a solo means it's "the start of a solo career ..." and not being done with the Beatles means it's just a rest. So it's both really.
Like John, Paul hardly said the band had broken up for good. "It's just a rest," he said.
But newspapers seized on the first public acknowledgment of the band's rumored troubles. "McCartney Breaks Off With Beatles," ran the New York Times headline on April 11, 1970. This loss of face—the public acknowledgment of a coup—was more than John could stand. "I was cursing," he said, "because I hadn't done it. I wanted to do it, I should have done it. Ah, damn, shit, what a fool I was."
The time had long passed where he could just take a washboard and break it over a mate's head. The fight between these two partners now had the whole world in thrall. They would never work together again. But the history of their partnership was just beginning to be written. Hardly a straightforward account, it would be another winding road on their path together.
End Part Two
Intermission
Part Three
"It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again" —Paul McCartney
It's supremely odd how history would play the collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The result of one of the most intertwined partnerships in music history, their work would consistently be reduced to static roles. It's almost as if, faced with the bound pair, a culture obsessed with individualism found a way to cleave them in two.
Take, for example, the relentless focus on "John" songs versus "Paul" songs—or sections of songs, or single lines—as though that's the skeleton key to the Beatles' inner workings.
Actually, this tradition has an impeccable source: John and Paul themselves. The irony is that the way they came to tell their own story, after their split, may speak less to the way they separated and more to the way that they remained connected.
First, consider the usual take. "Now your songs were co-credited, you know, in the Beatles era," Terry Gross said to Paul in a 2001 interview. "My understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, that many of the songs were written by one of you or the other, although the other would do some editing on the song, but that few of the songs were actually true collaborations."
"Is that right?" she asked. "Is that accurate?"
In response, Paul gave what has become a kind of official history: In the early days, he said, he and John were constantly in each other's presence, and "everything was co-written; we hardly ever wrote things separate."
Then, after a few years, as we got a bit of success with the Beatles and didn't actually live together or weren't just always on the road together sharing hotel rooms, then we had the luxury of writing things separately. So John would write something like "Nowhere Man," sort of separately in his house outside London, and I would write something like "Yesterday" quite separately on my own, and as you say we would come together and check 'em out against each other. Sometimes we would edit a line of each other's. More often, we'd just sort of say, "Yeah, that's great."
This bit—clear, ordered, and apparently airtight—is typical of McCartney. Lennon delivered basically the same message in a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner and, typical for him, he both far overstated the case and then doubled around to underscore its true ambiguity.
"When did your songwriting partnership with Paul end?" Wenner asked.
"That ended," Lennon jumped in quickly, and then he paused for several seconds. "I don't know, around 1962, or something." He laughed, and it sounds like a nervous laugh, or maybe he was announcing a joke: 1962 is when Paul and John first began laying their compositions down on studio tape for George Martin at EMI. "I don't know," Lennon went on. "I mean, if you give me the albums I can tell you exactly who wrote what, you know, and which line. I mean, we sometimes wrote together and sometimes didn't but all our best work—apart from the early days, like 'I Want To Hold Your Hand' we wrote together and things like that—we wrote apart always, you know."
Then he returned to the question and contradicted himself. "We always wrote separately," he said, "but we wrote together because ... because we enjoyed it a lot sometimes, and also because they'd say, 'Well, you're going to make an album?' We'd get together and knock off a few songs, you know, just like a job."
John's statement sounds like nonsense: "We always wrote separately but we wrote together." It's impossible to straighten into a literal meaning. But it actually captures the reality of their collaboration quite well.
Sometimes, it's true, songs tumbled out of their creators in whole. It's telling that McCartney seized the two clearest examples—"Yesterday" and "Nowhere Man"—when he described the collaboration to Terry Gross. On waking one morning, Paul sat down and practically transcribed the music for "Yesterday" on piano, using nonsense lyrics at first—"Scrambled egg ... ." "Nowhere Man" has a parallel story. After five hours trying to write a song, and failing, John gave up in frustration. "Then," he told Playboy in 1980, " 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down."
Neither experience was typical. For one thing, even when John and Paul were apart, they were constantly in touch, according to Cynthia Lennon's account of John's process. (She had a firsthand view through mid-1968). John had a studio in their attic and he went there at all odd times. "Then," Cynthia wrote, "there would be phone calls back and forth to Paul, as they played and sang to each other over the phone."
John and Paul also met frequently to work. In 1967, the journalist Hunter Davies sat in on several of those sessions. One priceless account shows the slow, ambling course of discovery on the way toward "A Little Help From My Friends."
They started around 2 p.m. in Paul's workroom, a narrow, rectangular space full of instruments and amps and modern art. The previous afternoon, they'd gotten the tune for the song. Now they were trying to polish the melody and write lyrics. John took up his guitar and Paul banged at the piano. "Each seemed to be in a trance," Davies wrote, "until the other came up with something good, then he would pluck it out of a mass of noises and try it himself."
"Are you afraid when you turn out the light?" John offered.
Paul repeated the line, agreeing it was good. John said they could begin each of the verses with a question. He offered another one. "Do you believe in love at first sight?" "No," he interrupted himself. "It hasn't got the right number of syllables." He tried singing the line breaking it in two between "believe" and "in love."
"How about 'Do you believe in a love at first sight?' " Paul offered. John sang that, and instantly added another line. "Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time." They repeated these three lines over and over again. It was now five o'clock. Some others came by, and as they bantered about, Paul started doodling on the piano before breaking out into "Can't Buy Me Love." John joined in, shouting and laughing. Then they both shouted out "Tequila."
"Remember in Germany?" John said. "We used to shout out everything." They did the song again, with John throwing in words in every pause—"Knickers" and "Duke of Edinburgh" and "Hitler."
"Then, as suddenly as it had started," Davies wrote, "they both went back to the work at hand."
John sang a slight modification of the line they'd agreed on. "What do you see when you turn out the light?" Then he answered the question: "I can't tell you, but I know it's mine." Paul said that would do and wrote the four lines on a piece of exercise paper propped up on the piano. Then they broke for cake.
Had Jann Wenner picked up Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, pointed to the second track, and took Lennon up on his offer to say "exactly who wrote what, you know, and which line," could Lennon have said honestly he had written that day's material? Sure. The only explicit edit of Paul's was the indefinite article "a."
Yet, looking for concrete divisions in their labor, though not irrelevant, can certainly seem myopic. It feels, from Davies' account, as though the two men were bound by a thousand invisible strings.
Davies looked on at the partners before Yoko, before The White Album — "the tension album" Paul said. But tension had always been key to their work. The strings connecting them hardly dissolved, even in the times when the collaboration was adversarial, the kind of exchange that Andre Agassi described when he said that, if he hadn't faced Pete Sampras, he'd have a better record, "but I'd be less." Picking up on that incisive line, Michael Kimmelman wrote in his review of Agassi's book Open that "rivalry ... [is] the heart of sports, and, for athletes, no matter how bitter or fierce, something strangely akin to love: two vulnerable protagonists for a time lifted up not despite their differences but because of them."
But even in the hardest times, it's hardly true that John and Paul stopped working together. In what was, ostensibly, the nadir of their partnership in January 1969, their concert on the Apple rooftop shows the two men in profound sympathy. At one point, John forgot a verse to "Don't Let Me Down." He and Paul proceeded in perfect sync as John sang nonsense lyrics, then returned to the top of the verse as if nothing had happened. You can see on the film how John shoots Paul a look of pure boyish glee. Several months later, when John wrote "The Ballad of John and Yoko," he rushed to Paul's doorstep. With George and Ringo out of town, he insisted they go straight to the studio. They cut the song in one long day, John taking the guitars and lead vocal, Paul on bass, drums, piano, maracas—and coming in with breathtaking harmonies.
We typically look back on a broken partnership and assume it suffered from distance and alienation. But as Arthur and Elaine Aron have shown, relationships can suffer just as much from too much closeness and the consequent loss of control or identity. People describing these kinds of relationships use words like suffocating, smothering, overwhelming. They've lost too much of their individual distinction into a shared whole.
There's good reason to believe this happened with John and Paul. To understand why, we need to consider the reality of the early 1970s. Today, with Wikipedia and mountains of Beatles books, we have fantastic detail on the minutiae of their individual contributions. But when they worked together, and when they split, they were, as writers, just as they appeared in their credits: Lennon/McCartney. When John took tea at the Plaza Hotel in the 1970s, the pianist would serenade him with "Yesterday." On a TV show, the band played "Michelle" during a break. "At least I wrote the middle eight on that one," John said.
It was as though the partners had deposited every asset of reputation and identity into a joint bank account. After their split, they stood in line, day after day, to take the maximum withdrawal. Of course, there were literal bank accounts—immense financial and practical complications of their divorce. But what's interesting here is their self-conception—their desperate need to individuate. One of their most common words after the split was me. From Paul's self-questionnaire in April 1970:
Q: Did you enjoy working as a solo?
PAUL: Very much. I only had me to ask for a decision, and I generally agreed with me.
The next year, John told Jann Wenner that his first solo album was the "best thing I've ever done." "Now I wrote all about me and that's why I like it," he said. "It's me! And nobody else. That's why I like it." Paul got to the identity question even more directly in an interview with Life magazine. "It's like there was me, then the Beatles phase, and now I'm me again."
As they gave their history, John and Paul became relentless in dissecting their own work. This formed the bedrock of the history of their collaboration. Asked about the songs, they often used the possessive: "That's John's," Paul would say, or "That's mine." John would do the same. It's telling that two men with notoriously poor memories—neither knew how many times they'd been to Hamburg, for example—left in doubt the authorship of only a single melody in a single song ("In My Life").
Of course, they did make many distinct and identifiable contributions. But with the ferocity of their claims for singular ownership, did they protest too much?
Even their bitterness after the split speaks to connection. After Paul's press release, and his public shot at his ex-partner's exhibitions ("too many people preaching practices"), Lennon wrote a song called "How Do You Sleep" with the lines "Those freaks was right when they said you was dead" and "The only thing you done was Yesterday" and "The sound you make is Muzak to my ears."
This is nasty stuff. But the opposite of intimacy isn't conflict. It's indifference. The relationship between Paul and John had always been a tug of war—and that hardly stopped when they ceased to collaborate directly. Asked what he thought Paul would make of his first solo album, Lennon said, "I think it'll probably scare him into doing something decent, and then he'll scare me into doing something decent, like that."
Predictably, Paul took a mostly sunny air in interviews after the breakup—and he returned to an admiring view of John that would grow over the years. He even thanked his ex-partner for ushering in a new and vital phase of life. "I sort of picked up on his lead," Paul said in 1971. "John had said, 'Look, I don't want to be that anymore. I'm going to be this.' And I thought, 'That's great.' I liked the fact he'd done it, and so I'll do it with my thing. He's given the okay."
With John, the basic ambiguity came through—his loving Paul, and needing to stay separate. On The Mike Douglas Show in 1972, a young man in the audience asked John if "How Do You Sleep" was "vicious." John at first denied it, saying he had just had dinner with Paul who was laughing and smiling. "If I can't have a fight with my best friend," he said, "I don't know who I can have a fight with."
Douglas was just moderating, but it seems he couldn't resist this striking declaration. He turned to Lennon. "Is he your best friend, Paul?"
"I guess in the male sex he," John stammered, "— he was. I don't know about now, because I don't see much of him, you know."
Two years later, John would mix up his tenses when describing Paul in an even more revealing way. It was Thanksgiving night in 1974, when he joined Elton John at a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.
Lennon wore a black silk shirt, a black jacket, and a necklace that dangled a flower over his chest. He had on his usual "granny" glasses with dark lenses. His thin, brown hair fell down past his shoulders. After storming through "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" and "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," Lennon came to the microphone to round out the set.
"I'd like to thank Elton and the boys for having me on tonight," he said. "We tried to think of a number to finish off with so I can get out of here and be sick, and we thought we'd do a number of an old, estranged fiance of mine, called Paul. This is one I never sang. It's an old Beatle number and we just about know it."
The song was "I Saw Her Standing There."
Though he lived another six years, John Lennon never took the stage for a major show again. His strange words have a peculiar and lasting echo. By then, Paul and John had been the most famous exes in the world for four years. But somehow, they were still "fiances"—prospective spouses. As much as had passed, the energy between them was always in front of them—always, somehow, in the future.