John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie
But for me the most important aspect of the Beatles has always been the Lennon-McCartney partnership.
It’s a drag, isn’t it,” Paul McCartney told reporters quizzing him the day after John Lennon’s murder, a soundbite as dispiritingly muted, even callous, as his reaction to his mother’s death when he was 14: “How are we going to get by without her money?” Behind the scenes, Paul was lost and tearful, as well as guilt‑stricken that he and John hadn’t properly reconciled since the Beatles split: “I’m never going to fall out with anybody again.” Still, the enshrinement of John and vilification of Paul had begun. “John Lennon was three-quarters of the Beatles,” Philip Norman told television viewers while promoting his biography, Shout!, a few months later.
The antagonism has abated in recent years, but the John-Paul duality persists. Heavy rocker versus cute populist. Working-class rebel v smug bourgeois clone. Tormented genius v girly sentimentalist. Strawberry Fields Forever v Penny Lane.
Ian Leslie takes on these tired polarities by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: “passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy”. However much at odds temperamentally, John and Paul were an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Beatles, with George and Ringo (not much featured here) as add-ons. The emotional ties they shared, not least the early loss of their mothers, weren’t ones they could talk about, so they sang them instead. As Paul put it: “You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people.”
Although I believe the enshrinement of John as a tormented genius and vilification of Paul as girly sentimentalist predated Lennon's murder by at least ten years.
If these newspaper reviews are any indication, the book has lots of stuff I never knew about before.
I’m sorry John isn’t here to read this book. I hope if Paul does read it he feels the depth of appreciation and gratitude and intelligence it contains. There is a passage about them being high on LSD, after recording the song “Getting Better” during the “Sgt. Pepper’s” sessions, that seems to me central to Leslie’s understanding of his subjects:
That night, John and Paul did something that the two of them practiced quite a few times during this period: They gazed intensely into each other’s eyes. They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other, almost obliterating any sense of themselves as distinct individuals. “There’s something disturbing about it,” recalled McCartney, much later, in his understated way. “You ask yourself, ‘How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?’ And the answer is, you don’t.”
Los Angeles Times review:
“ ‘Yesterday’ feels like a shift in the balance of power,” says Leslie. “From the beginning they were equals, and ‘Yesterday’ wasn’t only just a hit, but the song that more artists covered than any other Beatles song. Paul even sang it onstage by himself when they performed. And it triggered John’s insecurities.”
A further separation occurred in 1967 when Lennon, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, moved out of London into the suburbs while McCartney stayed behind, soaking in the beau monde of the city’s arts scene. Leslie also writes of Lennon’s use of LSD and McCartney’s reluctance to follow suit. “They weren’t living near each other anymore and songwriting became more like a job with set hours,” says Leslie. But “even as they were starting to drift apart, the songs were still astonishing.”
One-upmanship between the partners became a spur for Lennon to try harder, with McCartney responding in kind. When Lennon presented McCartney with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a woozy reverie loosely based on his childhood, McCartney wrote his own memory piece, “Penny Lane.” Lennon wrote “Imagine” a year after the Beatles broke up and thought he may have finally topped McCartney. “When he played it for people to get feedback, the question he asked was, ‘Is it better than ‘Yesterday?,’ ” says Leslie.
I always thought it was the Sgt. Peppers album that changed the balance of power, with McCartney pushing the band to get it done. Meanwhile Lennon,
according to the interview by Maureen Cleave (which contains the infamous "bigger than Jesus" quote):
He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. "Physically lazy," he said. "I don't mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more."
One of my ambitions is to find THE most perfect photo of John and Paul together, preferably playing music. This one is my favorite so far, although it would be better if you could see all of their faces.
