Becoming Artists (eBook)

Chapter 2: Songwriters

“John and Paul were so different. And George was bringing a certain peace into this set-up… George was right in the middle of those two characters.”

Klaus Voorman

The first songwriting sessions between the band’s two principal composers took place in 1958. Lennon was 18, an art school student, and McCartney only 16, a grammar school student. Their musical idols were Elvis Presley, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly. Each had worked on writing their own songs before, trying to imitate their heroes. It turned out they became each other’s biggest influence. In their early days, they wrote together in their parlors or bedrooms. Later, while on tour, they wrote in hotel rooms and buses. While performing during their early days in Liverpool they were one among any number of competing bands, but “we thought from the start we were better,” recalled Lennon. “We were the only group then writing songs, so we used to say we had written about a hundred, even though it was only thirty.”29

Their intense friendship served as the backbone for their songwriting partnership. The fact that their voices blended so well together was quite simply icing on the cake. Geoff Emerick, who engineered some of their later albums, noted how their voices, personalities, and musical approaches were so different yet still complemented each other.30 Their producer George Martin equally, though more poetically, spoke of Paul’s voice as sweeter, but Lennon “gave the combination its interest and sharpness. He was the lemon juice against the virgin olive oil.”31 An interesting side note to the relationship between Lennon and McCartney was that the left-handed McCartney could play the right-handed Lennon’s guitar, and he in turn could play McCartney’s. “Together they were ambidextrous, and in their personalities as well. John could finish a Paul song and vice versa.”32 “They’re like an old married couple with their kids,” said Starr.

In 1965, with Starr a short distance away at his home Sunny Heights, Lennon reclined at Kenwood.33 He had moved into his “absurd stockbroker Tudor mansion in Weybridge” in July 1964 and it naturally became the de facto site of his and McCartney’s songwriting sessions. (Harrison bought Kinfauns in Esher while McCartney remained in London.) When Lennon and his family moved to Kenwood, it was usual for McCartney to drive out to his house for songwriting sessions. He recalls getting ideas for songs on the drive or fleshing out material while waiting for Lennon to get out of bed. Except for the sessions where their goal was to begin and finish a song for a stated purpose, such as for their films, they would bring whatever material they had already written for the other to listen to, critique or contribute to. Often, a verse or two by one composer was completed with the writing of a bridge or chorus by the other. They both shared duties in polishing up lyrics. Since they had a contract for two albums a year, plus singles, this amounted to a substantial requirement for new Beatles material. McCartney later recalled that the two had a habit of “answering” each other’s songs. “He’d write ‘Strawberry Fields,’” Paul explained. “I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane’. But it was very friendly competition.”34 This competition, sometimes friendly, sometimes not, carried on even after the band had gone their separate ways. Lennon said in a 1971 interview his new album would “probably scare [Paul] into doing something decent and then he’ll scare me into doing something decent.” Even though they wrote more songs individually after they quit touring in 1966, until the very late period of the band, they always bounced their songs off the other. When asked in 1980 why he said a decade ago that he and McCartney quit writing together in 1962, implying that every song since had been written by one or the other alone, Lennon replied, “I was lying. It was when I felt resentful, so I felt that we did everything apart.”35 They were more creative when working together, correcting each other and improving upon an idea. No matter how slight the contribution was, it mattered.

During their most prolific period as a songwriting tandem, Lennon and McCartney had songs to burn. They didn’t know what to do with all of them, so they gave them to other artists such as the Rolling Stones (“I Wanna Be Your Man”), Peter and Gordon (“World Without Love”, “Woman”), Billy J. Kramer (“Bad to Me”, “I’ll Be On My Way”, “I’ll Keep You Satisfied”) and Cilla Black (“Step Inside Love”, “Love of the Loved”). When asked in 1965 about writing for others, Lennon’s droll response was “We thought we had some to spare.”36 Many of these “spare” songs became hits, and they gained royalties, but most of all they gained recognition of their partnership. They were in demand from all quarters for insights into their success. In a radio interview with Keith Fordyce for the BBC show The Lennon and McCartney Songbook, they discussed their songwriting partnership:

Fordyce: How far do you feel your individual talents are dependent on each other? Do you need to work together?

John: No, not really. But it helps a lot.

Fordyce: Two minds are better than one?

Paul: Yeah. We can do them on our own, but often one of us will just do a song and there’ll be, say, one verse in it that’s very bad or something very corny. If I’ve written it, then I’ll take it along and sing it to John. And he’ll say, “That bit is terrible and that verse is corny.”

John: You still get so involved with something and you finish it and if you’re on your own, you haven’t got the energy to go over it and see if it’s really got exactly what you want. But if you sing it to each other and even if it’s a finished song with almost the whole arrangement finished it’s still, sort of [hearing] “Yes, that’s fine.”

Fordyce: Do you consider you think alike or differently?

Paul: We think nearly alike. but pretty differently at the same time. We can write a song, like “Day Tripper,” where we’ve got to write one, and at the same time be the same writing it. We can write it thinking the same thing about it, but if we each wrote it individually it would be a different song.

Lennon lived among chaos; McCartney prized organization. McCartney carried notebooks to jot down ideas and Lennon wrote on any shred of paper he could find near him. Lennon was usually open to change while McCartney took criticism with difficulty. McCartney was a hard worker, willing to go all night if need be to finish up a song but Lennon wanted it over and done with so he could move on to something new. “I’d never struggle writing a song till it hurt,” Lennon told Michael Lydon. “I’d just forget it and try something else.” Although he believed wholeheartedly in what he said, that is, what he believed at a given moment, Lennon was to become in the future wholly and sometimes frighteningly honest. Years after he had heavily criticized McCartney and Harrison as well as George Martin in a Rolling Stone interview, Martin asked him, “What was all that shit about, John?” Lennon replied, “Out of me head, wasn’t I?”37 McCartney, ever the diplomat, was always willing to smooth things over and, if he could, keep everyone happy. Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia summed it up from her perspective as “John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence. Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.” But this was all on the surface. In appearance, it was a meeting of two crafty songwriters, each willing to make use of the other for his own purposes. Under the surface however, they both knew that they were born to compete with each other. Their tendency was to always alternate between guarding their public recognition as a unique songwriting team and their desires to be recognized for their individual skills as composers. They brought out the best and the worst in the other’s character.

Joshua Wolf Shenk writes “the endgame of their relationship” was wrought by changes that fractured “the inherent instability of their dynamic, the same instability that provided so much of the creative force.”38 Indeed, after the band’s demise, they would each describe who was the primary songwriter for the songs in their catalog. McCartney even got so precise as to narrow it down to percentages. Prior to the growing acrimony between the two, they had felt little need to publicly divide any individual credit.

John Lennon often stated that “In My Life” was the first song he wrote specifically about his life. He didn’t ascribe much inspiration to Cynthia for his early love songs although some most likely are in one...