John Lennon and Paul McCartney are among the greatest songwriting duos ever to put pen to paper. Music was changed forever when these two decided to grace it with their presence. The Beatles‘ impact on music can still be heard persistently today, and it doesn’t seem to be fading either.
The unison with which they could work together came with a barrage of positives, which manifested in the majority of the band’s discography. That being said, it did have a downside as well. The first is that other band members, namely George Harrison, often felt somewhat left out because their writing partnership took precedence. As Bob Dylan once famously said, “Who wouldn’t get stuck behind those guys?”
The other downside was that the band was essentially built on the writing partnership of Lennon and McCartney, so as they started to veer in different directions creatively, that reflected in the tension within the band. The label wanted the duo’s stamp on records because it helped sell them, but they weren’t often happy with what the other was working on.
This is reflected in a number of different tracks. For instance, Lennon notoriously couldn’t stand the song, ‘Hello, Goodbye’. It’s a track that McCartney assigned deep psychological meaning, yet something Lennon rolled his eyes at and coined as a blatant grasp for a hit.
“That’s another McCartney,” he said, “Smells a mile away, doesn’t it?… An attempt to write a single. It wasn’t a great piece; the best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano.”
The feeling was reciprocated, though, as there were several different songs that McCartney ended up not being heavily involved in because he couldn’t get behind them. When he spoke about his least favourite Beatles tracks, some appeared because they were rushed or had negative memories attached to them, but some came up purely because McCartney didn’t like them and didn’t think they fit the style that the band were going for.
One track in particular that he hated was ‘Revolution 9’, a song on the White Album that was so controversial the singer tried to get it taken off the record. Though McCartney has never spoken publicly about his disdain towards the track, many third-party accounts attest that he was never a fan.
“Paul simply didn’t see it as Beatles music,” wrote engineer Geoff Emerick in his book, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, “And he certainly didn’t agree that it was the direction that The Beatles should go in.”
However, for John Lennon, the track was considered one of his finest works, an arthouse masterpiece that relied on technology but delivered his most honest feelings. He told Rolling Stone in 1970: “‘Revolution 9’ was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens; just like a drawing of a revolution.”
Being a band known for their creativity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, The Beatles had license to try out a range of new ideas within their music that excited them as musicians and their audience. However, it also led to conflict within the band, as they had so much they could draw from; it was hard working out what they should draw from.
