WHO WROTE THE BEATLE SONGS?
A History of Lennon-McCartney
Todd M. Compton
PAHREAH PRESS
San Jose, California
Published by Pahreah Press
http://toddmcompton.com/pahreahpress.html
Copyright © 2017 by Todd M. Compton. All rights reserved.
17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Compton, Todd M., 1952―
Who Wrote the Beatle Songs? A History of Lennon-McCartney / Todd M. Compton
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN: 978-0-9988997-0-1
ISBN: 978-0-9988997-1-8 (e-book)
1. Beatles. 2. Rock music—1961-1970—Analysis, appreciation. 3. Rock music—Writing and publishing. 4. Lyric writing (Popular music).
ML421.B4.C66 2017
782.4/2166/0922
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017905995
Todd M. Compton, San Jose, CA
Cover photo “Press photo of The Beatles during Magical Mystery Tour”
courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Table of Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction — The Enigma of “Lennon-McCartney”
2 “The result wasn’t a bit like ‘Apache’” — The Early Beatles
3 “I knew at that moment that this was going to be a good collaboration” — Please Please Me
4 “One-On-One, Eyeball To Eyeball” — With the Beatles
5 “He’d bring them in, we’d check ‘em” — A Hard Day’s Night
6 “A folk song gone pop” — Beatles for Sale
7 “I started thinking about my own emotions” — Help!
8 “He’d say, ‘Nowhere land,’ and I’d say, ‘For nobody.’ It was a two-way thing” — Rubber Soul
9 “One day I led the dance . . . and another day John would lead the dance” — Revolver
10 “We were often answering each other’s songs” — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
11 “Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song” — Magical Mystery Tour
12 “I was going humity-humity in my head and the songs were coming out” — The Beatles (the White Album)
13 “I wanted to do something bigger, a kind of operatic moment” — The Get Back Sessions and Abbey Road
14 “Writing the song was my way of exorcizing the ghosts” — Let It Be
15 “Both inspired from the same lecture of Maharishi” — Beatle Songs After the Breakup
16 Who Wrote the Lennon-McCartney Songs? — Sweeping Away the Myths
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
My debts in this book are many. First, to my wife who has endured my Beatle files through the years, and was the book’s first reader and editor. She improved it in many ways, large and small. I would also like to thank Zach and Wes for their interest and inspiration, and for requiring me to play the White Album perhaps a million times while driving in my car. Distinguished musicologist Michael Hicks, who teaches the history of rock music at Brigham Young University, was kind enough to read parts of the book and provide a generous blurb. Lisa Fahey gave valuable graphics advice on the cover. Les Gripkey, a dedicated Beatles aficionado, was an early reader who has often provided background into the Beatles and their era in our far-ranging conversations. I appreciate Tim Compton, Tamara Hauge, Terry Harward, Tina Wilmore, Sandra Zapf, Frances Salas, Ron Kapf, Frank LaPallo, Craig Miller, Max Gaertner, Greg Dalgliesh, Alisa Tangredi, Terry Szink, Sterling Augustine, Krys Corbett, Mark Davis, Karoline Hausted, and Nancy Lim, friends at work and school who have provided help and encouragement.
All scholarship is based on previous scholarship and I should mention those debts. Mark Lewisohn’s massive, detailed books on the Beatles have been foundational reference works, often providing unique insights into the Beatles’ personalities and creativity. Walter Everett’s Beatles as Musician books have been pioneering in their scholarship and depth, and I’ve often worked my way back to primary sources through his exhaustive documentation. Others books that have been enormously helpful to me are Steve Turner, A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatle Song ; Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster ; and Richie Unterberger, The Unreleased Beatles . I should also thank Jan Wenner, Mike Hennessey, David Sheff, Joan Goodman, Miles, and many other journalists, who in interviews with Paul and John, asked the right questions that gave us all of the maddeningly contradictory evidence for the writing of the Beatle songs . . .
I should add that I expect readers will already know the basic story of the Beatles. If they don’t, they will be well served to read some standard books on the group for more depth on biographical issues. Mark Lewisohn’s The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988) is my favorite book on the Beatles. His three-volume biography of the group is unfortunately not yet complete, though the first volume, The Beatles: All These Years, Volume One – Tune In (2013), is magnificent. For a one-volume biography of the Beatles, the reader can do much worse than the second edition of Hunter Davies’s The Beatles (1986). I’ve limited my focus in this book to the Beatles’ songwriting, as a conscious narrowing of my narrative lens. However, I’ve often been painfully aware that a number of issues I mention briefly deserve extensive treatment. I could have written chapters on John’s relationships with Cynthia Lennon and Yoko Ono, on Paul’s relationships with Jane Asher and Linda McCartney. I could have easily written a chapter (or a book) on the Beatles breakup as background for the Let it Be and Abbey Road albums. Drugs impacted the Beatles, and the Beatles’ songs, in ways that have been viewed as positive and negative; I could have written a full chapter on that story. I should say that I find each of the Beatles utterly likeable, and flawed, at the same time. However, it was never my intention to look at these issues in depth, or to write a full biography of the Beatles. Hopefully, my book will incline future Beatle biographers to make songwriting more important in their research and longer narrative canvas.
1
INTRODUCTION —
The Enigma of “Lennon-McCartney”
W ho wrote the Beatle songs? More specifically, who wrote the Lennon-McCartney songs? And why is the question important?
Once at a party, I was telling a friend about my views of Paul and John as individual songwriters, and about how many songs attributed to “Lennon-McCartney” were actually written mainly or entirely by Paul or John, and that this analysis contradicted many of the stereotypes about the two main Beatles. My friend became increasingly annoyed. Finally, he said, “Okay, but one thing you have to admit. John wrote and sang ‘Helter Skelter’” — that hard rock masterpiece from the White Album — “and Paul wrote and sang ‘Good Night’” — the lushly orchestrated ballad that ends the White Album. My friend had just put his finger on the unrecognized complexity of Paul and John as songwriters: Paul had written and sung “Helter Skelter” while John had written “Good Night,” and had asked George Martin to orchestrate it in “Hollywood” style. (Ringo sang it).
As this anecdote shows, if one does not understand who wrote the Beatle songs, one can misunderstand the group pretty thoroughly. In the movie Backbeat , the writers drew on widespread stereotypes of Paul and John, portraying Paul as an ambitious, shallow entertainer, while John was the artist who loved hard rock. In keeping with this perspective, at one point they had John perform Little Richard’s rave-up “Long Tall Sally.” As Paul has pointed out, he always sang this song when the Beatles performed it. That song was his specialty. [1] But this did
not fit the bludgeon-like schematic stereotyping of Paul and John that the screenwriters drew on to create a plot and conflict for their movie.
Given the overwhelming impact the Beatles have had on popular culture in our generation, one might expect that the question, “Who wrote the Beatle songs?” would have an obvious, good, thorough answer. But surprisingly, it does not — in part because of information and misinformation provided by the Beatles themselves (aided and abetted by their inner circle), and in part because of lack of focus on what is arguably the central contribution of the Beatles — their songwriting.
Everyone but the Beatles neophyte knows that Lennon and McCartney wrote many of their songs separately. True, some songs, especially in the early Beatle period, were “full” collaborations, written in three hour sessions, “eyeball to eyeball,” as Lennon put it in a 1980 interview. [2] Other songs were written separately by Paul or John, and then the other helped finish them with “supportive” collaboration. (This was the most common form of Lennon-McCartney songwriting.) At least one song, “In My Life,” was written by Paul adding music to John’s words (as Paul tells the story). In a few cases, Paul and John wrote entirely separate songs, or parts of songs, then stuck them together to create one finalized Beatles song (e.g., “Baby You’re a Rich Man”). Sometimes Paul would add a counter-melody to one of John’s songs (as in “Help”), and sometimes John would do the same thing for one of Paul’s (as in “She’s Leaving Home”).
The necessary foundation for an understanding of the Beatles’ creativity is looking at every song separately and finding out who wrote it, and who wrote what part of it, if possible. Performance of the song is an important area of study, but is secondary to the actual songwriting. Much of the Beatles’ personal lives are even more secondary to the songwriting (though certainly relevant and important). The Beatles’ central story is a songwriting story.
The task of discovering who wrote the Beatles songs leads the researcher into a morass of difficulties. It has been made both easier and harder by the fact that both of the two main songwriters in the group have given extensive interviews discussing the writing of the songs. We are grateful for this information; we are less grateful for numerous contradictions in the principals’ statements. Sometimes John or Paul contradicts the other. Often, they contradict themselves.
A few examples:
“Eleanor Rigby” started as a McCartney song, as everyone agrees, with Paul writing the music and the beginnings of the lyrics. However, Lennon, in a 1971 interview, said that he wrote “about 70 per cent” of the lyrics. [3] Not so, says John’s close friend, Pete Shotton, who was present at a work session on the song: “My own recollection is that ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was one ‘Lennon-McCartney’ classic in which John’s contribution was virtually nil.” McCartney, in a 1981 interview, more or less agrees with Shotton. “I saw somewhere that he [John] says he helped on ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Yeah. About half a line.” Shotton (who one would expect to be biased toward John) and McCartney’s memories coincide in a convincing way, especially given that McCartney was the main writer of the song.
But wait — in an interview in which Paul was asked to name his favorite songs that he wrote with John , he mentioned three: “In My Life,” “Norwegian Wood,” and “Eleanor Rigby.” This sounds like more input than “half a line.”
Or take “In My Life.” In a 1980 interview, John gave this as an example of how he could write melodies, not just over the top rock ’n’ roll. He often described the song as entirely his own. However, Paul has maintained in numerous interviews that John wrote all or most of the words for this song, and he, Paul, wrote all the music. His account of sitting down at the Mellotron at John’s house and working out the melody for the song is quite anecdotally convincing.
And in a 1970 interview, Lennon said that Paul “helped with the middle eight” on this.
Then there is the title song of the Beatles’ most critically acclaimed album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . This is a song that is generally credited to Paul, not John, and there is no dispute on that front. However, how much of the song was written by Mal Evans, the Beatles’ bear-like, bespectacled roadie? In the official biography of Paul by his close friend Miles, based on hours of interviews with Paul, Miles writes that Paul got the title while brainstorming with Mal Evans. We also have a possible diary (whose authenticity is disputed) written by Evans in which he mentions working on the song with Paul. And Ringo said, “Paul wrote a song with Mal Evans called ‘Sgt Pepper.’ I think Mal thought of the title. Big Mal, super roadie!” By this account, the first two words of the title song of the album did not even come from a Beatle. (However, Ringo was not a first-hand witness of the songwriting session.)
Paul disputes that Evans was the source of the name “Sgt. Pepper.” Naturally, he would know better than Ringo. Or did he just forget? It doesn’t help that the Ringo quote appears in one of those Beatles books without footnotes and without dates for many quotes. If Ringo’s quote was quite a bit earlier than Paul’s, it would have added weight.
In 1971 John put “Cry Baby Cry” on a list of songs which he said were written by himself. When asked about the song in 1980, however, Lennon said brusquely, “Not me. A piece of rubbish.”
Members of the Beatles inner circle often got Lennon-McCartney song attributions wrong. For example, George Martin, who often heard the Beatles songs very soon after they were composed, or heard them being finished in the studio, simply referred to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as a Lennon song. In 1995, Paul pointed out that he had co-written the song. He said, “Now, John will have told George Martin that he had this great new song. He won’t have told him: ‘Hey, yesterday Paul came to my house and we wrote it together.’ You don’t. You just say: ‘I’ve got this new one.’ George would say: ‘Super, John, it’s lovely.’”
These are just a few random examples of variation in song attribution.
In fact, the Beatles and their inner circle have given countless interviews, and have produced an ever-growing number of books. Many of these sources are flatly contradictory, as Lennon and McCartney, then the other Beatles, and members of the inner circle, give widely varying testimony.
Sometimes Lennon or McCartney will speak in terms of possibility (e.g., “I may have thrown something in”), probability (“I think I threw something in”) or seeming certainty. One of the two main songwriters may use all three approaches in reference to the same song.
Thus, for certain key songs, we will have, not just a conflict in opinion between Lennon and McCartney; we will have a range of contradictory opinions from either Lennon or McCartney alone. From the corpus of Lennon and McCartney interviews, we don’t have simply two contrasting opinions on a song; we may have eight to ten opinions.
One obvious, important tool the historian uses when assessing contradictory data is chronology. The earlier the testimony, the sharper the witness’s memory. Thus, as a general rule, the earliest evidence is the most reliable. This applies to the evidence of the Beatle songs, to a certain extent, and early data is very desirable.
However, bias and misinformation can still be present in very early evidence. A person who has been in a car accident, if questioned immediately after the accident, may tell his or her story in such a way as to cover his or her own errors, if he or she caused the accident. In the case of the Beatle songs, because of their phenomenal cultural, critical and popular impact, clearly a member of the inner circle might want to connect him or herself with them as closely as possible. In addition, the Beatles became a partisan phenomenon, as they feuded with each other after the breakup, and every element of the group came to be viewed with partisan bias. Claiming a stake in a Beatle song obviously also might even have financial repercussions.
Thus a chronological view of the Beatle song evidence is fraught with bias and complexity (and occasional misinformation) at every step of the way. We may look at Beatle song perception by stages:
Period one: the Beatles era
, dominated by the standardized “Lennon-McCartney” credit itself. For most Beatle songs (putting the Harrison and Starr songs to the side for the moment), this credit was misinformation, straight out of the gate. From very early on, Brian Epstein directed Paul and John to describe all their songs as collaborations. According to Beatles publicist Tony Barrow, “When press or others questioned John or Paul about who wrote what, each would claim the other had contributed when this was very often quite untrue. It was the easy way out and they’d been told to do it by Brian Epstein.” [4] In 1964 Paul said, “Sometimes maybe he’ll write a whole song himself, or I will, but we always say that we’ve both written it.” [5] In 1966, when asked if he’d written ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ by himself, Paul replied, “We both work on all our songs.” [6] I know my experience, growing up with the Beatles, was to think of the Lennon-McCartney songs as completely co-written. I didn’t even pay much attention to who was singing lead in different songs.
As the Beatles developed, they chafed against the idea that all songs had to be considered co-written, and Paul and John began to talk about how some of their songs were not written in collaboration. They were more open about separate authorship of songs after Brian Epstein’s death in August 1967, as they reached the maturity of albums such as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper . And some of the tensions of the Beatles breakup were already present toward the end of the “Beatles era” — from the White Album on. In addition, some insiders were apparently following the party line in stating that all Lennon-McCartney songs were co-written while other insiders weren’t.
Period two: after the breakup. Fairly soon after the breakup, in 1970 and 1971, Lennon gave interviews in which he discussed the authorship of all the Lennon-McCartney songs. A decade later, he admitted that he intentionally overemphasized separate authorship of songs immediately after the breakup, because he was tired of the idea of writing with Paul:
Who Wrote the Beatle Songs Page 1
