Lennon-McCartney Rivalry Recalled (1985)

 

Lennon-McCartney Rivalry Recalled

By Robet Palmer 

N.Y. Times News Service

November 24. 1985

    The media attention recently given to a four-year-old interview in which Paul McCartney calls John Lennon his Beatles songwriting partner, "insecure, jealous, and a maneuvering swine," is curious indeed. The rivalry that existed between the two has been explored exhaustively for years in books and articles on the Fab Four.

     My own brief encounters with the two former Beatles may shed a glimmer of light on their differences and on a fragile but long-lasting mutual affection.

     I have interviewed McCartney twice. In one of our talks, he attributed differences between the two to their upbringing. Lennon, he said, had had an unstable home life and consequently, an insecure childhood, which left him with a chip on the shoulder. McCartney's family was extended and perhaps unusually sociable. When mom or dad weren't around to bounce the children on their knees, there were always grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives to fill in. But the atmosphere around McCartney during the interview: tight security,  and a strict time allotment, showed little of this warmth.

     I first met John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they invited me to one of their recording sessions. When I arrived in the control room, Lennon was in the studio adding vocal harmonies to "(Just Like) Starting Over."  When he sidled in to join us, he said to me, "I figured you were the guy from The New York Times, it made me really nervous." The remark resolved my own nervousness.

     After the session, we went to the Dakota, where we sat around the kitchen table most of the night, talking music and indulging ourselves with brownies, milk, and a cheesecake that must have been sent from heaven. 

    There were more visits to the in the two months before Lennon was murdered, and the talk was always fast, intense, and mercurial. Lennon told Beatles stories from the early days, but had little to say on the subject of Paul McCartney. Basically, he said their temperaments were very different, and while the clash added juice to their early songwriting collaborations, it was inevitable that they would drift apart. He did not pretend that he cared for McCartney's post-Beatles music, but he didn't go out of his way to exonerate it either.

     One man, Paul McCartney, living in self-imposed isolation and perhaps providing for his children the close family life he had enjoyed as a child. The other, John Lennon, verbally brilliant, cosmic one moment and deftly cutting the next a rocker until the day he died. No matter how much distance developed between them, they never showed signs of intense hatred, only a kind of puzzled acceptance of the way things had turned out for them, and a low guttering, but never wholly extinguished flame, is something very much like love.