Music: “The Last Beatles Song” - Now And Then

[Chairman Maouth]

Hard to argue most of this. But why avoid a good argument, so...

Lennon's inner pain gave his songs a texture McCartney's sheltered worldview could never match, but McCartney's melodies and musical hooks outpaced Lennon by miles. Obla-di Obla-da is the dumbest lyric in pop history, yet it's still a hit because Paul McCartney had a gift for crafting hit after hit after hit.

As for Now And Then... it's a moody period piece, but not much more. It reflects a slightly older, more vulnerable John Lennon singing about his love/need for Yoko. The tone is so personal that it's hard to pretend three other guys are collaborating on it. Still, Paul, Ringo, and the ghost of George are present, which makes it a Beatles keepsake, which is undeniably cool. But as a tune it lacks any musical cleverness or any quality that made The Beatles what they were. It's an audio equivalent of a professional photo-op.

Boy, this could become a very involved and lengthy argument. I'll try to keep it brief though, using limited examples.

I would argue this: "McCartney's melodies and musical hooks outpaced Lennon by miles."

Lennon wrote Day Tripper. It contains one of the most iconic hooks in music history. It's debatable whether Day Tripper or Smoke on the Water are more iconic. Following the release and success of Day Tripper, McCartney, in an effort to compete with Lennon's Day Tripper and its guitar-based hook, wrote Paperback Writer.

There is really no debating which song has aged better.

Lennon also wrote I Feel Fine. There really are no comparable hook-based songs that McCartney wrote. Perhaps you can think of one aside from Paperback Writer. I can't at the moment. Guitar hooks were more of a Lennon forte. There are countless examples. I Want You (She's So Heavy) is another great example.

But if you're talking simple melody, excluding hooks, you have a much better argument in my opinion.

I've seen the argument you made before, and while it's valid of course, it's really just a matter of taste. Eleanor Rigby is one of my favourite Beatles songs, written mainly by McCartney. But personally, I'll take In My Life over Yesterday, any day of the week. I'll take Help! over any McCartney songs of the same era. However, McCartney hit home runs later with The Long and Winding Road, Let it Be, and Hey Jude. With some notable exceptions, Lennon was basically phoning it in by that time until he later came up with some monsters during his solo career.

Does McCartney have anything to rival arguably the greatest Beatles song, A Day in the Life? I'm not sure, and yes, I'm aware of McCartney's contribution to A Day in the Life.

While doing a little Googling, I came up with an interesting article, written by someone who knows a little about songwriting, Elvis Costello. He rates the top 100 Beatles songs and explains why. I haven't read it yet. It's freaking long, but I intend to. I have no idea if it supports your opinion or mine. I suspect we'll both find things in it that support our opinions, though.

100 Greatest Beatles Songs

100 Greatest Beatles Songs: From 'Helter Skelter' to 'Sgt. Pepper's,' ranking of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison's output.

www.rollingstone.com

 

[VMBM]

But personally, I'll take In My Life over Yesterday, any day of the week.

Paul McCartney has claimed to have written the music for "In My Life". Even though the song has always been credited more to John (his lyric obviously), I could actually believe that it has Paul's melody...

 

[Lshap]

Boy, this could become a very involved and lengthy argument. I'll try to keep it brief though, using limited examples.

I would argue this: "McCartney's melodies and musical hooks outpaced Lennon by miles."

Lennon wrote Day Tripper. It contains one of the most iconic hooks in music history. It's debatable whether Day Tripper or Smoke on the Water are more iconic. Following the release and success of Day Tripper, McCartney, in an effort to compete with Lennon's Day Tripper and its guitar-based hook, wrote Paperback Writer.

There is really no debating which song has aged better.

Lennon also wrote I Feel Fine. There really are no comparable hook-based songs that McCartney wrote. Perhaps you can think of one aside from Paperback Writer. I can't at the moment. Guitar hooks were more of a Lennon forte. There are countless examples. I Want You (She's So Heavy) is another great example.

But if you're talking simple melody, excluding hooks, you have a much better argument in my opinion.

I've seen the argument you made before, and while it's valid of course, it's really just a matter of taste. Eleanor Rigby is one of my favourite Beatles songs, written mainly by McCartney. But personally, I'll take In My Life over Yesterday, any day of the week. I'll take Help! over any McCartney songs of the same era. However, McCartney hit home runs later with The Long and Winding Road, Let it Be, and Hey Jude. With some notable exceptions, Lennon was basically phoning it in by that time until he later came up with some monsters during his solo career.

Does McCartney have anything to rival arguably the greatest Beatles song, A Day in the Life? I'm not sure, and yes, I'm aware of McCartney's contribution to A Day in the Life.

While doing a little Googling, I came up with an interesting article, written by someone who knows a little about songwriting, Elvis Costello. He rates the top 100 Beatles songs and explains why. I haven't read it yet. It's freaking long, but I intend to. I have no idea if it supports your opinion or mine. I suspect we'll both find things in it that support our opinions, though.

100 Greatest Beatles Songs

100 Greatest Beatles Songs: From 'Helter Skelter' to 'Sgt. Pepper's,' ranking of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison's output.

www.rollingstone.com

The Lennon/McCartney debate is a rabbit-hole worthy of its own forum – so much material occupying such a lofty place in music history, written by the best songwriting duo in the past... hmmm... 60 years or so.

I was thinking more about melodic and structural hooks than instrumental hooks when I mentioned Paul's talent, but you're right about John being the better riff-guy. Paul's focus seemed to be on crafting the overall melody/verse/chorus/bridge. Off the top of my head, he didn't build songs around isolated guitar or piano hooks. The hook Paul used most often was his voice. 'Blackbird' comes to mind as one of his tunes distinguishable by its guitar line, but it was unusual chord formations more than actual riffs. Usually, Paul's best songs were mostly chords and vocals, with the instruments placed behind in a supporting role, rarely taking the attention away from the voice.

"And I Love Her" is a beautiful McCartney melody featuring a rare guitar riff, but that recognizable acoustic guitar line was George's addition. However, most of Paul's classics, from "All My Lovin" to "Here, There, and Everywhere" and up to "The Long and Winding Road" and "Hey Jude" have no notable riffs at all. What makes them brilliant songs is they can be stripped down to voice and instrument and work perfectly. So could "Penny Lane", even without the brass and piccolo trumpet. The hook is all in the singing. Sing a McCartney song well, add straightforward chords, and you'll never feel the song is missing something.

John, on the other hand, wrote his early stuff with a rock-guitar sensibility, which had riffs baked into them. I'm just guessing, but it sounds like John found a guitar riff he liked and built a song around it, while Paul found a melody and started from there. Which approach made for better songs? No right or wrong answer. Maybe John's songs are more fun for guitarists, and McCartney's more fun for singers.

Since I promised you an argument, I'll boldly state that John's best music wouldn't have existed without Paul's influence. You mentioned "Help", which I love. The lyrics are pure John, but the musical phrasing is more a hybrid of honky-tonk and country, closer to Paul's showtunes than John's rock 'n roll. "In My Life" – possibly my favourite song ever – would be too simple without the guitar riff (which may have been Paul's idea) and George Martin's piano middle. Yeah, the age-old meme is that John needed Paul's melodic influence just like Paul needed John's grittier, rock influence. It's true they made each other's work better, but I'll state for the record that Paul was a greater influence on John than John was on Paul.

Meanwhile, George was off on his own, taking the best of both influences and creating some of The Beatles best all-time songs. But that's another debate...

And then there's the post-Beatles era, with John moving towards piano and McCartney moving in every direction imaginable. Hard to judge their work when it was being influenced by other musicians and producers. Plus, there comes a point where even the best songwriter runs out of ideas. John's "Double Fantasy" might have been his last gasp at quality writing... but of course we'll never know. It was a good album with very simple songs dressed up with good, clean production. "Woman", "Watching the Wheels", "Starting Over", "I'm Losing You" were solid tunes at their foundation, much better IMO than the three castoff demos that became Beatles songs decades later. John's legacy was never tarnished by sticking around too long, which Paul has been accused of doing. Had John released "Now And Then", it may have been dismissed as indulgent and uninteresting. But 43 years after his death, it's infused with historical significance of being the Last Beatles Song Ever. It's not a good song, but it's an important song.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

The Lennon/McCartney debate is a rabbit-hole worthy of its own forum – so much material occupying such a lofty place in music history, written by the best songwriting duo in the past... hmmm... 60 years or so.

I was thinking more about melodic and structural hooks than instrumental hooks when I mentioned Paul's talent, but you're right about John being the better riff-guy. Paul's focus seemed to be on crafting the overall melody/verse/chorus/bridge. Off the top of my head, he didn't build songs around isolated guitar or piano hooks. The hook Paul used most often was his voice. 'Blackbird' comes to mind as one of his tunes distinguishable by its guitar line, but it was unusual chord formations more than actual riffs. Usually, Paul's best songs were mostly chords and vocals, with the instruments placed behind in a supporting role, rarely taking the attention away from the voice.

"And I Love Her" is a beautiful McCartney melody featuring a rare guitar riff, but that recognizable acoustic guitar line was George's addition. However, most of Paul's classics, from "All My Lovin" to "Here, There, and Everywhere" and up to "The Long and Winding Road" and "Hey Jude" have no notable riffs at all. What makes them brilliant songs is they can be stripped down to voice and instrument and work perfectly. So could "Penny Lane", even without the brass and piccolo trumpet. The hook is all in the singing. Sing a McCartney song well, add straightforward chords, and you'll never feel the song is missing something.

John, on the other hand, wrote his early stuff with a rock-guitar sensibility, which had riffs baked into them. I'm just guessing, but it sounds like John found a guitar riff he liked and built a song around it, while Paul found a melody and started from there. Which approach made for better songs? No right or wrong answer. Maybe John's songs are more fun for guitarists, and McCartney's more fun for singers.

Since I promised you an argument, I'll boldly state that John's best music wouldn't have existed without Paul's influence. You mentioned "Help", which I love. The lyrics are pure John, but the musical phrasing is more a hybrid of honky-tonk and country, closer to Paul's showtunes than John's rock 'n roll. "In My Life" – possibly my favourite song ever – would be too simple without the guitar riff (which may have been Paul's idea) and George Martin's piano middle. Yeah, the age-old meme is that John needed Paul's melodic influence just like Paul needed John's grittier, rock influence. It's true they made each other's work better, but I'll state for the record that Paul was a greater influence on John than John was on Paul.

Meanwhile, George was off on his own, taking the best of both influences and creating some of The Beatles best all-time songs. But that's another debate...

And then there's the post-Beatles era, with John moving towards piano and McCartney moving in every direction imaginable. Hard to judge their work when it was being influenced by other musicians and producers. Plus, there comes a point where even the best songwriter runs out of ideas. John's "Double Fantasy" might have been his last gasp at quality writing... but of course we'll never know. It was a good album with very simple songs dressed up with good, clean production. "Woman", "Watching the Wheels", "Starting Over", "I'm Losing You" were solid tunes at their foundation, much better IMO than the three castoff demos that became Beatles songs decades later. John's legacy was never tarnished by sticking around too long, which Paul has been accused of doing. Had John released "Now And Then", it may have been dismissed as indulgent and uninteresting. But 43 years after his death, it's infused with historical significance of being the Last Beatles Song Ever. It's not a good song, but it's an important song.

I think you described McCartney's songs and how they were written and what they consist of, brilliantly. While I was writing my previous post, I remember thinking McCartney's hooks are his melody. I wish I had mentioned that, but you nailed it.

I disagree about who influenced who more. McCartney's spent his entire life trying to write lyrics that stand up to Lennon's, and for the most part he's failed. Lennon just steamed along, doing his thing. Full disclosure though, I do recall Lennon making a comment about how he can also write a good love song like McCartney can. I believe this was in reference to "If I Fell", after McCartney wrote "And I Love Her". But in my opinion, Lennon later wrote the greatest love song by any Beatle, "Jealous Guy", although Harrison's "Something" and McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "And I Love Her" are also strong contenders. I think among most Beatle fans, "Jealous Guy" would not be at the top of their lists. It would be “Something” or a McCartney song.

I'm not buying the honky tonk thing about "Help!" either. It was originally written as a ballad. In my opinion "Help!" has more in common with "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" than it does honky tonk.

“In My Life” is also probably my favourite Beatles song ever. I think I'll be touching on that song a little more in a reply to VMBM, although likely not till later today.

And I agree about George. He wrote arguably the two best songs on the critically acclaimed, Abbey Road. Neither are my favourites, but there's no debating their popularity.

That's all I got. Your post was brilliant. While we disagree in a couple of areas, you really know your stuff.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

Oh yeah, and more full disclosure - I personally prefer Paperback Writer over Day Tripper. I used Day Tripper as an example because it's such an iconic song with such an iconic hook. The hook on Paperback Writer is killer though. But I still prefer And Your Bird Can Sing over both of them.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

Paul McCartney has claimed to have written the music for "In My Life". Even though the song has always been credited more to John (his lyric obviously), I could actually believe that it has Paul's melody...

McCartney has revised some history since Lennon died.

The kicker is that in 1977 in an interview where McCartney was shown a list of Lennon's recollections about songs and who wrote what, he disagreed with Lennon's recollection of only one song. I believe it was Ticket to Ride. That was the only one he disagreed with. It was only after Lennon died that McCartney's recollections about many songs attributed exclusively or mainly to Lennon, changed.

I have spent much of the morning looking for this 1977 interview, but I can't find it. I read it 4 or 5 years ago. I can't back up what I'm saying with a source, but I assure you I read it from a credible source. If I recall correctly, it was some panels lifted from a magazine interview with McCartney. That may be why I'm having a difficult time finding it. Text contained in an image is not searchable. Searching an assortment of terms and variants around "Paul McCartney reviews Beatles songs 1977" does not reveal what I'm looking for. I suspect it's still out there, but I'm not finding it.

I always found Lennon's recollections of songs actually quite flattering towards Paul. He gave credit where credit was due, praising him at times, and at other times he was brutally honest. In contrast, I find McCartney's recollections to be a little more self-serving. Now it just saddens me that McCartney appears to be minimizing Lennon's contributions at the expense of John Lennon's legacy. McCartney is singing a different tune than what he sang in 1977 when Lennon was still alive.

This is related...

I guess it would have been 1970 when John told Paul he was leaving the Beatles. Allen Klein asked John not to announce it yet. John agreed.

"When I got back [from Toronto] there were a few meetings and Allen said, ‘Cool it,’ ’cause there was a lot to do [with The Beatles] business-wise, and it wouldn’t have been suitable at the time. Then we were discussing something in the office with Paul and Paul was saying to do something, and I kept saying, ‘No, no, no’ to everything he said. So it came to a point that I had to say something. So I said, ‘The group’s over, I’m leaving.’ Allen was there, and he was saying, ‘Don’t tell.’ He didn’t want me to tell Paul even. But I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t stop it, it came out. And Paul and Allen said they were glad that I wasn’t going to announce it, like I was going to make an event out of it. I don’t know whether Paul said, ‘Don’t tell anybody,’ but he was damn pleased that I wasn’t. He said, ‘Oh well, that means nothing really happened if you’re not going to say anything.’ So that’s what happened." — John Lennon

Then, Paul publicly announced that he was leaving the Beatles. This enraged Lennon.

McCartney has always been more concerned with his image and how he's perceived than Lennon ever was. That may be the best proof I have to back up my opinion. Possibly revising songwriting credits wouldn't be the first time Paul publicly stabbed John in the back.

 

[VMBM]

McCartney has revised some history since Lennon died.

The kicker is that in 1977 in an interview where McCartney was shown a list of Lennon's recollections about songs and who wrote what, he disagreed with Lennon's recollection of only one song. I believe it was Ticket to Ride. That was the only one he disagreed with. It was only after Lennon died that McCartney's recollections about many songs attributed exclusively or mainly to Lennon, changed.

My source is Barry Miles' authorized biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (1997, paperback version 1998). In it, Paul goes through basically every Beatles song and gives his recollections of writing them and even uses percentages à la "70 % me, 30 % John" (!).

In the case of "In My Life", he says that John had some of the lyric but no tune, and he went and wrote the music for it, using Smokey Robinson and the Miracles as inspiration. The author Miles then quotes the critic and Beatles scholar Ian MacDonald's book Revolution in the Head (1994) where it's said that melodically the song shows more of McCartney's fingerprint than Lennon's. The irony is that I think elsewhere Paul has been very critical of MacDonald and other Beatles authors along the lines of "what the hell do they know?"; in this case, though, apparently he didn't mind using MacDonald as 'proof', since it supports his story. Idk, generally it is still very much considered a Lennon song, so it doesn't really matter too much imo.

I agree that Paul has had a tendency to rewrite history and to justify himself ("...but, you know, the great thing about it was..." etc). In the aforementioned book, he also claims that "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" was a near 50-50 collaboration, even though there seems to be nothing to back this up and it's hard to think of a more 'Lennonian' song in the whole Beatles catalogue. To be fair, he also sometimes gives a partial credit to John for songs that the latter probably had nothing to do with. And Lennon himself did make some claims that don't seem to be true, like crediting himself for 70 % (of the lyric) of "Eleanor Rigby".

McCartney is of course right to always point out that he was there and we weren't and thus only he knows what happened etc, but this also means that he can say what he wants, no matter how accurate, since Lennon isn't here to give his side of the story. On the other hand, it's obvious that John was one of the most important people in his life and it's hard to believe that Paul would deliberately diminish his role in the Beatles saga. While they might have slagged each other off in interviews and even in their songs, it is documented that whenever some third party tried to badmouth the other to them, they did not react kindly to such a thing.

All in all, I favor Lennon a bit, but objectively speaking, it would be impossible for me to declare that he was the more important one... Or vice versa; it was about as close to a 50-50 partnership as you can get. One of the luckiest days in the history of music was when they met (was it in 1957?); both certainly had the talent to become a star and a great artist on their own, but I think together they were even that much greater.

 

[Lshap]

@Chairman Maouth, @VMBM
I've got no evidence other than my sense of McCartney as a person, after listening to a hundred interviews over the decades. He strikes me as a man with nothing to prove to anyone. In fact, Paul McCartney may be the living person with the most secure legacy on the planet. He seems totally at ease talking about the past, recounting what was and correcting what wasn't. I don't get the sense he's trying to slant history in his favour; he seems beyond that. If anything, he's become more protective of the legacies of John, George, even Yoko, giving them credit even at his own expense.

I tend to believe his version of who wrote what, although there's still room for interpretation as memory isn't 100% accurate. At the very least, I'll say Paul believes his version is accurate.

 

[Chairman Maouth]

This is one of the best Beatles discussions I've ever had. You both state your opinions, and also state why your opinion is what it is, and you both are convincing in your logic. I hope I've stated mine as well as both of you have yours.

I'm not going to write something new just for the sake of writing something new. I have nothing new to add and I'm just going to stand pat.