The lyrics Paul McCartney said were never good enough for The Beatles
Despite the formidable pairing they were, it was perhaps best that John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang the respective songs that they brought to the table.
Their styles represented the yin and yang of their creative relationship and subsequently brought light and shade to The Beatles’ discography, and ever the melodic songbird, Paul McCartney’s songwriting was sweet and delicate, which perfectly matched the schoolboy charm of his voice, while conversely, Lennon was the darker of the two, delving his lyrics into existential questioning, even when the melody warranted otherwise.
Together, they covered the entire spectrum, becoming the greatest songwriting duo to ever do it. Within that, they would more regularly take on the vocals of their own songs, knowing that the nuances of their own lyrical intent were better suited to the characteristics of their voice. All the while, the subtle competition that existed between these two bloodless brothers continued the band on to a path of experimental genius.
McCartney once explained, “If I did something that was a little bit ahead of the curve, then John would come up with something that was a bit ahead of my curve. And then so I’d go, ‘Well, how about this?’ and there was a lot of friendly competition.”
“If you know someone that long from your early teenage years to your late 20s, that’s an awful long time to be collaborating with someone, and you grow to know each other, and even when you’re apart, you’re still thinking about each other, you’re still referencing each other,” he added.
This competitive spirit is what arguably drove a wedge between the pair, as their careers rolled on. McCartney’s playfulness would become a source of creative resentment for Lennon. He once described ‘Hello, Goodbye’ as “Three minutes of contradictions and meaningless juxtapositions,” while ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ was brutally labelled “granny music”, as Lennon passionately continued his pursuit of artistic philanthropy.
As these feelings continued to surface, it was for the benefit of the band that from the 1960s onwards, the pair would take the vocal reins on whatever idea they brought to the table. But in those heady early days, when the band were basking in the joy of newfound fame, they were more enthusiastic in their collaboration, an idea best showcased in the 1961 hit ‘I’ll Be On My Way’.
Later given to Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, the early Lennon-McCartney song was recorded by The Beatles just once, during a 1963 radio session. It was the sort of sweet and innocent blues rock tune the pair quickly became famous for, boasting rather charmingly naive lyrics that rhyme “June light” with “moonlight”, and muses of a place “where the winds don’t blow, and golden rivers flow”.
It was a song that soundtracked the growing pains of this new creative duo, and subsequently never made it to a fully fledged Beatles record. But despite McCartney himself admitting that the song was “a little bit too June-moon for me,” Lennon still managed to lay down the lead vocals for it.
It’s the sort of song that would have been brutally ridiculed by Lennon in the late 1960s, but in those earlier, more innocent days, he simply said, “That’s Paul, through and through. Doesn’t it sound like him? Tra la la la la [laughs]. Yeah, that’s Paul on the voids of driving through the country.”
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