The Paul McCartney cover John Lennon thought wasn’t rock and roll: “I hate this shit”
Music history is full of iconic songwriting partnerships. Take Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, for example, who penned some of the most influential compositions in rock music for The Rolling Stones. Or Elton John and Bernie Taupin, whose seamless split between pianist and lyricist produced some truly glittering pop hits. But perhaps the most influential songwriting duo in music history was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who provided the driving creative force behind the biggest band of all time, The Beatles.
Lennon and McCartney met when they were still just kids, playing shows around their home city of Liverpool. With the dawn of the 1960s, they started up The Beatles, donning smart suits and matching bowl cuts while they penned sweet rock and roll songs about love and holding hands. In those early years, McCartney and Lennon worked closely on their songwriting, often collaborating on tracks.
As the Fab Four grew in fame and acclaim, the relationship between their central songwriters soon began to sour. Creative differences drew the pair apart, as Lennon began to prefer working with Yoko Ono to McCartney. They started to write separately, with McCartney penning melancholic tracks like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude’ while Lennon experimented with ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Lennon threw some hurtful insults towards his former songwriting partner, often sharing his dislike for McCartney’s compositions and even comparing him to Engelbert Humperdinck. But beyond the McCartney tracks that made it to the studio, Lennon also hated a cover that he once heard McCartney working on behind the scenes. Guitarist Brian Griffiths recalled the story in Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin.
Griffiths showered praise on McCartney, acknowledging his talent for progressions, diminished chords, and even declaring that he could “play for more than anyone else, right into Gershwin and those guys.” But Lennon didn’t always echo Griffiths’ admiration for McCartney. And there was one occasion when the pair noticeably disagreed on the Beatle’s singing.
Griffiths and Lennon stumbled upon McCartney, who was sitting by the piano, covering a classic song by Elvis Presley. He was recreating the rock and roller’s 1960 track ‘It’s Now or Never’, leaving Griffiths, once again, impressed by his talents. “I was thinking… what a voice on that guy!” he remembered thinking. However, Lennon didn’t quite share his awe.
“I hate this shit!” Lennon apparently commented, “This guy’s tryin’ to be like Elvis. But it’s not rock ‘n’ roll, then, is it?” McCartney certainly was shaped by the work of Elvis, borrowing from his early work in the realm of rock and roll and even sometimes incorporating his vocal style into his own. But inspiration doesn’t necessarily equate to imitation, although Lennon saw it that way.
McCartney’s casual cover of the Elvis track probably didn’t warrant such an impassioned reaction from his fellow Beatle, so it seems likely that this occurred during those years when the pair were experiencing creative turbulence and tension. Fortunately, the two Beatles did manage to reconcile those differences before Lennon’s death in 1980.
They repaired their relationship throughout the 1970s, even entertaining the idea of working together again on music, though this never really came to fruition. Lennon’s comments on McCartney’s Elvis cover, then, can probably be taken as a heat-of-the-moment thing, a moment of anger that probably wasn’t founded in his true feelings about his bandmate’s talent.
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