The Paul McCartney song that contained “harmless little digs” at John Lennon
The disintegration of the friendship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney was complex. It certainly wasn’t a full break, as many fans imagined at the time. The pair kept in contact, even if it was through friends and lawyers, and the animosity between them had largely subsided by the mid-1970s. But for a brief period, the swipes being taken between the former Beatles were prime entertainment.
One of McCartney’s most notorious kickbacks at Lennon was in the lyrics to ‘Too Many People’, the lead track to his 1971 album Ram. With its lines about “preaching practices” and “going underground”, McCartney set his sights on some of Lennon’s hypocrisies. The result was a fascinating addition to the public feud between the two at the time, and even a full half-century later, McCartney was a bit sensitive about the song’s contents.
“This song was written a year or so after the Beatles breakup, at a time when John was firing missiles at me with his songs, and one or two of them were quite cruel,” McCartney wrote in his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “I don’t know what he hoped to gain other than punching me in the face. The whole thing really annoyed me. I decided to turn my missiles on him too, but I’m not really that kind of a writer, so it was quite veiled.”
“It was the 1970s equivalent of what we might today call a ‘diss track’. Songs like this, where you’re calling someone out on their behaviour, are quite commonplace now, but back then, it was a fairly new ‘genre’. The idea of too many people ‘preaching practices’ was definitely aimed at John telling everyone what they ought to do – telling me, for instance, that I ought to go into business with Allen Klein,” McCartney added.
“I just got fed up with being told what to do, so I wrote this song. ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two’ was me saying basically, ‘You’ve made this break, so good luck with it.’ But it was pretty mild. I didn’t really come out with any savagery, and it’s actually a fairly upbeat song; it doesn’t really sound that vitriolic. If you didn’t know the story, I don’t know that you’d be able to guess at the anger behind its writing.”
Plenty of fans guessed at it, as evidenced by McCartney discussing the impact of the song not long after Lennon’s death in 1980. “I was looking at my second solo album, Ram, the other day, and I remember there was one tiny little reference to John in the whole thing,” McCartney told Playboy in 1984. “He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit. In one song, I wrote, ‘Too many people preaching practices’, I think is the line. I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn’t anything else on it that was about them. Oh, there was ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two’.”
“Piss off, cake. Like, a piece of cake becomes piss-off cake, And it’s nothing, it’s so harmless really, just little digs,” McCartney reiterated to Mojo in 2001. “But the first line is about ‘too many people preaching practices.’ I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn’t need to be told what to do. The whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, to each his own. Freedom. Suddenly it was, ‘You should do this.’ It was just a bit the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it. So that one got to be a thing about them.”
For his part, Lennon seemed to understand that he was the subject of ‘Too Many People’ immediately. “There were all the bits at the beginning of Ram like ‘Too many people going underground’. Well, that was us, Yoko Ono and me,” Lennon would later claim. “And ‘You took your lucky break’, that was considering we had a lucky break to be with him.”
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