“There is an unfairness there”: the song credit Paul McCartney always regretted not changing
The work of Paul McCartney will always be connected with John Lennon until the end of time. Even though they had separated for a decade before Lennon’s untimely passing, the two creative forces behind The Beatles were always joined at the hip when it came to filling in each other’s musical statements on every one of their records. While it was no big thing for them to work together as a partnership, Macca still felt that there were a few songs for which Lennon should never have been given his flowers.
It’s not like McCartney doesn’t have somewhat of a point, either. Yes, they had worked together on a number of fantastic tunes, but there were also plenty of times when one of them would start a song and completely finish it on their own, and yet they would still be credited together on the album sleeve.
Then again, it’s a small gripe to have considering how much money each of them had for their royalties back in the day. They were each getting a massive cut of their earnings from their songwriting, and if that meant that McCartney got credit for ‘I Am the Walrus’, and Lennon got credit for ‘And I Love Her’, it was hardly a matter worth squabbling over. But it’s a different story when the music is used for something different.
When looking back on their midperiod, it was clear that each of them had grown far beyond the need for each other. Every one of their tunes was as solid as ever, but when working on Help!, one melody that would not leave McCartney’s head became the basis for ‘Yesterday’, featuring one of the first times where a Beatle played an entire song without the involvement of their bandmates.
Lennon was even willing to relinquish songwriting credit to McCartney for that one tune, saying that it was a beautiful piece of work that he never wished to write on his own. But when McCartney wanted to make a collection of his lyrics as a part of the book Blackbird Singing, he ran into trouble the minute that Yoko Ono put her foot down when he asked to be solely credited for ‘Yesterday’.
Even though the book ultimately featured Lennon/McCartney across most of the lyrics, Macca did harbour some regret about not switching things to McCartney/Lennon for that track, saying, “I must just be resigned, because it doesn’t really matter, except from the point of view of this Blackbird credit. There is an unfairness there, I think. But it’s an unfairness I’m willing to live with. I don’t mind.”
But that hasn’t stopped McCartney from trying to be sneaky when making some of his later live albums. Whenever performing a handful of his Beatles classics, he has tried to switch it back to his plan of McCartney/Lennon, but he has come under fire every time by people thinking he was trying to rob his old mate of receiving credit.
At the same time, it’s not hard to see why McCartney would be a little bit upset if he saw some of his tunes get the shared treatment when they weren’t at all. If this same thing had happened to someone like Bernie Taupin, would it really have been a big ask for his poetry to be credited solely to him rather than ‘Elton John and Bernie Taupin’ on every page?
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