‘Jealous Guy’: the song Paul McCartney thought was aimed at him
It would have been impossible for any of The Beatles to ignore each other the minute they broke up. They had been virtually brothers for the last decade of their lives, and even if the future was wide open for them, the idea of ignoring their extended family was going to be much more complicated than having to simply carry on with their own ventures. That didn’t mean there wasn’t still some bad blood, and Paul McCartney was always looking over his shoulder to see if any mud was being thrown on him in the next few years.
Because for the first few months of The Beatles’ split, Macca was being treated like the villain who wanted to break them up. Fans may have been adamant about the fact that Yoko Ono broke up the band, but if there was anyone to blame, it was Allen Klein, pitting each of them against each other and then separating McCartney from the pack when dealing with his business affairs.
That’s not to say that every one of their exchanges during the back half of their career was terrible. Let It Be may have been painted as this dark epilogue for the group when everyone didn’t want to be there anymore, but looking at how Get Back turned out, it looked like all of them were having a great time outside of a few moments when things got tense, like George Harrison leaving the group for a few days.
There’s even a bit of collaboration between John Lennon and McCartney when working on a handful of tunes. ‘Gimme Some Truth’ wouldn’t be released until Lennon made his solo album Imagine, but you can hear the basic skeleton taking shape when Macca starts dictating how the syllables should fall on the beat in the breakdown section of the final version.
“He used to say, ‘Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.’”
Paul McCartney
When the band fractured, though, Lennon took a few leftovers when working on his pop singles. ‘Jealous Guy’ had been a rough sketch that he had been working on ever since the band’s days on retreat in Rishikesh, but since it originally had the title ‘Child of Nature’, McCartney was convinced that the new words had been written in reference to him after Lennon’s death.
Since ‘The Nerk Twins’ had a constant back-and-forth relationship going, McCartney remembered Lennon saying that it was written about his bandmate being a spoiled sport, saying, “He used to say, ‘Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon.’ He wrote ‘I’m Just a Jealous Guy’, and he said that the song was about me. So I think it was just some kind of jealousy.”
However, Lennon had said leading up to his death that the song was self-directed, saying, “The lyrics explain themselves clearly: I was a very jealous, possessive guy. Toward everything. A very insecure male. A guy who wants to put his woman in a little box, lock her up, and just bring her out when he feels like playing with her.”
It’s not like either theory doesn’t have legs, either. There had been a few times when McCartney could have been jealous with Lennon’s natural charisma and leadership skills, but given how easy Macca could pull a melody out of thin air, it must have been a bit difficult for Lennon to see him create something out of nothing, even if it meant him putting some truly dopey lyrics on top of it all.
While we’ll probably never know for sure what the song was about, the fact that both of them disagreed about its origins is why Lennon and McCartney work so well. There was that constant tension between them, but that uncomfortable feeling is often what led to some of their greatest performances.
