The 1965 song Paul McCartney didn’t want to take credit for: “The lyric came out rather bland”
Part of the beauty of all Beatles music is not being able to tell where John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s musical influence ended on each other’s songs.
There are plenty of tunes that are clearly full of Lennon’s sardonic wit, but sometimes the most jovial songs that they ever made came from him rather than the whimsical vibe that Macca gave off every time he made a record. Both of them were brilliant at bouncing things off of each other, but McCartney figured that there were a handful of tunes that he was happy to take his credit off of if he thought they weren’t up to snuff.
But there was no sense in trying to break up the duo when they were still in their prime. Some of the best songs of all time were written by them after years together, and there’s a good chance that they had a good 200-300 songs already completed that most people never got to hear before Please Please Me was recorded. Then again, any duo has their off days, and there are more than a few times where ‘The Nerk Twins’ had songs that simply didn’t work like they were supposed to.
They never had a completely dry session, but McCartney did recall a few times when they were completely clocked out of any ideas. ‘I’m Happy Just to Dance With You’ is a good example of what the duo sounded like when they were spinning their wheels, and even though With The Beatles is a fairly solid follow-up to what they had been doing, it’s hard to think of ‘Little Child’ or ‘Hold Me Tight’ as anything other than filler.
That shouldn’t have been a problem by their mid-period, though. They were progressing by leaps and bounds even when working on their lesser albums like Beatles for Sale, but by the time that they finished up work on Help, McCartney was happy to admit later that he didn’t have that much to contribute when working on a song like ‘It’s Only Love’. It’s not the worst song in the world, but you’d have thought it was a scourge on their discography if you asked Lennon.
He was absolutely furious about not getting the lyrics right on the tune, and even though the tune itself is fairly pretty, McCartney remembered the whole thing being too forgettable for him to take credit for, saying, “Sometimes we didn’t fight it if the lyric came out rather bland on some of those filler songs like ‘It’s Only Love.’ If a lyric was really bad we’d edit it. But we weren’t that fussy about it, because it’s only a rock ‘n roll song. I mean, this is not literature.”
If I may be the song’s lawyer here for a second, it’s not like Lennon’s assessment holds that much ground. The normal by-the-numbers love song approach was nothing new by this point, but the idea of a couple that’s in this constant state of indecision is a lot more interesting than just making another puppy love song that they were used to writing ever since the days of ‘From Me To You’.
In fact, the hidden gems on Help are actually a better indication of the maturity that they would be showing on Rubber Soul, an album later. ‘Tell Me What You See’ is the kind of look at loneliness from someone who can’t even talk to their crush, and the country and western style flair of ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ at least predicted where they would be going when they started making ‘Norwegian Wood’.
So while ‘It’s Only Love’ tends to be looked at like some bastard child of the band’s catalogue, it was never deserving of that assessment to begin with. The sentiment of the song isn’t all that profound or anything, but sometimes a tune doesn’t have to be saying much to actually have a strong impact.
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