The Beatles song Paul McCartney wanted to erase John Lennon from: “My lyric”
There’s no way of thinking of The Beatles without going back to the partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Every single member of the band helped make the Fab Four what they were, but there was a certain synergy between McCartney’s optimism and Lennon’s biting wit that made the band’s songs work so well all the way up until the very end. But even when they started writing tunes on their own, Macca felt that he shouldn’t have Lennon’s shadow shrouding any of his own masterpieces.
It was bad enough that he was being painted as the villain of The Beatles’ story half the time the band was brought up in interviews, but for the first few years, McCartney was practically being looked at as the casualty of the band. George Harrison was reaching the greatest heights of any Beatle, Lennon was earning critical success, and even Ringo Starr had some of the biggest hits of his solo career, and yet there was McCartney getting torn through the mud for making silly love songs with his wife, Linda.
But even if he wasn’t the most fashionable Beatle, his ear for hooks never fully went away. RAM is just now getting the credit it deserved for being one of the greatest albums ever made by a former Beatle, and there are more than a few times where his songs managed to eclipse what Lennon was doing half the time, especially when he began working on experimental stuff like on McCartney II.
Once he launched his solo career, though, he got a bit more accustomed to revisiting his past a little bit. No one would have expected him to begin playing Beatles songs the minute that Wings formed or anything like that, but by the time he was releasing The Beatles Anthology, he seemed much more fond of some of the tunes that he wrote with his old mate all those years ago.
But whereas most people in McCartney’s position would be fine to play the songs as they were written, there were subtle changes that he felt needed to be made. Lennon was a key part of their partnership, but since Macca was happy to relinquish his songwriting credit on songs like ‘Give Peace a Chance’, he felt that he should at least get top billing when they started publishing the words to songs like ‘Blackbird’ in poetry books.
As far as he could tell, Lennon contributed nothing to the song, and he felt that it was only fair to have his old mate’s name scrubbed from the credits, saying, “I was reading a book, an anthology of poetry, and one of the poems in it was ‘Blackbird’, which is my lyric. And it said by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Now John had nothing to do with those words, especially once they’ve been extracted from the music and put into a poetry book. I think it’s fair enough to put ‘Blackbird’ in a poetry book by Paul McCartney.”
Then again, that’s not what the rest of the world would have thought at the time. In many ways, McCartney is right to fight for what lyrics he wrote, but when you think about the legacy of the band, it’s much better to have the brand name of Lennon/McCartney rather than muddying everything up by picking and choosing who wrote what every single time one of their tunes is published.
It must sting having to watch one of your own classics be rewritten in history, but it’s not like there was anything malicious about keeping Lennon’s name on there. If nothing else, this was only another reason to help keep the spirit of his old mate alive whenever people read the lyrics to everything from ‘Blackbird’ to ‘Hey Jude’ to ‘Norwegian Wood’.
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