The Beatles songs that sent Paul McCartney off in a sulk: “Oh, fuck you!”
Generally, in the history of The Beatles, Paul McCartney was the one trying to keep it all together. In the band’s final years as fall out and feuds strained their relationships to breaking point, the bassist is seen in footage like the recordings of the Get Back sessions, trying to keep them all on track for the sake of the music. However, that logical mindset didn’t stretch to these two songs.
In Peter Jackson’s mammoth Get Back series, McCartney truly comes off as the parent of the band. While George Harrison is busy storming out and John Lenon has clearly checked out of the band, McCartney is constantly trying to hold it together, trying to get the Let It Be album done, and even desperately trying to get them to remember happier times as he starts up jam sessions of their old songs.
Out of all of them, he’s also the most consistent. It’s clear that McCartney was usually willing to put a fight aside to protect their music and get the work done. There are a fair few Beatles songs missing one of the members. Lennon doesn’t play on 18 tracks, including a few of Harrison’s songs or a chunk of the Abbey Road medley. Harrison is absent for 12 tracks across their discography, and Ringo is gone for 15. In comparison, Paul is only missing five tracks, the majority of which are only because they were simple, solo acoustic numbers such as ‘Julia’, which only features Lennon.
However, there was one song where McCartney purposefully didn’t appear as he went off to sulk. ‘She Said, She Said’ because the target of that strop as he refused to play on the track. “John brought it in pretty much finished,” he recalled in Barry Miles’ Many Years From Now, adding, “I’m not sure, but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we’d had a barney or something, and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George played bass.”
The second song that became the target of a McCartney tantrum was ‘Yer Blues’; however, this one is contested. He does play on this one, at least, but according to Ian MacDonald’s book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, he wasn’t happy about it, as McDonald reports that he was “sulky” during its recording.
That makes sense. Written during a trip to India and then brought into the studio during the tumultuous White Album sessions, it was worked on at a time when Lennon and McCartney’s relationship was getting tense and stropping. So, a tantrum doesn’t feel out of the question.
However, McCartney later insisted he did, in fact, like the song. “We were talking about this tightness, this packed-in-a-tin thing,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016, “So we got in a little cupboard – a closet that had microphone leads and things, with a drum kit, amps turned to the walls, one mic for John. We did ‘Yer Blues’ live, and it was really good.”
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