“Yoko took your lucky break”: the harsh lyric Paul McCartney removed from ‘Too Many People’
There are numerous reason why The Beatles split up. The simple fact that the members had been in a band since they were kids is good enough as the ability to grow together, both musically and as people, is an incredibly difficult thing to maintain. But one of the most pervasive arguments is that Yoko Ono was the root of the problem, as if John Lennon’s wife single-handedly caused the breakdown of the band. It’s false, but Paul McCartney didn’t help the situation.
There are many, many other causes of the breakdown of the Beatles that in no way involve Yoko Ono. In fact, Ono probably played a part in keeping them together for a while as her own experience as an avant-garde sonic artist undeniably inspired and reinvigorated Lennon’s enthusiasm for his own musical experimentation, colouring later records like the White Album.
Ono simply happened to be there a lot. Especially during the Get Back sessions, when tensions were at an all-time high for the band due to George Harrison feeling underappreciated, McCartney growing tired of the lack of commitment of the other members, Lennon growing tired of McCartney and so on. The fact that Ono was almost always sitting in the corner realistically made no real difference to the arguments that were already tearing the band apart, but it also did clearly irritate the others.
“I thought she was a hard woman,” McCartney said of his impression of her back then, adding, “We didn’t know her too well, really.” But when the band split and the members went off into their solo careers, the songwriter didn’t help the pile on of blame that landed on Ono’s shoulders and certainly would’ve made it worse if he’d kept the original lyrics for ‘Too Many People’.
In the Ram track, McCartney launches a somewhat veiled attack of Lennon. “I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn’t need to be told what to do,” he told MOJO, explaining the lyric “too many people preaching practices”. The song captures the idea of there being too many cooks in the kitchen of the band and too many voices talking over one another, with McCartney, at the time, believing Ono to be the one too many.
Initially, the line “You took your lucky break and broke it in two” was, according to Vincent Perez Beintez in The Words and Music of Paul McCartney: The Solo Years, originally going to be, “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” suggesting that Yoko took Lennon’s ‘lucky break’, or his existence in this history-shaping band, and ruined it. It was a bold claim that had found its way into the press already, with many blaming the entire break-up of the band on Ono’s shoulders, despite issues existing between the bandmates for man years. Perhaps recognising the extra tension it would put on Ono, McCartney changed it at the last minute, dropping the pointed finger at his estranged friend’s spouse.
McCartney would later reconsider his thoughts on Ono and their relationship. Especially in the wake of Lennon’s death, he made an effort to get to know her. “The thing is, in truth,” McCartney told Playboy in 1984, “I never really got on that well with Yoko anyway. It was John who got on well with her–that was John who got on well with her… that was the whole point. Strangely enough, I only started to get to know her after John’s death. I began wanting to know if I could be of any help, because of my old friend.”
He would later continue: “I just thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ve misunderstood, maybe it’s my mistake, not hers’. So, I telephoned her and started talking to her about just things generally”, he said, now describing the artist as “a very loving, caring woman” rather than the hard person he saw as the problem before.
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