The John Lennon song he thought Paul McCartney should have sang: “That’s commercial”
The ending of The Beatles was never going to be easy for fans to get over. The Fab Four had felt like extended family members to every single rock and roll fan, and now that they were falling out over shoddy business decisions, it was the equivalent of watching a drawn-out divorce happening on the world’s stage half the time. While it would be a cold day in hell before any of the band members wanted to make something together again, John Lennon did have echoes of his old bandmates in his work whenever he got the chance.
Granted, it’s easy to spot some of his Fab influences when some of his mates never actually left. Ringo Starr was always a mainstay on some of Lennon’s early albums, and George Harrison even added the odd guitar part here and there, but considering everyone seemed to have a personal falling out with Paul McCartney, it was easy to believe that the ‘Nerk Twins’ had become bitter enemies.
That’s what their songs seem to imply, after all. ‘How Do You Sleep’ was meant to be one of the most scathing diss tracks of all time after Macca lashed out at Lennon due to his peace practises, and the original demos for the song which feature Lennon shouting ‘How do you sleep, you cunt?’ implies that he probably could have taken things a lot further if he wanted to.
But that didn’t mean that Lennon had nothing but vitriol for his writing partner. They might have seen eye-to-eye on some things towards the end, but there was still that bond that united them before they had a penny to their name when writing tunes like ‘Love Me Do’. And even when Lennon was working on a couple of solo tunes, he couldn’t help but wonder whether McCartney could have added something to his best work.
Even McCartney didn’t notice his influence on Lennon’s music in the early days. The whole concept behind ‘Gimme Some Truth’ started during the Get Back sessions, and when listening back to the band’s dissection of the tune, Macca was the one to suggest how the lyrics should flow during the bridge sections when Lennon gets especially nasty.
While some Lennon songs never got a proper release like ‘God Save Oz’, even Lennon remarked at the time that he could have used his old mate to flesh out the vocal sound instead of bringing in Bill Elliot on background vocals, saying, “We got this guy that Mal had found in a group called Half-breed or something, and he sounded like Paul. So I thought, ‘That’s a commercial sound,’ – it would have been nice to have Paul’s voice singing ‘God Save Oz’ – but the guy imitated more my demo.”
That wasn’t the only time that the duo gave loving compliments towards each other. Lennon would eventually perform ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ with Elton John while introducing it as a song “from a fiance of mine called Paul” and McCartney himself would end up using Lennon’s signature echo on tracks like ‘Let Me Roll It’ off Band on the Run.
There’s no question that fans would have loved to see what The Beatles would have sounded like had they got back together, but this kind of record shows a look into that alternate world for a brief second. Elliot isn’t nearly the kind of singer that McCartney could be, but with ‘The Cute Beatle’ behind everything, this could have easily been the kind of record that could have turned up on the zany side of The White Album.
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