The one line that defined The Beatles’ breakup: “Poor state of affairs”
The entire fallout of The Beatles is something that the world wasn’t fully ready for when they called it a day.
The Fab Four meant everything to music fans, and the idea of them not getting together to make a new album or creating the odd song here and there just felt wrong. But while many pieces of their final days weren’t as bad as most people made them out to be, Paul McCartney knew there were a few lines that seemed to be writing history before it had even begun.
Because as much as the band turned into three against one when Macca announced that they were breaking up, he never wanted to break up the group. He wanted to hang out with his friends forever, and after he was turned into the villain of the story for a little while, once Allen Klein came in, the last thing that he wanted to do was go against his bandmates. But it’s not like everything was chipper, either.
McCartney is a self-professed workaholic in many respects, and he was going to do everything he could to keep the band together in the studio. He and John Lennon were still a team every time they wrote, and while George Harrison was getting sidelined far too often whenever he made one of his tunes, McCartney never wanted to be the cause of friction every time one of the songs wasn’t coming together.
He wanted to be the kicking off point for something great, and for the first few days at Twickenham Studios, it looked like things could work out. He had already come up with ‘Get Back’ just out of the air one day, waiting to see if Lennon would show up, and while the rest of the band were getting their act together, getting everything started with ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’ was a good sign that things were working out.
In fact, that one song might be one of the purest collaborations between Lennon and McCartney during their final years. The White Album had already seen each member of the band going into different studios to work on their songs, and since McCartney was used to finishing up entire tunes without the rest of the band involved, having Lennon’s ‘everybody had a hard year’ verse was the perfect match for Macca’s idea.
But if you look at what Lennon is actually talking about, McCartney felt that the lines about everyone struggling in their own way summed up their final days a little bit too well, saying, “It had been a rough year or two for John. The breakup of his marriage. His estrangement from Julian. A problem with heroin. And there was the generally poor state of affairs in the band by this time. That’s encapsulated in the combination of the phrases ‘Everybody pulled their socks up’ and ‘Everybody put their foot down’. Those lines refer in some way to the state of the nation, or the state of The Beatles.”
If Lennon had stuck with his original idea, it probably would have turned out something like what made it onto Plastic Ono Band, but what makes it work is what everyone else is doing around it. Hearing McCartney’s verses overlap with Lennon’s in the final section of the song is one of the greatest Beatles moments from their later years, and if you ever needed confirmation as to why Billy Preston should be considered a ‘Fifth Beatle’, just listen to the subtle accents that he’s putting into every single one of the breaks.
The band hadn’t lost an ounce of their chops, but given the storm that they would have to weather directly after this, having a hard year would have been a bit of an understatement in some respects. They were in for the darkest days of their careers at the time, but for a brief second, McCartney proved why he was known as the one who could take a sad song and make it better.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.