Why Paul McCartney forgave John Lennon for ‘How Do You Sleep?’
After the breakup of The Beatles, things got messy, really messy.
In one corner, you had Paul McCartney, having been tipped off about the dastardly ways of Allen Klein, ready to fight to ensure that the manager got absolutely nowhere near the band’s accounts, and in the other corner, you had all three of the others. He recalled, “I said, ‘Well, this is like bloody Julius Caesar, and I’m being stabbed in the back!’”
By this point, the band were already done, though the public wasn’t clued in on that yet. With the rest of the band wanting to bring Klein in, McCartney was only left with one course of action: suing The Beatles.
It wasn’t a decision he took lightly, and not one he ever wanted to make. “I was thought to be the guy who broke The Beatles up and the bitch who sued his mates. And, believe me, I bought into that,” McCartney said as the decision, and ensuing and inevitable fall out with his friends, plummeted him into a depression. Being slated by the public and cast out by his oldest mates, the musician was absolutely devastated, though he knew he’d done the right thing. Years down the line, John Lennon would admit that, too, after seeing firsthand why Klein had such a poor reputation. But before that became clear, the fight between the once-tight collaborators was nasty.
Technically, McCartney shot first with the subtle dig of ‘Too Many People’ on Ram, which was said to be about Lennon, his addictions and his relationship. However, soon after, Lennon dealt a truly harsh blow on the outright ‘How Do You Sleep?’ Unlike McCartney’s passive-aggressive, this was full-out rage.
“Those freaks was right when they said you was dead,” Lennon sings in the first verse, referencing the ‘Paul Is Dead’ theory to immediately make the song’s subject clear. But it’s in verse two when things get especially catty, singing, “You live with straights who tell you you was king / Jump when your momma tell you anything / The only thing you done was Yesterday / And since you’re gone you’re just another day.”
It’s nasty on so many levels. One, McCartney’s mother was dead, so that reference is intensely below the belt, but also, the suggestion that he only contributed ‘Yesterday’ was so insulting it was almost laughable. In the new documentary, Man On The Run, McCartney reflects on hearing the track, listing off the myriad of hits he gave the band, yet, overwhelmingly, everyone seemed to agree that Lennon’s song was a step too far, as even Sean Ono Lennon said, “He was tough, my dad”.
At the time, it obviously stung bad, which had Macca saying simply, “Fuck you, John!”, but at the end of the day, he forgave Lennon. He forgave him basically instantly, because in the wildness of the track, McCartney saw glimpses of the boy he first loved, stating, “You’ve got to remember, I’d known John since he was a teenager. And that’s kind of what I loved about John”.
“He’s a crazy son of a bitch,” McCartney said, unable to stay mad about his crazy, if cruel, antics, “He’s a lovely, lovely, crazy guy.”
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