All the episodes of Beautiful Possibility in sequence are here.
This episode works pretty well on its own, but obviously since it’s part 2, it works better if you’ve read/listened to part 1 first. You’ll also have a fuller and more beautiful experience of this episode if you’ve listened to the Rabbit Hole: “The ‘entangled form’ of Lennon/McCartney.
Hi everyone,
Before we get to the main episode, I want to take just a couple of minutes for a few housekeeping notes. And I also want to talk with you — briefly — about Ian Leslie’s book, before we continue with part 2 of “He Said He Said.”
Housekeeping first.
If you joined midway through, you’ll get the most out of Beautiful Possibility by starting from the beginning — but if you’re not doing that, I’ve added notes at the top of every episode about what you’d want to listen to or read to get the most out of that episode.
Second, after this episode, I’m going to slow the release rate of new material to once a week, alternating between Rabbit Holes and episodes, to give all of us — including me — the chance to get caught up.
Before we get to this week’s episode, I want to talk just for a few minutes especially to those of you in the Beatles studies counterculture — what y’all might call the “JohnandPaul world” — about Ian Leslie’s book. And to do it we’ll need to borrow just a tiny bit from the final episode of part one. If you’re not interested in this part, obviously please feel free to scroll down a bit to the main episode.
Okay, then.
As much as I respect and support the Beatles studies counterculture, I’m also very aware that I'm not really part of that world. As I mentioned in a prior episode, as a Beatles scholar, I have one foot in the mainstream and one foot in the counterculture and I have a bumpy relationship with both. So I may be talking out of turn in what I want to say here. But sometimes standing between worlds and being part of neither allows a perspective of both sides that isn’t available otherwise. So I hope those of you who are part of the “JohnandPaul” world will accept the following with the love with which it’s intended.
I know many of you are disappointed and frustrated by
’s book. I was disappointed and frustrated, too, when I read an advance copy of it back in December.I know the misleading title and the promotional hype made it seem like it was going to be — finally — something different from the same old Grail-phobic, fear of softness false narrative of every other Beatles book. And I know it was frustrating and disappointing to discover it’s mostly a lightweight version of the same old distorted breakup narrative dressed up in the deceptively prettier package of the title and Leslie’s “discovery” of the shocking truth that John and Paul didn’t actually hate one another.
The most troubling part of it is, of course, that Leslie’s book once again hurts John and Paul by misunderstanding and trivializing their relationship. I mean, I love my dog, too, more than I love most people, but equating Paul's love for John with his love for Martha is maybe the most creative and bizarre way so far of pretzel-twisting to avoid the lovers possibility — and that’s saying something, given all the pretzel-twisting we’ve already seen in that regard.1
Like many of you, I feel all of that frustration and disappointment. But to offer some perspective, Ian Leslie is a good writer. His prose is quite beautiful, especially in the passages where he describes the music. And writing this story more beautifully is also part of healing the story.
And while it’s not what many of us hoped for when it comes to the lovers possibility, Leslie is not entirely illiterate in the softer language of the Grail. And regardless of its content, that a published book with the words “love story” and “John and Paul” is in the world is a vast improvement over what’s come before. It’s a sign that despite the resistance, the story is changing for the better.
And while Leslie completely misreads his own research and does the usual Grail-phobic and nonsensical “they weren’t lovers” thing at the end of his book — and again, how could he possibly know that? — it’s still true that if people who are absolutely opposed to the idea that John and Paul even liked each other read his book (because you know those people will not be listening to Beautiful Possibility) and soften their relationship to the story just a little bit, that's work worth doing. And that makes Ian Leslie's book worth having in the world.
What's more important is that situations like Leslie’s book are going to keep happening, as long as the best research and analysis and writing being done on The Beatles is being done by people who publish anonymously in places nobody can find on platforms that aren’t credible.
As we talked about in episode three, as long as all of that is hidden away in the counterculture, of course people will occasionally stumble in, grab hold of bits and pieces of what they find, misunderstand what they’ve found because they’re not Grail-fluent, write daft articles and books like Leslie’s, and then take credit for it as if they’ve discovered something new. It’s similar to Columbus “discovering” America, when the people who were already there are like, uh... hello?
Again, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and we’ll talk about this better in the final episode of part one, but—
No one from the Beatles mainstream is coming to save this story — this foundational myth of our modern world. The blind will not suddenly see. We know — and by we, I mean the Beatles studies countercuture — that whether John and Paul acted on their love for one another or not, the story of The Beatles is at its heart, a love story. And as long as the only people willing to write publicly about them are people who are afraid of love, this is never going to change.
If we want the truer and more beautiful story of John and Paul, and of The Beatles, in the world, we're going to have to put it there — and by we I mean those of us who do see the actual love at the heart of this story — because the fear of softness among old-school Beatles writers that we talked about in episode 1:4 is a real and powerful thing. And also because those old school writers have a lot vested in the false narrative, and we don’t live in a culture where people — especially men — are allowed to say they’re wrong without being accused of being, well... soft. That, too, as we’ll see in a future episode, is collateral damage from the breakup narrative.
We're not going to be able to heal the story by reclaiming it from the false breakup narrative by just wringing our hands and feeling frustrated. If you’re frustrated and disappointed with Ian Leslie’s book, I encourage you to come out from under the cloak of anonymity and share your work legitimately, under your actual names with the serious professional credentials that I know for a fact many of you possess, and in places where people can find it, and more than that, in places where people who find it will take it seriously
I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m publishing this under my own name on a public platform. And I’ve never been anything other than open with my very conservative corporate clients about the nature of my work, and it’s never once been a problem. In fact, several of them are reading and enjoying Beautiful Possibility. The world has not ended. Everything is fine — at least so far — with regard to publicly writing the lovers possibility.
But it will take more than just Beautiful Possibility to lift this story out of the false and toxic breakup narrative, just as it took more than The Beatles to make the Love Revolution happen.
I can think of at least half a dozen Beatles countercultural scholars who are writing the lovers possibility and who would write amazing substacks that would make a real difference in reclaiming this story from the fearful, angry breakup narrative. If you're one of them and you start a substack — under your own name and citing your professional credentials, as I have — I’ll share it on The Abbey. That’s how we start a movement. That’s how we change the story.
Speak your truth even though your voice shakes. This story, this music, the world-changing love between John and Paul is worth it.
And If you’re still worried about the ethics of doing this, I get that. Just hang on a bit longer with me — we’re still working on laying the foundation to talk about how we can talk about it without stepping on John and Paul's right to tell their own story, and we’re almost there.
As for Ian Leslie…
Ian... honey... as my actual Texas grandma never said, you’ve got yourself on the wrong side of the deep end with all of this. You are so far out of your league here, especially if you’re going to use “love” in your book title. Take a seat, and let me show you how to interpret the art... and the love... of Lennon/McCartney.
The Pyramus and Thisbe pantomime that the Beatles performed in 1964 is usually thought of as either a quirky comedic part of their story, or as an example of the kind of degrading publicity stunt that performers of a prior era were forced into during a time when they were considered vaudeville-style “entertainers” rather than serious artists.
I suspect the sketch, no doubt instigated at manager Brian Epstein’s recommendation, is an example of what all four of them, but perhaps especially John and George, despised about the “mop top” era, and it’s hard to fault them in this. However much that sort of thing was part of the “trojan horse” subversion of Brian’s respectability makeover, The Beatles must have felt ridiculous participating in this sort of vaudevillian schtick — world-class artists leading a world-changing cultural revolution, but compelled by Brian’s outdated theatrical sensibilities and the customs of a prior generation to dress in silly costumes and shill for laughs like a third-rate comedy troupe.2
I wonder, though, if it’s a bit more than that.
A lot of people in the mainstream Beatles world see John and Paul playing lovers onstage as amusing — how funny, to see Paul and John dressed in silly costumes pretending to be lovers. And a lot of people in the Beatles studies counterculture see John and Paul playing lovers onstage as romantic, and especially given the parallel of Pyramus and Thisbe as lovers kept apart by cultural disapproval.
But for me, watching the Pyramus and Thisbe skit is deeply uncomfortable and not at all amusing or romantic. Because in light of the lovers possibility, I can’t help but wonder if performing it might have been especially painful for Paul and John in ways the other indignities Brian foisted on them weren’t.
When years after, Paul named that pair of kittens Pyramus and Thisbe, maybe it was a happy reminder of a happy memory. Or maybe it was a bittersweet reminder of the one and only time he and John had been allowed to present themselves to the public as a romantic couple — a farcical staging of what they longed for but couldn't have.
Whether or not John and Paul acted on their love for one another, it seems — as we’ve talked about in prior episodes — abundantly clear they were deeply in love. Imagine what it might have been like for the two of them to perform that love as a comedy in which two men declaring their love for one another could only be seen by the audience as ridiculous.
Can you feel what it might have been like, declaring, “My love, my love, thou art my love” to the person who really is your love, and having the reaction from the audience be only mocking laughter at how daft and socially taboo that is, the notion that John and Paul might be in love. And can you feel how John and Paul might have felt, having to laugh along with the audience at the “ridiculousness” of their love?
If you’re fluent enough in the language of the Grail to be able to understand that kind of pain, then you have a sense of what performing Pyramus and Thisbe might have been like for both of them, and why maybe it’s not in actuality especially comedic or romantic. And as we talked about in the first part of this episode, maybe you have a sense of what Paul might more specifically mean, when he says his biggest regret is that he couldn't have told John he loved him — not that he didn’t or that he never had, he’s quite careful with his wording — but that the culture’s narrow definition of masculinity meant they couldn't express their love fully and honestly the way they both longed for.
If you can understand the pain of the Pyramus and Thisbe skit, you might see the deeper reason why it was significant enough in at least Paul’s life that it was still on his mind years later, when he named those kittens. And you might also see how these sorts of experiences might have been part of the inspiration for all those exuberant love songs about the joy of sharing love with the world — songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “I Feel Fine” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face” and “I Saw Her Standing There.”
If John and Paul were a romantic couple, then it’s likely that in a world in which their love wouldn't have been considered real by most of the people who bought their records, John and Paul’s songs — and especially their “mop top” love songs, so full of eagerness and the joy of new love — were the only place they could speak their love freely... there’s a place where I can go... without being ridiculed (or worse) for that love.
And you might also see that what makes their love songs more than the standard sentimental Tin Pan Alley songs of the prior generation might be that bittersweet tension, the sadness and frustration beneath the sentiment, that the joy being expressed in those songs is imagined and out of reach — because like the lovers in Pyramus and Thisbe, and outside of those precious few weeks in Paris in 1961, any public expression of that love would have been impossible.
In an indirect way, their love songs were their only way of having that love acknowledged and understood — and more importantly, celebrated by the whole world. After all, what’s more acceptable to mainstream culture — and thus more subversive — than a silly love song?
“With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls, for stony limits cannot hold love out. And what love can do, that dares love attempt." — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
As we’ve seen in the past few episodes, whether or not their love was physically expressed, I don’t think there’s much cause to doubt that John and Paul had — and in a very real way continue to have — an unusually close relationship. And while I certainly don’t intend this as any sort of imposition on Paul's innermost thoughts — because no one can say for certain what’s in another person’s heart — I also don’t think there’s much cause for doubt that the two of them not only loved one another, but were deeply in love, and that Paul remains deeply in love with John to this very day.
And as we started to talk about in the first part of this two-part episode, I also don’t think there’s much doubt that their love for one another was expressed in their songs.
The intimacy of their bond built a protective wall around them, enfolding them in the exclusionary circle of two that was Lennon/McCartney — John and Paul — within a circle of four that was John, Paul, George and Ringo, the four of them in turn enclosed within a fiercely loyal and protective circle of their closest friends.3
But as close as John and Paul were, like Pyramus and Thisbe, there were walls between them as well as around them, constantly shifting as their relationship unfolded and deepened.
Some of those walls were of their own making — John’s depression and Paul’s relentless work ethic, John’s insecurity and fear of abandonment, and Paul’s self-assuredness and fear of expressing love. And later, the self-imposed walls between them grew higher and thicker, with the tragic miscommunications of the breakup, followed by the separation of geography, with Paul in the UK or on tour and John stranded in America due to his immigration troubles. And after that, the thickest wall of all, when John was murdered.
But it’s likely most of the walls between them were built from the outside — by their unprecedented fame, by the respectable, subversive teen heartthrob image that Brian initially created around them that gave them the power to spark the Love Revolution, but kept them from being able to live their lives as authentically as they — and perhaps especially John — might have preferred.
And then there were the walls built between them by those who sought to drive a wedge between Lennon and McCartney in an attempt to grab some of that power for themselves, and we’ll get to all of that eventually.
And even after John’s murder, the world built further walls between them when, as we’ll talk about in a future episode, Paul struggled to even get us to believe that he and John had liked, never mind loved, one another.
And always and above all else, the wall that stood between them was built by a culture that had made love between men illegal and unacceptable, whether it was physically expressed or not, and the constant need to hide that love away from a disapproving culture — made literal in Pyramus and Thisbe by the disapproving families who kept the lovers apart.
But as the story of Pyramus and Thisbe shows us, love demands to be expressed. If it’s strong enough, it will find its way through the cracks in the wall by any means it can.
Artists, especially great artists, are driven to speak their truth in their art — to the world, to those they love, and to themselves. And for Paul and John, it seems all-but-certain that the “crack in the wall” through which they could whisper their messages to one another was their music — the one place in all of it where their mastery of craft and love of wordplay and double meaning meant they could safely express their truth, and thus their feelings for one another, without interference or censure.
The songs of Lennon and McCartney — their “whispers through the wall” — are perhaps the one line of communication that never failed them, even when everything and everyone around them — including their own demons — seemed determined to pull them apart.
In the first part of this two-part episode, we did a deep dive into “No Words,” from Paul’s 1973 album Band On The Run, to see why it’s likely what we’re calling a “JohnandPaul” song — not to be confused with a song written by both of them, but rather a song written to or about one another.
“No Words” was written in 1972, during a time when the walls between them were especially thick — at the height of their estrangement, when they were separated by both geography and heartbreak. In this episode, we’ll turn our attention to John’s “whisper through the wall” in reply to Paul’s Band On The Run, and maybe even his specific reply to “No Words” — a song called “Bless You,” from John’s 1974 album, Walls And Bridges (and btw, note the title of the album, relative to Pyramus and Thisbe).
We’re going to spend most of this episode on “Bless You,” because of its complexity and because “Bless You” — along with “(Just Like) Starting Over” — might well be John’s most important post-breakup JohnandPaul song.
We don’t yet have nearly enough context to fully talk about “(Just Like) Starting Over,” in part because by the time we get to John and Paul in 1980, the story that we think we know has so been distorted by all the parties involved — including John and Paul themselves — that it’s going to take awhile before we can untangle it. And for that matter, I’m still untangling it myself.
But if we go slowly and carefully and take our time — and if we're not afraid to say some quiet things out loud a little earlier than we probably should — I think we can find our way through just enough of the necessary context to talk about “Bless You.”
Unlike prior episodes, I’m not going to include much external research in the actual body of the text. This is a complex piece of lyrical interpretation and interrupting it for external quotes would make it too hard to follow. So the supporting research for what we talk about here will mostly be in the footnotes, along with the usual additional commentary.
After the breakup, both Paul and John, bless their tormented iconoclastic genius hearts, made launching their solo careers so much harder on themselves than it needed to be. Each of them made a series of self-sabotaging choices that — as we’ll talk about in future episodes — are entirely understandable in the context of the lovers possibility, but largely incomprehensible without it.
Paul made things harder on himself with his home-grown, cottage-core approach to Wings, putting Linda, who had no musical experience at all, in the band, and setting off on his scruffy, low-rent college bus tour, with a band that someone — I wish I could remember who — dubbed “Paul McCartney and the Semi-Professionals.” And of course, Paul’s McCartney press release widely interpreted at the time as the official announcement of the breakup of The Beatles, didn’t help, either.4 And neither did “Mary Had A Little Lamb.”5
And John, well... John made it harder on himself in let me count the ways. One of those ways was when he proclaimed that all those Lennon/McCartney songs that had changed the world were too complicated, with all those instruments and studio tricks and all those, y’know... words, and the only songs that counted for anything were simple and confessional with as few words as possible — like a haiku. And that’s why his solo work was far superior to anything he’d written when he was Fab.6
Not surprisingly, this claim was met with scepticism from nearly everyone other than John and anyone sucking up to John at the time. “The Nutopian National Anthem” was well and good for a laugh, but it was a hard sell that songs like “Oh Yoko!” and “Ya Ya” and even “Working Class Hero” and “Imagine” surpassed the profound and groundbreaking artistry of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day In The Life” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
Some of John’s insistence that his solo work was better than his Lennon/McCartney work was the usual Breakup John bluster and bravado — inevitable fallout from his lifelong insecurity about his talent, and an obvious attempt to cover his terror at standing solo in the sun without Paul and The Beatles buffering him from his demons.
Some of it was that. But maybe not all of it.
Writing something that’s actually simple is easy. Simple is the domain of lovestruck teenagers, amateur poets and hack songwriters. We fell in love one night in June, your eyes were shining like the moon, ooh baby baby I love you takes ten seconds to write because it’s exactly what it appears to be, which is to say not much. Listen to the Top 40 from most any era, including today, and you’ll find “moon/June baby I love you” songs all over the charts, even from some of the world’s biggest artists.
But art — and for sure, great art —is by definition more than it appears to be on the surface. It's the complexity of art — its subtext and layers of meaning — that gives great art the power to hold our attention over generations.
Complexity and layers of meaning are why we’ve spent hundreds of years studying Shakespeare and Mozart and Van Gogh — because their art is complex enough to hold our attention over not just decades, but centuries. Regardless of how often we experience great art, there is always something new to find. And complexity is why we’ll almost certainly study Lennon/McCartney for hundreds of years, too — if we can get out of our own way about their work, that is.
Perhaps the most difficult kind of song to write is a song that appears simple but maintains its complexity beneath the surface7 — which is why it’s not surprising that a songwriter of John Lennon’s calibre would be drawn to the haiku as a form. Anyone who knows anything about poetry knows a haiku is among the most challenging forms of poetry to write well, because it has to hold complexity within an extremely sparse and simple structure of just three lines and seventeen syllables.
It was a very, very narrow creative box John constructed for himself in his solo work — to write simple, confessional haiku-style songs without sacrificing the complexity required to make those songs more than just “moon/June baby I love you.”
The simpler a song is, the more difficult it is to hide subtext in it. And when we factor in the likelihood that some of those songs were written about and for Paul, the creative box John has put himself into narrows even further — to write a simple-but-complex haiku song that contains messages that your secret lover will recognise but that the rest of the world won’t notice, and to accomplish this in a form with literally no musical or poetic distractions to cover the subtext.
Think of it as trying to hide a bouquet of red roses in an all-white room with almost no furniture.
That’s an unfathomably difficult thing to do. It’s a good thing John Lennon is one of history’s most accomplished lyricists or he’d be in big trouble.
Let’s look at “Bless You.”
“A real artist, however determined he may be to hide any signs of personal intervention, however hooked on the idea of anti-art, tends to give himself away in the end.”8 — George Melly
“Bless You” was written near the end of John’s 18-month long “Lost Weekend,” during which he and Yoko were separated and John was having an affair with his assistant May Pang — an affair that was, according to May Pang, orchestrated by Yoko. And that’s a good reminder of how unusual the relationship between John and Yoko was — something to keep in mind as we continue.
The “Lost Weekend” also marked the end of John’s estrangement with Paul. In fact, when “Bless You” was written, John was considering joining Paul in New Orleans to work on Paul’s latest album. It was to have been Lennon/McCartney, together again.
May Pang tells a story about John playing “Bless You” for her and telling her that he wrote it for Yoko.9 That seems like a plausible claim. Let’s find out if it holds up.
Here’s the first verse—
Bless you wherever you are
Windswept child on a shooting star
Restless spirits depart
Still we’re deep in each other’s hearts
The opening words —”bless you,” which of course is also the title of the song — tell us right from the start that this is no ordinary pop song.
“Bless you” is a prayer in two words. It’s been spoken aloud for thousands of years to consecrate and praise, to approve and protect — and perhaps most of all, to ask for divine care for the object of the blessing. John’s use of it as both the title and the opening words signals that we’ve temporarily stepped out of ordinary space and into the sacred space of prayer. And given John's creative “strip it all down to the most honest” state of mind, he’s offering that prayer within the confines of a confessional.
By beginning with the words “Bless you,” John is telling us that whatever we’re about to hear — assuming John doesn’t subvert the blessing later in the song — can be taken as emotional truth. As a confession.10
We’ll return to the larger implications of this later. For now, let’s move on to the rest of the verse.
the obvious, surface interpretation of the next line, “wherever you are,” is to take it literally as a geographical reference. And perhaps that’s what it is — though that doesn’t tell us anything about whether the “you” in question is Yoko or Paul, because John is physically separated from both. And although he’s in communication with both of them, he probably doesn’t know for certain where either Yoko or Paul are physically located on any given day.
But it’s likely John intended something more than a literal reference to geography with that opening line. Not just because we’re presuming that since this is John Lennon, “Bless You” is more than a “moon/June” song, but also because this isn’t the first time “wherever you are” has made an appearance in one of John’s songs.
It’s also the hook in “You Are Here” from Mind Games, his album prior to the one on which “Bless You” appears11—
Love has opened up my mind
Love has blown right through
Wherever you are, you are here
Wherever you are, you are here
As a lyricist, John is often a magpie, working with found or repurposed words in the same way a visual artist might work with found or repurposed objects.
To offer just a few examples, John magpied “I Am The Walrus” from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” “Cry Baby Cry” from an old English nursery rhyme and “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” from the cover of a gun magazine. He borrowed the lyrics of “Tomorrow Never Knows” from the first lines of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (Leary in turn borrowed them from The Tibetan Book of the Dead), and “Good Morning Good Morning” from a commercial for breakfast cereal.
“Wherever you are, you are here” is also a magpie line, slightly adjusted from the well-known aphorism in spiritual writing, “wherever you go, there you are,” which goes back at least as far as the 15th century Christian devotional The Imitation of Christ.12
The saying is meant to remind us that geography and physical distance do not in fact solve (or create) our problems, because wherever we go, we take who we are with us — our demons and fears and attachments and loves.
John did read widely throughout his life, including spiritual texts, but I doubt he spent his Lost Weekend reading 15th century Christian devotionals. So it’s more likely he picked up the line from the late ‘60s LA-based sunshine pop band The Association, whose members often quoted the aphorism as a way of talking about what it was like to tour.
John is probably using this geographical metaphor to indicate headspace as much as geographical distance — like when we say we’re mentally or emotionally in a good or a bad “place,” or when we refer to psychological distance from a situation as not being “here.”13 That kind of “wherever you are” could refer in equal measure to Yoko and to Paul (as well as to John himself). John may not know for sure where Yoko and Paul are geographically, but more relevant is that he likely doesn’t know where either of them (or himself for that matter) are in their own heads, relative to his relationship with either of them.
“Wherever you are” is especially important as the opening line of “Bless You.” Just like a foundation stone sets the frame for the structure that’s to be built on it, John uses “bless you, wherever you are” to set the frame for the rest of the song, and as we’ll see, it pairs with a later line in an important way.
For now, let’s move on to the second line, “windswept child on a shooting star.”
I’m being a bit subjective here, but when I think of Yoko Ono, “windswept child on a shooting star” isn’t the image that comes to mind. For one thing, Yoko is almost a decade older than John — even for adults, that’s a significant age gap. And in our culture and especially in 1974 in a marriage between a man and a woman, it’s unusual for the woman to be that much older.
More than that, Yoko was many things in John’s life, and while we can never know for sure what happens between a couple in private, she doesn’t appear to have been the “child” in their marriage. And she’s certainly not on any kind of fiery upwards trajectory — unless you count what being married to John Lennon did for her art career, which, okay, that’s fair. But I doubt that's what John intended with the line, and her art wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire in 1974.14
Far from being a “windswept child on a shooting star,” by 1974, Yoko seems to have been the stability in John’s life. She’s still in New York, still taking care of business — while John is off on his drug and alcohol-fueled Lost Weekend. Getting kicked out of comedy clubs and wearing Kotex on his head and living like a frat boy makes John inarguably the child at that point in their relationship.
And in fact, the line after this one — “restless spirits depart” — would seem to be John referencing himself in just this way — restless in his domestic situation with his departure from Yoko, and also restless with his departure from his creative relationship with Paul. “Restless spirits depart” also supports John’s original claim that he’s the one who left Yoko, rather than that Yoko forced John to go, as the story was later amended to and as the prevailing narrative usually insists — and we’ll get back to that in the next verse.
Still, however much “child” doesn’t seem to fit Yoko’s role in John’s life, there is precedent. John referred to Yoko as a “little girl” in “Isolation,” only two years prior. And in Japanese, the name “Yoko” translates to “ocean child” which John uses in “Julia,” a song that’s as much about Yoko as it is about his mother.15
On the other hand, “windswept child on a shooting star” is a pretty good description of Paul McCartney in 1974.16
The Oxford English Dictionary defines windswept as “exposed to strong winds.”17 And after years of exposure to the strong winds of John’s toxic breakup narrative about how Paul’s music was Englebert Humperdink and “muzak to my ears,” by 1974, that’s all — temporarily at least — fading into the past. Soaring triumphantly on the artistic and commercial triumph of Band On The Run as it dominates the charts through most of the year, Paul’s solo career is on a blazing, white-hot upward trajectory — much like a shooting star.18
If I had to make a call at this point, I’d lean ever so slightly towards Paul as the windswept child deep in John’s heart — but I definitely wouldn’t bet Paul’s farm on it. Clearly, we need more context, so let’s look at the second verse.
Some people say it's over
Now we've spread our wings
But we know better, darling
The hollow ring is only last year’s echo
If you speak American English, it’s easy to assume the first two lines of this verse are two separate thoughts — some people say it’s over, and then the next thing that happened, now that it’s over, is that we’ve spread our wings. And that might be what John intended, though it’s a bit flat-footed, like a school essay on “how I spent my summer holiday” — “first we went to Disneyland and then we visited my grandma in San Diego and then we... etc. etc.”
But the missing “that” is a British stylistic form, and despite living in New York, John seems to have retained his British speech patterns in his lyrics. it’s more likely the two lines are a single connected thought — “some people say it’s over now (that) we’ve spread our wings.” It’s a small but important detail, because it makes the link between the relationship being over and the spreading wings causal rather than merely chronological.
This couplet could for sure apply to John and Yoko. “Spread our wings” is an obvious metaphor for the freedom that comes with being single again after four years of marriage — and especially his and Yoko’s “we never leave each other’s side” marriage. And of course, “some people say it’s over” could refer to the widespread assumption that after a year and a half apart, John and Yoko have split for good.
And, of course, “some people say it’s over now (that) we’ve spread our wings” is an equally apt description of the Beatles, and specifically Lennon/McCartney, going their separate ways after the breakup, each pursuing their own creative paths in solo careers.
Obviously, though, there’s another, more specific meaning of “wings” at play here. Wings is, of course, the name of Paul’s new band — the band that’s currently soaring to the top of the charts and the heights of critical acclaim with Band On The Run.
It's beyond unlikely that John uses “wings” in a lyric without a conscious awareness of this association — just as he’ll be consciously aware of it again in “(Just Like) Starting Over.”19 And because John knows Paul as well as Paul knows John, he knows Paul is likely parsing every word of John’s songs for clues about their relationship, because Paul has told us so and there’s no reason to doubt him on this, at least in broad strokes.20
As for the first part of the line — “some people say it’s over” — obviously this tells us that the love affair in question is not, in fact, over. But there’s also a subtle hint of deception here — that “some people say it’s over” because they don’t know what’s really going on between the two lovers in the song. That “you and I” know something that “some people” don’t know.
This is usually taken to mean the press and the rest of the world that believed that John and Yoko were split for good. But it’s possible — just possible, mind you — that the “some people” in question is, in fact, Yoko.
Still, there’s nothing to tip this definitively one way or the other, relative to who John’s writing about — which brings us to the last line of the verse — “The hollow ring is only last year's echo.”
I cautioned earlier that to understand “Bless You,” we’d have to be willing to say some quiet things before we’re really ready to. Most of those quiet things are hiding in this line.
As always, let’s look first at the literal.
In a love song, a ring virtually always means a wedding ring. The imagery of a hollow ring suggests a wedding ring that’s not on a finger — the hollow part being the empty centre of the ring when it’s not being worn. A wedding ring not on a finger implies a broken engagement or a broken wedding vow, the latter of which would seem to point to the breakdown of John’s marriage to Yoko. Not exactly a stunning revelation, given they’re currently separated, John’s living with May Pang and Yoko’s reportedly having an affair of her own.
But lyrics need to be taken in context. The full line is “the hollow ring is only last year’s echo.” An echo is, of course, the lingering trace of something that’s already happened. So the broken vow is in the past. Maybe this is John telling Yoko that their marital troubles are just a memory, and that John is hopeful that he and Yoko can repair their marriage.
All of this is more or less consistent with the story as it’s currently told. But there’s another meaning of “hollow ring” that suggests another possible interpretation of the line — given that when John writes “Bless You,” he’s still over half a year away from reconciling with Yoko, but is at the time currently in the process of reconciling with Paul.
You might recognise the phrase “hollow ring” as an expression that means something put forth as if sincere but that doesn’t feel sincere. It’s similar to the expression “empty promise.” And paired with the wedding ring association and the context of the song, this meaning of “hollow ring” suggests an empty wedding vow that “rings hollow.”
“The hollow ring is only last year's echo” could mean that for John, it’s not the separation, but the vows themselves that were hollow — that “JohnandYoko” was never the epic romance he insisted it was at the time, and that he’s ready to acknowledge that — at least to the one person he might be writing the song for, the only other person in his life who works at the same level of lyrical sophistication as John does and who would therefore get the reference.
This is one of the quiet things, and we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, but though this might feel like a reach, I don’t think it is — especially given the tortured, tangled, heroin-addled Paul-just-married-Linda-so-now-I-have-to-marry-Yoko-right-away circumstances under which John and Yoko’s vows were exchanged, and John’s overall tendency to act on impulse.
And more than that, I don’t think it comes as a big revelation that there was an obvious element of performance in the JohnandYoko relationship — particularly in those first years. Yoko is, after all, a first and foremost a performance artist whose primary interest has always been in challenging mainstream cultural norms, including the cultural norms surrounding love, sex and marriage. Yoko and John as a couple did quite a bit of challenging those cultural norms. And John has explicitly said that their wedding and honeymoon, as well as — in a certain way at least — their marriage, was an act of performance art.21
Consider the extreme over-the-topness of never leaving each other’s side, the naked Two Virgins album cover, the dramatic and theatrical wedding in Gibraltar that became “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” the public bed-in-for-peace honeymoon, John playing the sex tape of him and Yoko at the Beatles meeting, the bed brought into the studio during the Abbey Road sessions, complete with Yoko in a literal tiara, and on and on and on and on.
In our “document everything on social media” culture, it’s easy to lose sight of the reality that none of this is by any standard at all a healthy or normal way to live a relationship — not even in the dying light of the countercultural Love Revolution. This is theatre — a love affair and a marriage not lived, but performed as a statement about love and marriage.
Even some of the songs that John wrote about his relationship with Yoko — I’m thinking in particular of “Oh Yoko!” and later in 1980, “Dear Yoko” — are so over-the-top in their exaggerated expressions of extreme (albeit joyless) devotion that it’s hard not to conclude they’re intended more as satire than as sincere expressions of marital bliss.22
But even here, I wonder if the JohnandYoko show was really intended as a political statement at all — at least on John’s part.
We’re again getting way too far ahead of ourselves in saying some quiet things, but it’s hard not to wonder if John performing of the “great romance” of JohnandYoko was in large part a passive-aggressive swipe at Paul — because John publicly performing perfect marital bliss for a lover he’s still in love with who’s married someone else is very much something a man with poor impulse control and major trust and abandonment issues who’s also prone to jealousy and possessiveness might do, under the guise of making a political statement with a performance artist.
But now we really are getting so far ahead of ourselves we might need a GPS to get back. So let's just say there's an old saying — “marry in haste, repent at leisure.” And by 1974, well into the Lost Weekend, John might be doing a bit of repenting of the performance art circus of JohnandYoko.23
If “the hollow ring is only last year’s echo” is John's acknowledgement of the performative nature of his marriage to Yoko, then the “darling” in “but we know better, darling” isn’t Yoko, it’s Paul.
And if “Bless You” is written for Paul, then the “hollow ring” line is John’s reassurance — not to Yoko, but to Paul — that everything that’s happened over the past years between them — the pain, the anger, the separation of the breakup and his performative marriage to Yoko — is now in the past, because John is starting to realise the damage he did during the breakup, in the same way that any recovering addict begins to see the damage they did, when their head finally clears.24
I’m not in any way claiming that any of this for sure means that the “hollow ring” line means John and Yoko’s marriage overall was only an act of performance art, or that “Bless You” is John confessing this to Paul, or even that “Bless You” is written for Paul — how could I possibly know any of that for sure? The point is that the line — and the song thus far — is ambiguous. It fits John’s relationship with Paul as much — and sometimes better — than it does his relationship with Yoko.
What I’m proposing is that there might be a second, “shadow song” beneath the surface of “Bless You,” precisely overlapping the more “public” song, with every line having two meanings — the surface meaning shaded towards Yoko and the less obvious meaning shaded towards — and nearly invisible to anyone but — Paul.
While others have picked up on the idea that John’s songs are often about more than one person, and that two lines can refer to two different things at the same time, what I'm talking about here is slightly more sophisticated and more Lennon-esque than a simple double meaning—
That “Bless You” contains a surface song and a shadow song. The surface and relatively straightforward song is intended to distract us with what we expect to hear — a song about Yoko. And beneath it, a far more sophisticated shadow song — sophisticated enough that a fellow genius with an intimate, shared history, would recognise in a way others wouldn't.
I’m suggesting that in writing “Bless You” — as well as other songs in his solo work — John may be using the same techniques as a stage magician does — misdirecting us with one hand while performing the actual illusion with the other hand.
And now’s a good time to remind you again that this is John Lennon we’re dealing with — who is known in his work for his use of double meanings, subtext and sophisticated and difficult-to-interpret wordplay, and who enjoys tricking people with his words.
Let's look at the third and final verse—
Bless you whoever you are
Holding her now
Be warm and kind hearted
Remember though love is strange
Now and forever our love will remain
If something about this verse is throwing you, it’s probably the sudden appearance of “her.” Because whether “Bless You” is written to Yoko or to Paul, it’s written in the second person — meaning it’s written to the “you” of “wherever you are” in the first verse.
So who is this new character, the “her” who has appeared out of nowhere in the final verse? And for that matter, who’s the “you” in “whoever you are,” also in the final verse? Because up until now, the “you” in the song has been John’s beloved, be that Yoko or Paul.
The conventional answer is that the “her” in “holding her now” is Yoko, and thus the “whoever you are” is Yoko’s Lost Weekend lover — which, okay, story-wise, that’s plausible, so let’s go with that. For now, let’s assume “Bless You” is written for Yoko, and that in the final verse, John has shifted the meaning of “you” and is now talking not directly to Yoko, but to whoever is holding Yoko in their arms in John’s absence, aka Yoko’s lover.
And if that’s the case, that means that John is asking Yoko’s lover to be “warm and kind hearted” to her. Which, okay, that’s nice. Is this like when George Harrison gave Eric Clapton his blessing to marry Pattie because if she was going to leave George, then he’d rather she was with someone he could trust? Maybe, but doubtful, given “whoever you are” suggests John doesn’t seem to even know Yoko’s lover’s name.
But if that’s the case — if “whoever you are” is Yoko’s lover — then that also means that John has shifted the meaning of “you” from Yoko to Yoko’s lover, and he’s now addressing the lyric to Yoko’s lover rather than to Yoko. Which is fine on its own — sort of — but if that’s the case, who is the “our” in the final line, “now and forever, our love will remain”? Who is John talking to, when he says that?
Convention would say that “our love” refers to John and Yoko’s love. So let’s see if we can make that work.
Maybe John’s warning Yoko’s lover that he (or she) can have their fun, but ultimately, Yoko is John’s. John did have abandonment and thus jealousy issues, and he did write about his jealousy. But “Bless You” doesn’t seem even remotely like a jealousy song. It’s not “Run For Your Life” or “You Can’t Do That” or even “Jealous Guy.”
“Bless You” also doesn’t even remotely seem like a competitive “keep your hands off my baby” song of rivalry with another man for Yoko. And it also doesn’t seem like a “have your fun, but her love with me is stronger than what you have with her” song —especially since the lover doesn’t even enter the picture until the final verse (if at all).
So what exactly is John’s plan here? Is he in fact subverting the sacred confessional that he’s established at the beginning of the song? Is he asking Yoko’s lover to pass along John’s intimate affirmation of his and Yoko’s love — “now and forever our love will remain”— to Yoko on his behalf? Like, Yoko’s lover is a messenger or something?
This too seems unlikely. Because what “Bless You” does seem to be is an intimate, vulnerable reassurance, spoken directly to a lover, that even through adversity and separation, “our love will remain.” And that intimacy has been building up to those last two lines — the climax of the song — the reaffirmation that John and his beloved’s love endures despite geographical and emotional separation.
Remember, John is in both haiku and confessional mode — and that means he’s writing simply and straightforwardly about his feelings. So why, after all of that confessional intimacy, would John make the most important part of his message indirect? And to someone he doesn’t even know? John doesn’t need a go-between in the final lines to affirm their love. He’s been doing just fine speaking directly to his beloved in the first two verses.
All of which is to say that the “our” of “our love will remain” is clearly John and his beloved, the person he’s writing the song to. But if the “her” in the song is Yoko, then that final message of the song — “our love will remain” — doesn’t seem to work, at least not if the “our” is John and Yoko.
What I’m saying is that if the “her” in the song is Yoko, “Bless You” doesn’t just fall apart thematically. It also falls apart grammatically. And this is John Lennon, who bends the English language to his will. He understands better than most people what words mean and how grammar works. And grammar needs to work the same regardless of who’s writing a song — that’s what keeps a song from turning into incomprehensible word salad.
For example, take “I Am the Walrus.” As absurdist as "I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together” is, it works as absurdism only because those pronouns mean what we know they mean, and they work in the line the way we all agree that pronouns work.
John is playing with our perception of identity in “I Am the Walrus,” but he’s not breaking grammatical rules by making words mean something different than we’ve all agreed that they mean. If John was changing what words mean and how the English language works, we wouldn't have any way of understanding the line at all, and it would deteriorate into nonsense. Not absurdism, which is what “I Am the Walrus” is, but actual meaningless, incomprehensible nonsense.
John isn’t writing nonsense in “Bless You.” He’s not even writing absurdism. “Bless You” is a confession and a prayer. The message needs to get through clearly and unambiguously.
I know this is subtle and a little complicated. It twisted my brain, too, and still does — and that is on-the-mark for a John Lennon lyric. So let’s step through the final lines of “Bless You” using the basics of English and musical grammar — which, again, remain the same even if John’s playing with the form.
Here’s the last verse again —
Bless you whoever you are
Holding her now
Be warm and kind hearted
Remember though love is strange
Now and forever our love will remain
If the “her” in the final verse is Yoko, and the “whoever you are” is Yoko’s extramarital lover, and “our love” is John and Yoko, that would mean that after the first two verses in which John is talking directly and intimately to Yoko, he switches — with no lyrical or musical cues to signal the shift — to talking to a nameless lover about Yoko. Which, because it happens at the beginning of a new verse, is scruffy but still barely workable.
But then, for the final two lines — in the middle of both a thought and a verse, and again with no cues to signal the shift — he switches back to talking directly to Yoko about “our love.” And if you're confused yet, well... yeah.
To put it another way, according to the basic rules of grammar, for “Bless You” to be about Yoko, the “you” would have to shift its meaning from referring to Yoko in the first two verses to referring to Yoko’s lover in the first four lines of the last verse, then shift its meaning again for the final two lines of the last verse back to referring to Yoko — all of it with no lyrical or musical cues to signal those changes.
It would be like if I was talking to you and then in the middle of the sentence I started to talk to someone else about you — without any signals to you that I’d switched gears — and then later in the sentence, I switched back to talking directly to you — without any signals to you that I’d switched gears again.
And if that’s really what’s happening here, that’s not subversion of the form or John Lennon playing with words. It's just jaw-droppingly bad writing — and by “bad writing,” I don’t mean “not as good as ‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’” I mean actual incompetence in which the writer literally does not have even a basic grasp of how either musical structure or sentences or pronouns work.
Even in his Lost Weekend drug-fueled haze, even if he’s writing a substandard lyric, John Lennon knows how sentences and pronouns work, and he certainly knows how musical cues in songs work. By the time he writes “Bless You,” he’s been a professional writer at the very top of his craft for a decade. He’s one of the most accomplished and sophisticated lyricists in music history— the writer of “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,” and “Always, no — sometimes think it's me/But you know I know when it's a dream”25 — complex observations on the dissolution of the ego that incontrovertibly require mastery of pronouns and grammar, or those lines wouldn't be what they are.
And if there is truth to the lovers possibility, John would be especially aware of the use of pronouns in a song, given that many of his and Paul’s songs to and about one another would have — out of necessity — altered the grammatical pronouns to conceal their love affair.
The point of all of this madness is that if “Bless You” is about Yoko, then the “her” really can’t be anyone but Yoko, or the song collapses in on itself. And if “Bless You” is about Yoko and the “her” is Yoko, then the song also collapses in on itself, both thematically and grammatically.
To make sense of “Bless You,” we may need to resort to drastic measures. We may need to take John at his word when he says he’s decided only simple, confessional songs are worth writing.
What if John hasn’t done anything complicated here at all? What if the final verse of “Bless You” is saying exactly literally what it says, with no grammatical monkey business? And what if what it says isn’t what we’ve always assumed it says?
John’s also the co-writer of “If I Fell,” another likely JohnandPaul song, though we won’t go into detail about it here. What’s important here is that like “Bless You,” “If I Fell” is also a simple, confessional declaration of love. And more than that, the pronouns in “If I Fell” are used virtually identically to the way they’re used in “Bless You.”
Here’s a verse from “If I Fell.” Notice the use of the pronouns — “you, “her,” and “our.”
If I trust in you, oh please
Don't run and hide
If I love you too, oh please
Don't hurt my pride like her
'Cause I couldn't stand the pain
And I would be sad
If our new love was in vain
Artists tend to use similar patterns across multiple works. All three pronouns in this verse of “If I Fell” — “you,” her” and “our” — are used the same way and in the same order as in the final verse of “Bless You.” And we all understand with no trouble at all that the “her” in “If I Fell” is not the same person as the “you” that the songwriter is falling in love with, and that the “you” is also the “our” of “our new love.” There is no confusion or ambiguity here at all.
So why can we see this so easily in “If I Fell,” but not in “Bless You”?
The answer is, because in “Bless You,” we’re making the assumption up front that the song is about Yoko, because that’s what we expect in a love song written by John after 1968. And more than that, we’ve been conditioned by the culture to assume a love song written and sung by a man is about a woman. And so confirmation bias bends our experience to fit those expectations — even when the actual lyric self-evidently doesn’t line up with that assumption.
This happens a lot when it comes to John and Paul’s songs, both together and solo. To bend the lyrics to our culturally-conditioned expectations, we ignore inconsistencies and rearrange our experience of the song to fit what we think is there, instead of hearing what’s really there.
What I'm saying with all of this is that “Bless You’ can either be about Yoko or it can make sense, but not both. And the only other person it could reasonably be about, given everything else in the song, and given what we know about John and about this time period, is Paul.
But wait, what about the story May Pang tells of John playing “Bless You” for her and telling her it’s about Yoko?
Well, let’s be careful not to make the same mistake on the opposite side, by thinking that if “Bless You” is for Paul, it can’t also be for Yoko. Maybe it’s for both of them.
John works with layers of meaning. Maybe he wasn’t fibbing when he told May “Bless You” was for Yoko. Maybe he just left out the part about how it’s also — or even mostly — for Paul. Yoko isn’t a lyrical genius — and that’s not meant as a putdown, most people aren’t lyrical geniuses — she’d be fine with the surface song, even if it doesn’t actually make sense on closer inspection.
Either way, May Pang has confirmation bias of her own. She’d assume that “Bless You” was for Yoko, whether John told her so or not, and John would know that. And since Yoko put her up to the whole “having an affair with John” thing in the first place, and since May Pang was working as Yoko’s assistant while John was recording Walls and Bridges, John might be especially motivated to let May think “Bless You” is about Yoko.
And knowing that people will see what they expect to see would be why John can get away with putting “Bless You” on the album in the first place without making it obvious that he’s written the deeper shadow song for Paul. John’s counting on everyone — other than Paul — hearing what we expect to hear and assuming it’s for Yoko — and only for Yoko — so as to conceal the deeper meaning of the song in plain sight.
In short, John seems to be hiding a bouquet of red roses in a white room.
If you’re still thinking this sounds like a reach, remember again that this is John Lennon, and as we all know, John is a writer who loves more than anything to play with the meaning of language so as to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate. And also as we all know, he’s a lyrical genius who does that specific thing better than virtually anyone else ever has. None of that goes away just because he’s set a new goal of writing within a simple, confessional form.
And that in and of itself is support for the credibility of the lovers possibility — because what makes more sense? That John Lennon would write a lyric that’s a nonsensical mess, or that John Lennon would write a song that brilliantly seems to have one meaning, but has another entirely different meaning superimposed underneath?
Before we take an even closer look at the final couplet of “Bless You,” there’s a bit more to say about “whoever you are” — which also points us towards the song being for Paul and not Yoko.
“Whoever you are” calls us back to the opening lines, “wherever you are, windswept child on a shooting star,” which we talked about could be a description of Paul caught up in the runaway success of Band On The Run.
Just as John no longer knows for sure where Paul is on any given day, geographically or emotionally, John also maybe no longer knows for sure “who” Paul is. Yes, they’ve to some extent reconciled during the Lost Weekend, but Paul’s life has changed so much since the breakup — a new wife, a new family, a new band, and apparently a whole new wardrobe.
The change in Paul after the breakup is hard to wrap my head around even today. Paul McCartney, the glamorous bachelor prince of Swinging London, leading member of the avant garde counterculture, who dazzled at art openings and theatre premiers became — almost overnight — traditional husband and father-of-two Farmer Paul living on a remote Scottish farm populated by actual literal sheep.
As we’ll see when we get there in the story, that change was probably the sanest thing Paul could have done — and that change, along with Linda, probably saved his life. But it was nonetheless spectacularly disorienting to the rest of the world, including almost certainly John. And it wouldn’t be at all surprising if John was worried that Paul had changed so much that maybe their bond couldn't be rekindled. Maybe that’s the meaning of “whoever you are.”
We’re not quite done with “Bless You” yet. Because there’s still those final two lines —
Remember although love is strange
Now and forever our love will remain
John will write “now and forever” again and more famously in 1980 in “Woman,” and again, we don’t have context yet to talk about that. For now, it’s the first line of the couplet that I want to call our attention to.26
You might assume when John says “love is strange,” he’s generically musing on the unpredictability of love.
Or maybe we’re back to Yoko again, however implausibly — because if there was a stranger high-profile couple in the ‘60s and even the ‘70s than John and Yoko, I’m hard-pressed to think of who it would be. John and Yoko were so strange, in fact, that Richard Neville, the editor of the ‘60s countercultural magazine Oz, who was apparently acquainted with every high-profile freak in England, listed John and Yoko first in his informal rundown of Fabulous Freaks in his 1995 memoir of the Sixties, Hippie Hippie Shake.27
But there’s something more interesting going on with these last two lines than the performative strangeness of JohnandYoko.
Because in “Remember although love is strange,” both the “remember” and the “although” imply that John is referencing something that's been said and shared previously between the two lovers.
We’ve talked about John’s tendency to magpie — to repurpose found material in his songs. And not surprisingly, what he mostly magpies is other songs.28
We’ll talk about the very first ever Lennon/McCartney magpie in the next Rabbit Hole. And another early instance is “There’s A Place,” the title line of which John (and Paul) borrowed from the song “Somewhere” from West Side Story — which is, by the way, a song sung by two lovers separated by a disapproving culture. In “If I Fell,” John (and Paul) obliquely reference “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Then in “Run for Your Life,” John magpies the title from the Elvis song, “Baby, Let’s Play House.” John quotes “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” in “I Am The Walrus,” and he quotes “Fool On The Hill,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lady Madonna” in “Glass Onion,” and Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” in “Yer Blues.” Most notoriously, John magpies the opening line of “Come Together” (along with a good bit of the melody) from the Chuck Berry song, “You Can’t Catch Me.”
The lyrical magpies continue with John’s solo work. We won't go through all of them, but on “Mother,” John borrows “children don’t do what I have done” from the folk song “House of The Rising Sun.” And he magpies the signature lyrical hook from Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me” on “Remember” (which may also be written to Paul, who was in self-imposed exile in Scotland at the time).
John also magpies on Walls And Bridges, the album that “Bless You” is on. There’s a call back to Little Richard’s “Rip It Up” on “What You Got?”, when John sings “Saturday night and I just got paid.” “Old Dirt Road” includes lyrical references to Curtis Mayfield’s “Keep On Keeping On” and Marty Robbins’ “Cool Clear Water.” And “I’m Scared” calls back to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (although that one might not count since by 1973, “like a rolling stone” had entered the language as an expression independently of Dylan’s song).29
You might have noticed the magpie moment in the final verse of “Bless You.”
“Love Is Strange” was written by Bo Diddley and covered by, among others, skiffle star Lonnie Donegan, Mickey & Sylvia, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. But unless you’re familiar with the lesser-known 1971 Wings album, Wild Life, you might not know that Paul also recorded “Love Is Strange.”
Paul’s recording of “Love Is Strange” is in of itself a bit strange. Paul didn’t just record a straight-ahead cover. As he and John often do, he reworked the lyrics — which is why it’s never a good idea to discount cover songs when it comes to John and Paul, and especially relative to the lovers possibility, and we’ll talk more about that in the next Rabbit Hole.
We won’t go deep into Paul’s rework of the lyrics of “Love Is Strange,” but it’s worth noticing just a couple of changes he makes to the original—
First, he changes the opening line, “love, love is strange,” to “baby, love is strange,” and later in the song, to “my sweet baby, love is strange.” This seems like a trivial tweak, but it’s not. It shifts the point of view of the song from an abstract third person musing on love in general to a song sung directly to a specific person — his “sweet baby.” Unlike previous versions, Paul isn’t just talking about love being generically strange, he’s talking to his lover about their love being strange.
Paul and Linda were strange as a couple only in that they were so disconcertingly normal. But if John and Paul were indeed lovers, then as strange as John and Yoko were as a couple, Paul knows that John and Paul as a couple are strange, too — or at least they were in 1974, when a man in love with another man was still considered aberrant by a majority of Brits and Americans. And of course Paul’s also going to be aware that their lives as Beatles overall are strange compared to most people’s, and have been from the time they were both teenagers.
The second significant adjustment Paul makes to the original lyrics of “Love Is Strange” is that he omits the couplet that refers to love as a “fix” he can’t get enough of.
Fix is a term specifically associated with heroin use. And Paul’s omission of that reference in “Love Is Strange” is probably in part his general reluctance to include hard drug references in his songs. He and the other Fabs did after all veto “Cold Turkey,” John’s heroin addiction song, as being inappropriate subject matter for a Beatles album.
But it might be more specific than that.
Paul frequently emphasises in Many Years From Now how concerned and troubled he was by John’s heroin use. The omission of the “love is like a fix” verse might also be motivated by a desire to avoid equating his love for John with John’s heroin habit.30
And finally, Paul changes “a lot of people take it for a game” to “many many people take it for a game.” And it’s at least possible that he’s referencing John and Yoko here, in their performative public love affair — because Paul records “Love Is Strange” only been a few months after the release of “Too Many People,” in which Paul has explicitly told us that the “too many people” of the title refers to John and Yoko.31
Of course, none of Paul’s lyrical changes prove that “Love Is Strange” was recorded as a “whisper through the wall” to John, although they certainly point in that direction. And it’s one more addition to that accumulating body of supporting research that we’ve talked about.
And “Love Is Strange” also reminds us of the need to avoid looking at individual data points in isolation and to look at them in context — because John’s referencing of “Love Is Strange” in the final verse of “Bless You” is yet another clue that “Bless You” is written for Paul.
Just as Paul’s “tell” that he’s writing to and about John seems to involve regret at having not expressed love, one of John’s “tells” that he’s writing to and about Paul seems to be his use of either Lennon/McCartney or Paul’s solo song titles and quotations in John’s own songs.
We’ve already noticed several of these tells — the callback to “I Want To Hold Your Hand” in “If I Fell” — both possible JohnandPaul songs, the possibly ironic “Oh Yoko!” when John quotes “I Call Your Name,” possibly as an aside to Paul. And in “Glass Onion,” which we know was at least partly about Paul because John mentions him by name. And in the next Rabbit Hole, we’ll talk more about “I Know (I Know)” on Mind Games, which contains the line “getting better all the time.”32
John’s most notorious magpieing of “Paul songs” is, of course, in “How Do You Sleep?” — obviously a song about Paul, at least consciously at the time it was written33 — when he rhymes “Yesterday” with “Another Day” — both Paul songs. And “Another Day” in turn makes another appearance on “What You Got?” on Walls And Bridges, another possible Paul song, and yet again — along with a reference to Paul’s song, “My Love” — on “(Just Like) Starting Over”, which is also likely written to Paul, although we’ll need a lot more context to talk about that one.
And of course, “Bless You” includes a magpie of “Love Is Strange.”
If “Bless You” is indeed written to Paul — as it appears to be — it’s a beautiful and haunting exchange of whispers through the wall.
Paul whispers to John with his cover of “Love Is Strange” that, well, that their love is strange, and also that it’s serious, and not the game that the two of them have maybe been playing during the breakup — and/or maybe the game John and Yoko have been playing by performing their marriage as theatre.
John whispers back with the final two lines of “Bless You” — “Remember although love is strange, now and forever our love will remain” — John's message of reassurance and reconciliation, not to Yoko, but — for the rest of the song to make sense — to Paul.
“Bless You” is where we get to choose whether we believe John Lennon is John Lennon, one of history’s most accomplished lyricists, or just some other guy who writes average songs and doesn’t understand how the English language works.
And if John Lennon is the same John Lennon who wrote “Strawberry Fields Forever,” then “Bless You’ is an intricately crafted “shadow song” — with the actual meaning of the song occupying exactly the same footprint as the surface song. And in which the surface song seems to say what the world expects it to say, and the shadow song beneath the surface contains a message intended exclusively for a very special audience of one — the only other songwriter in the world who would understand that message, because he, too, is a master wordsmith, and because he's spent over a decade writing in “entangled form”34 with John.
We’re not quite done yet, though. John has one final lyrical trick up his sleeve, and it’s maybe my favourite thing about “Bless You.”
The first verse of “Bless You” starts with “wherever you are,” and the final verse starts with “whoever you are.” Together, they’re what (for lack of time to research poetry terms) I’m going to call a split couplet — two lines that obviously belong together but are physically separated in the lyric.35
Using a split couplet as a framing device on its own isn’t unique or all that sophisticated. “Split couplets” — or whatever they’re called — are often used at the beginning and end of a lyric as a framing device for the song as a whole. And that’s what “wherever you are/whoever you are" is doing in “Bless You.”
What’s unique and sophisticated is how John uses this particular split couplet. Because instead of subverting the theme of the song as a blessing, he's using the lyrical structure of “Bless You” to reinforce that theme.
This is, once again, a little hard to explain, but stay with me here.
The split couplet — “wherever you are” and “whoever you are” — consists of two lines meant to be together but physically separated, just like the lovers in the song. And further, the language of the split couplet itself — “wherever you are” and “whoever you are” — references both geographical distance and emotional separation — which are the two thickest walls between John and Paul at this point in their relationship (other than cultural disapproval, of course).
What joins the split couplet back together in the lyric is the “hollow ring” middle verse, in which John confesses his remorse for having caused pain and reaffirms the constancy of their love — which is also in real life what’s required for the lovers to reconnect with one another across emotional and geographical estrangement.
By using a split couplet to join the opening verse to the closing verse, John uses the structure of the song to re-create the lyrical theme of separated lovers re-united by their love. The structure of the song echoes the current real life structure of the relationship that the song is about.
This, combined with the shadow song, is stratospherically advanced songwriting that only a handful of songwriters could pull off. And there is no doubt whatsoever that John Lennon is one of those songwriters.
Musically, “Bless You” is obviously missing the McCartney touch (and also the George, Ringo and George Martin touch). But lyrically, it might be one of John’s finest moments as a songwriter. And here's the thing — the lyrical mastery in “Bless You” is only visible when we allow for the possibility that he and Paul were a romantic couple.
This is another example of how the lovers possibility adds complexity and depth to their music that’s not visible otherwise.
When we let go of our expectation that the song is about Yoko and allow for the possibility that it's about Paul, the apparent average-ness of “Bless You” resolves itself, and the song becomes an elegant, intimate confession of love in the face of adversity and separation — consistent with John’s extraordinary and intuitive skill as a lyricist.
Before we move on from “Bless You,” you might have noticed we haven't yet sussed out the identity of the mysterious “her” in the final verse — though perhaps it’s now self-evident who the most likely candidate would be. If the “her” isn’t Yoko, then it’s also not Paul for the same reason it’s not Yoko. And it’s not May Pang, for many reasons — including that when he writes this song, John is the one holding May Pang.
To understand the likely identity of “her” in the final verse means we once again have to get ahead of ourselves and say some things before we’re quite ready to say them.
If “Bless You” is written for Paul, then the “her” in the final verse can only be Linda, as John urges Paul to”be warm and kind hearted” to the woman who’s become Paul’s culturally-approved, public romantic partner in a way that was denied to John, given the prejudice of the times. And that means that —again, if “Bless You” is written for Paul — John is sending this message of goodwill to the woman he’s been jealous of since she first appeared in Paul’s life.
John’s jealousy of Linda is well-documented, though Grail-phobia and fear of softness keeps most writers from calling it what it self-evidently is.36
During the recording of Abbey Road, John climbed over the wall of Paul’s London townhouse to get to Paul, because Paul had skipped a studio session to have an anniversary dinner with Linda. (And, btw, we know this happened because the Apple Scruffs waiting outside Paul’s gate photographed John climbing the wall.)
And it mostly goes unremarked on that after living with Yoko without being married for almost three years — and despite John and Yoko’s stated opposition to the concept of marriage — the day Paul and Linda were married, John declared a wedding emergency. He tried to get a ferry captain to marry them. And when that didn’t work, he chartered a plane to Paris for him and Yoko. And when that didn’t work, he demanded that Apple employee Peter Brown find somewhere that John and Yoko could get married with no delays — which is why they were married in Gibraltar, only eight days after Paul married Linda.37
In two separate letters to Paul during the breakup, John wrote that he gave Paul’s marriage to Linda two years before Paul left Linda and came back to John.38 And in an announcement of Paul and Linda’s wedding in a 1971 Beatles promotional booklet, John crossed out “marriage” and wrote “funeral.”39
To anyone even a little fluent in the language of the Grail, these are obvious and classic signs of jealousy. But perhaps the most telling of all is a 1971 interview in which John reveals — though probably unintentionally — the specific contours of his jealousy of Linda.
John was asked n the interview when he first met Linda and if he got along with her. He answers with the following —
"The first time was after that Apple press conference in America. We were going back to the airport and she was in the car with us. I didn't think she was particularly attractive. A bit too tweedy, you know. But she sat in the car and took photographs and that was it. And the next minute she's married him."
Even more telling, in the same interview, John is then asked about Paul’s marriage to Linda. After a lengthy rant about how — to John’s frustration — teenage Paul was frequently reluctant to disobey his father, John concludes his apparent nonsequitur with—
“I was always saying, 'Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can't hit you.You can kill him (laughs) he's an old man.' I used to say, 'Don't take that shit.' But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, 'I need a steady career.' We couldn't believe it. Once he rang up and said he'd got this job and couldn't come to the group. So I told him on the phone, 'Either come or you're out.' So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me. But it was a long trip."40
The reason we’re talking about this interview — and this is not my original observation, but the work of an excellent scholar and writer in the Beatles studies counterculture — is that John’s answer to what Paul wants in a woman is to tell the story of how Paul chose John over his father when he quit his management trainee job and returned to the band in February 1961.41
We’ll probably devote a whole episode to that time period when we get there in the story. But for now, the thing to notice is that if we factor in the lovers possibility, John’s nonsequitur about Paul being reluctant to disobey his father relative to an answer about Linda isn’t a nonsequitur at all. He’s drawing a clear parallel between Paul having quit the band to work a regular job at the behest of his father, and Paul marrying Linda.
So what’s the connection between the two stories?
If you’re Grail-fluent, you might already see it.
The story about teenage Paul and his father is about Paul having chosen John over the conventional life Paul’s father expected of him, complete with the "steady career.” And when Paul married Linda — at least from John’s point of view — the situation repeated itself, hence the line in “How Do You Sleep?” accusing Paul of “living with straights” (“straight” being ‘60s slang for regular, non-groovy people, rather than a reference to sexual orientation).
But this time, it goes the other way. Paul chooses Linda and the respectable mainstream family life over... well, again, if it’s true that John and Paul were a romantic couple, then presumably Paul chose the conventional life of being a husband and father over the life he’d had — or perhaps could have had — with John.42
We'll talk a lot more about that when we get to that part of the story. For now, back to those last lines of “Bless You.”
If “Bless You” is for Paul — as it seems to be — and if the “her” in the final verse is, in fact, Linda — as it can only be if the song is for Paul — then these last lines are John’s blessing to Paul and Linda’s marriage, on the occasion of John and Paul’s reconciliation.
The Lost Weekend is often made out to be nothing but a drunken, drug-fueled frat boy holiday — the ex-Beatle gone wild. But if “Bless You” is written for Paul (or for Paul and Yoko), then there’s a new maturity in John’s apparent realisation that love is not a matter of either/or, as he made it out to be during the breakup — when it was either Yoko or Paul, because John couldn't figure out how to love both of them at the same time (which in and of itself is something to think about, relative to the lovers possibility).
The final lines of “Bless You” suggest that John has come to see that there’s room in Paul’s heart for both Linda and John — and maybe, given the reconciliation with Yoko on the horizon, that there’s room in John’s heart for both Yoko and Paul.
“Bless You” seems to be John’s newly discovered understanding that despite the many walls between them, his and Paul’s love for one another doesn’t need to be bounded by geography or convention or whether or not they’re Beatles or who they’re legally married to or whether they can hold hands in public.
After years of bitterness and separation, John’s “confession” in “Bless You” — and his “whisper through the wall” to Paul — seems to be that he’s finally understood that there’s more than enough love to go around for everyone, even if the expression of it is sometimes... strange.43
What we’ve looked at in this two-part episode are only a few of the many “whispers through the wall” that run through the music of Lennon and McCartney, from the first song they ever wrote together all the way through to 1980 and even beyond — into Paul’s solo work right up to the present day. And we'll talk about some of those songs in the playlist commentary that will be the companion Rabbit Hole to this episode.
There's probably no way to know if these “whispers through the wall” were the cause of John and Paul’s Lost Weekend reconciliation, or the reflection of it. I expect the answer depends to some extent on the song.
But either way, if “Bless You” is indeed a song for Paul, then it’s not only a healing song for Paul and John (and possibly also for John and Yoko). It’s a healing song — a blessing — for all of us, if we can set aside our fear and our confirmation bias and see what’s actually there, instead of just what we expect to see.
Obviously Lennon and McCartney were transcendently more together than they were apart. This is inevitable, of course. If the music they created together is born from their erotic lifeforce love, then it can only be fully expressed through their intertwined genius.
On his own, John is less musically inventive and Paul is less lyrically imaginative. And each of them separately are simultaneously more careless and more cautious, less innovative and less bold. And of course, what’s missing above all is that indefinable certain something — that magick — that happens only when the two of them write together — and more than that, when the four of them (along with George Martin) record that music together.
But geniuses are still geniuses when they write separately. And the erotic lifeforce love that supercharged that genius didn’t go away when they wrote separately. To dismiss the lovers possibility is to deny ourselves the ability to see and experience the expression of that love — and that genius — in their solo work.
But by opening ourselves up to experiencing songs like “No Words” and “Bless You” through the soft gaze of the Grail, we restore the more complex meaning and artistry in those songs. And in the process, we restore the full genius of Lennon and McCartney, together and separately, to their music.
In a very real way, the lovers possibility offers us the gift of hearing these songs again for the first time in what might be their truer context
And because this is Lennon/McCartney, there’s even more here to notice.
We’ve seen how allowing the possibility of John and Paul as lovers into the story reveals new and more complex layers of meaning in their music. But more than revealing the complexity, their love for one another may well be a big part of what motivated that complexity.
Obviously, their genius was still genius regardless of whether or not they were lovers. And all great artists work with complexity — layers of meaning being a prerequisite for art that endures over generations. But layers of meaning become a necessity when an artist is whispering their love through a wall, in a secret affair that can’t be expressed openly.
Pressure makes diamonds. Genius can shatter under too much pressure, but that same pressure can also force a deeper expression of genius, causing it to evolve more quickly, and in more complex ways, than it would have without that pressure.
The constant, unrelenting pressure of secrecy, combined with a longing to express their love and a drive to create art that’s rooted in truth may have driven Lennon and McCartney to constantly push the boundaries of their genius — compelling them to become masters of double meaning, sophisticated wordplay, and increasingly inventive musical forms in an unusually short amount of time.
If John and Paul were indeed a romantic couple, their love affair may be more than just a means for revealing deeper sophistication in their art — it might be the x-factor for the unprecedented speed with which their music evolved. And that alone justifies including the lovers possibility in the story. Because as “Bless You” in particular shows us, without the lovers possibility, we may be missing most — and possibly the best of— their genius.
There’s a beautiful symmetry here. Opening ourselves to the possibility that John and Paul wrote their love songs for and about one another reveals new complexities in their music that simply aren’t visible otherwise. And in turn, being able to hear these new layers of complexity begins to reveal the traces of the lovers possibility that run through those songs. And it’s in this symmetry that we find the beginnings of healing the wound in this story.
In April of 1982, a little over a year after John’s murder, Paul released the album Tug Of War. “Here Today” on Tug Of War is what Paul calls his “love song to John,” but it’s possible the more intimate “love song to John” on Tug Of War is actually the title song.
There are all kinds of things we could say about the song “Tug Of War” as one of the more obvious and significant JohnandPaul songs, beginning with the title — and we’ll talk more about that song, along with “Here Today,” in the Rabbit Hole.
But as a way of wrapping up our initial exploration of the credibility of the lovers possibility, let’s skip ahead to this verse of “Tug of War” —
In years to come they may discover
What the air we breathe and the life we lead
Are all about
But it won't be soon enough
Soon enough for me
Paul’s right, of course. It's too late to make things right for John and Paul in the way Paul obviously longs for. But it’s not too late for us to heal this story by discovering — as Paul also hopes for in “Tug Of War” — what the air we breathe and the life we lead are all about.
And the answer to that, of course, is love.
We can’t bring John back, not literally. But we can restore his full creative voice — and Paul’s — to the story by recognising that given the depth of their love for one another, whether they acted on that love or not, John and Paul almost certainly wrote many songs about and to one another, beyond the heartbroken bitterness of “Too Many People” and “How Do You Sleep?” And that the songs they wrote for and about one another are so much more complex than we’ve given them credit for in the past.
You probably noticed we didn’t talk about either “Two Many People” or “How Do You Sleep?” — and we’re not going to.
The story of John and Paul as tender and forgiving with one another, working it out in their “whispers through the wall” even during the worst of times, and then finding their way back together, has been lost beneath an obscene focus on the bitterness and anger of “Too Many People,” and especially “How Do You Sleep?” And this despite John having later acknowledged what anyone even partly fluent in the Grail already knew when we first heard it — that “How Do You Sleep?” isn’t about Paul at all, but about John’s own jealousy and insecurity.44 And which is why “Jealous Guy”, the more honest song that’s also almost certainly a song to Paul, appears on the same album.
Like Lennon Remembers, “How Do You Sleep?” is John at his worst, his most wounded and destructive, drug-fueled and exhausted, angry and grieving — which is why it’s time to put “How Do You Sleep?” to sleep, and to let go of thinking there’s anything useful for us there, other than a grotesque fascination with reliving the pain of two deeply wounded hearts struggling to make sense of what the hell just happened.
Just as John deserves better than being defined by his worst moments in Lennon Remembers, John and Paul both deserve better than to have the sum of their relationship written into history defined by its worst moment — especially when there are so many more honest songs available to us, when it comes to understanding their story.
Both Paul and John have told us to look for the truth of their story in their songs. And the songs of Lennon/McCartney, together and separately, tell a story not of rivalry and bitterness and separation, but of partnership, and of tenderness and of love— even when that love and tenderness exists alongside anger and accusations and pain.
We’ve devoted a significant amount of time to exploring the traces of the lovers possibility in their music, including the extended Rabbit Hole that follows. This is in part because the music is where John and Paul have both explicitly told us to look for the truth of their lives. And because of this, it’d be easy to make the mistake of concluding that the credibility of the lovers possibility rests largely on their songs.
But that’s not at all the case.
What I’ve shared with you over the past three episodes, including our exploration of the a priori reasoning based on their photographs and videos, is only a small sample of the research that I’ve gathered over the past three years that supports the lovers possibility. It’s essentially just what could be shared without the context of the story as a whole.
Ultimately, the credibility of the lovers possibility is found in how it resolves the inconsistencies and blank spots in the story as it’s currently told. And we’ll re-tell that story through the frame of the lovers possibility in the second and third parts of Beautiful Possibility.
But even with just what we’ve covered here, I hope you’re starting to see that discounting the possibility that John and Paul were a romantic couple — not even the certainty, just the possibility — requires ignoring the photographs and videos that show John and Paul looking at one another, and expressing physical affection for one another, in obviously erotic ways and counter to the accepted social standards of the time. Dismissing the lovers possibility requires ignoring the implications of what we see between them in public and what we know about the history of the band, given who they both are as men, and the intricate and intimate dynamic of their relationship.
Most of all, dismissing the lovers possibility requires willfully ignoring John and Paul's own words, and the truth of both their genius, and their explicit instructions that their art is where we should look for the truth of their lives.
Every time we turn away from the lovers possibility in favour of the bitterness and rivalry of “Too Many People” and “How Do You Sleep?” and Lennon Remembers, every time we fall for the false and distorted breakup narrative encoded into all of those “definitive’ books, we become the oblivious and cruel audience at the Pyramus and Thisbe skit, laughing at the ridiculous idea of John and Paul in love, and dismissing their pain in having to hide that love. And in dismissing their love for one another, we diminish ourselves — our past, our present, and our future.
We perpetuate our own wounding, when we turn away from love.
But for all its tragedy, Pyramus and Thisbe is at its heart a love story, and all love stories are Grail stories and all Grail stories carry within them the potential for healing.
The story of two lovers separated by a cruel and ignorant culture, whether told in Pyramus and Thisbe, or Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story, is a testament to the enduring power of love to penetrate the stone walls of the heart. And in the case of the riverbed-changing, world-creating love story of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, it’s a testament to the power of love to endure, beyond separation and miscommunication and bigotry and death, and even Grail-phobic Beatles writers and oblivious audience members laughing at the ridiculous idea that John and Paul might be in love.
And while it’s true that this is Paul and John’s story to tell, it seems to me they have told that story — in their songs. They’ve told us that their songs are where we should look for the truth of their story. It’s a question of whether we’re willing to listen.
We can start to heal the wound at the heart of this story by making the choice to listen. We can choose to hear their songs in all of their beautiful, messy complexity, written as they were by two men so determined to express their love to each other through the many walls between them that they accidentally sparked a Love Revolution — because while all love songs are songs for all lovers, there’s extra magick afoot, when two beautiful, wounded geniuses fall in love at a summer church fete, and their hidden musical love letters to one another accidentally become the creation story of a new world.
Until the next time, peace, love and strawberry fields,
Faith ❤️
PS Here’s the playlist for next week’s Rabbit Hole/Playlist commentary—
Also “Martha My Dear” might be a JohnandPaul song — the lyrics certainly fit the emotional arc of their relationship that we talked about in episode 1:5.
You can... ahem... tell which side of that issue I land on. I confess a bias here. Sorry about that.
That The Beatles so tightly limited their inner circle is, of course, largely because of their unprecedented fame. And if John and Paul were lovers, that would have added an additional need for that kind of tightly-constrained inner circle. And it’s notable that of those in the inner circle — which was essentially the four of them plus Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans — neither Mal nor Neil wrote a memoir, though virtually everyone else even tangentially associated with them did.
It’s also worth noting that upon signing a deal to write a memoir in 1975, Mal Evans wrote in his diary, “I was born August 3rd, 1963, in Liverpool. Died May 20th, 1975, crying in a hotel room NY.” (Mal Evans quoted in Living the Beatles Legend, Ken Womack, Harper Collins, 2023.
Here’s what Paul had to say about that press release:
“I didn't want to do a press conference to launch the album because whenever I'd meet a journalist, they always floored me with one question: they'd say, "Are you happy?"' and it almost made me cry. I just could not say, "Yes. I'm happy," and lie through my teeth, so I stopped doing interviews. Peter Brown, who was at Apple at that time, said, "What are you going to do about publicity?"' I said, "I don't really want to do any." He said, "It's a new album. You'll kill it. Nobody'll even know it's out at all. You should do something." I said "Well, how do you suggest we do it?"' He said, "Maybe a questionnaire?"' I said, "Okay, look, you write some questions that you think the press wants to know. Send 'em over to me and I'll fill it out but I can't face a press conference." So the questionnaire came, and Peter Brown realised that the big question was the Beatles so he put in a couple of loaded questions and rather that just say, "I don't want to answer these," I thought, Fuck it. If that's what he wants to know, I'll tell him.”
Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.
NOTE: This is why we only have John’s contemporaneous version of the breakup — he and Paul had opposite coping skills when it came to handling heartbreak. Paul shut down and John went on the defensive. And that’s probably a clue to the underlying causes of the breakup itself.
I choose to believe that Paul releasing “Mary Had A Little Lamb” as a single was intended as “fuck you” irony, in response to the claims that Paul’s music was lightweight. I haven’t researched this enough to have an informed opinion — it’s just my coping mechanism. 😎
Here’s John in 1971—
“Blackburn: On the record, I listened several times to that “My Mummy’s Dead” track and then I suddenly realized it reminded me of something. Then it seemed like perhaps it was “Three Blind Mice.”
Lennon: It was just a feeling. It was almost like a haiku poem. Actually, I got into haiku in Japan just recently. I think it’s fantastic. God, it’s beautiful. We bought some haiku originals when we were there. But obviously when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind, you’re left with a precision. The difference between haiku and Longfellow or something is immense. Longfellow says, “Oh, beautiful yellow flowers standing quietly in the shadowy electric light,” when the haiku would just say, “Yellow flowers in a white bowl on a wooden table” and that gives you the whole picture.
Blackburn: It looks much more simple, but like your music is now, it can in fact be listened to many, many times to get into it.
Lennon: Because people’s perception of reality . . . they’re not used to it, they don’t know what it is. So when a simple haiku or a simple statement is made, they’re not used to it. They’re used to devious intellectual ways of feeling things. I don’t know what people who aren’t intellectuals do to arrive at the point, but they probably go through some mystic Walt Disney scene...
Blackburn: Religion is a very popular need for the reason that you say.
Ono: It’s a convention.
Blackburn: But it’s more than a convention in that people need religion; it covers up the pain.”
Interview with John Lennon, Tariq Ali & Robin Blackburn, January 21, 1971, Tittenhurst Park (Lennon’s home), Berkshire, UK, Excerpts published March 8, 1971, the Red Mole (UK), reprinted in Lennon on Lennon, edited by Jeff Berger, Chicago Review Press, 2017.
And here’s John in 1980—
“ANDY PEEBLES: Do you, and did you, get fed up with people ostracising your lyrics and trying to read marvellously intellectual interpretations into them? Both of you, this must apply to?
JOHN LENNON It was fun, sometimes it's fun but then it gets to be stupid, you know. That’s why I started from the “Mother” album onwards trying to shave off all imagery, pretensions of poetry, illusions of grandeur, I call ala Dylan Dylanesque, you know. I didn't write any of that. Just say what it is, simple English, make it rhyme and put a backbeat on it and express yourself as simply as possible, straightforwardly as possible. As they say, Northern people are blunt, right, so I was trying to write like I am, and— I enjoy the poetic side and I'll probably do a little dabble later because Yoko's lyrics are so poetic.”
Interview with Andy Peebles, December 6, 1980, The Last Lennon Tapes, BBC Press, 1981.
NOTE: I’m not sure why Peebles chose the word “ostracized” — did he mean analyzed? It’s an interesting error, in the context of him suggesting to one of the world’s greatest wordsmiths that it was ridiculous to read deeper meaning into the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney — a textbook example of how music journalists aren’t generally equipped with the tools required to understand art, and yet that’s what they’ve tasked themselves with, and what we now mistakenly expect of them.
“Yesterday” is an example of a masterful haiku song and it might be hiding some complexity of its own, beyond what’s usually considered. For more on this, see Unscrambling "Yesterday"
George Melly, Revolt Into Style, Penguin Press, 1970.
May Pang tells this story in her memoir of her time with John. Loving John, Warner Books, 1983.
”On the day of his decision to make the album, however, none of that had yet been clear to John. All he could say was, “I want to put a song on the album for Yoko and I want a song for you." My song was "Surprise, Surprise," a song John had begun to write the day after we made love for the first time. John played it for me, looking caringly at me while he sang, "I was blind she blew my mind . . . I love her."
When he finished, he asked, "Do you like it?"
Tears were streaming down my cheeks. "Of course I do."
"Do you really like it?"
"I really do." I put my arms around him and kissed him.
“John . . . "
"Yeah?"
“Thank you. Thank you very much. This song is the nicest present you could ever give me."
John seemed very pleased. Then he played me the song he had written for Yoko, a tender ballad that he called "Bless You.”
"Do you think she'll like it?" he asked when he was done.
"It's a beautiful song. She's going to love it."
May Pang, Loving John: The Untold Story, Warner Books, 1983.
The lyrical line “Bless you” is similar to Paul’s “Let it be” and also “This is not a lie” from “However Absurd.” All three are lines that re-centre a lyric from ordinary pop music to sacred space. (There is a lot more to say about “this is not a lie” and its links to the absurdist art of Rene Magritte, and we’ll talk about that a bit in the Rabbit Hole)
“You Are Here” was also the name of John's 1968 art exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London. The way it’s used in the exhibition title may also intend a broader message — the idea of living in the moment. If so, that’s an articulation of the new meta-myth of the Love Revolution — the idea that living here, now, in the present, has value beyond “suffer now, rewards later.”
So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are.”
Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ, ca. A.D. 1440.
John frequently uses geographical metaphor to describe his state of mind. Here’s one example from a late 1967 interview with Hunter Davies —
“If I am on my own for three days, doing nothing, I almost completely leave myself. I'm at the back of my head. I can see my hands and realise they're moving, but it's like a robot who's doing it. I have to see the others to see myself. Then I realise there is someone like me so it's reassuring. We were recording the other night, and I just wasn't there. Neither was Paul. We were like two robots going through the motions.”
The Beatles, Hunter Davies, McGraw Hill, 1968.
As noted in a footnote in a prior episode, I’m an admirer of Yoko’s visual art. But there’s no denying that she would almost certainly never have had the international profile she now has if she hadn’t married John Lennon.
It’s possible “Julia” is also in part about Paul. The first two lines are magpied from Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran — “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.” And that quote apparently had special meaning to both Paul and John—
“There’s a line of ‘Kahlil Gibran’s] that always used to attract me and John, which was ‘Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you.’”Paul McCartney interviewed for Club Sandwich 42, Autumn 1986.
It's at least possible that John has used “child” to describe Paul in a song before, if “Little Child” is written for Paul, given its reference to asking the love interest in the song not to “run and hide.”
https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=windswept retrieved 2-27-25.
It’s worth remembering, too, given John's love of Paris and its meaning in his and Paul’s relationship story (see ep 1:4), that the French title of A Hard Day’s Night was Four Boys In The Wind, and. “windswept” is a pretty good description of all four of them during those frenetic, heady days of Beatlemania. Decades later, Paul would title his exhibition of Beatlemania photographs “Eyes of the Storm.” That’s a more tentative connection, which is why it lives in the footnotes and not in the body of the episode.
All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, interviewer David Sheff, St. Martin's Griffin, Mar 26, 2000.
“SHEFF: “Spread your wings and fly...” No pun?
JOHN: (laughing) No. But you know I nearly took the word “wings” out because I thought, Oh, God! They’ll all be saying, “What’s this about Wings?” It has nothing to do with Wings.”
NOTE: Did Sheff not notice the other references to Paul’s songs in the lyric (which we’ll get to in the Rabbit Hole)? Or did he just choose not to ask about them?
Also, John spends quite a bit of time in the Sheff interview protesting about how he doesn’t care about Wings or about Paul’s music, and how disconnected he and Paul are in 1980. Like, a lot of time. Like, “the lady doth protest too much” a lot of time. And given that we know from his diaries that he was constantly writing about Paul,* we should not make the mistake of believing his protests that he didn’t care what Wings (aka Paul) was doing. And though we don’t yet have the context to go into it, “(Just Like) Starting Over” and the diaries point to some interesting possibilities relative to 1980.
*Fred Seaman, John’s last assistant, in 1981 stole John’s diaries (from 1975,1979,1980) and entrusted them to friend Robert Rosen. When asked about what was in the diaries in a 2000 interview, this is what Rosen said: "What John thought about everybody else, especially Paul, just on and on and on. "What's Paul doing, heard Paul's song on the radio"..."Paul's music is playing in my head", "John thought he had a psychic connection to Paul", "That anytime John heard Paul's music in his head, he thought that meant that Paul was in town".
(Did I just do a footnote to a footnote? Yes, yes, I did.)
“[John and I] weren’t speaking at all by that time. So the only way we could communicate our feelings was through writing songs.”
Paul McCartney interview, Uncut magazine, “My Life In The Shadow Of The Beatles,” July 2004.
The Dick Cavett Show, recorded September 8, 1971, ABC Studios, broadcast Sept 11, 1971, re-published in Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, edited by Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2017—
“Cavett: You know that when you did that week in bed, I don’t know if everyone still knows exactly what happened. I’m sure people think that tremendously lurid things took place, and the press was, I think, expecting—
Lennon: Well, the first time we did it, we did it in Amsterdam. You see, we were getting married. We knew we were going to get married. And we knew we were going to get chased by the press. And Yoko had always been doing things for peace. All her work—like she said, she’d been standing in Trafalgar Square—and she had done lots of different things for peace as an individual. And when she married me, I said, “Look, I’m not going to stand in Trafalgar Square, I’ll get slaughtered.”
So she wanted to work for peace. . . . We had to sit around and think of something we could both do together. We were going to get married, and we knew we had just seen Jackie Onassis and, uh . . . whatever . . . Aristotle and that. And all that chasing that they had . . . we’re not as big as them, but all that chasing that they had, and they couldn’t get away. Even with all those millions, he couldn’t get away. So we thought, a) we are going to be chased, so let’s invite them around.
Ono: Use this! ⬅️(Notice how excited Yoko is about John talking about their publicity plans for their relationship. It’s the most animated she’s been the whole interview.)
Lennon: Let’s use this occasion. Instead of just saying, “Oh, whoopee, John and Yoko got married,” the front page. What? There’s no news in that. Let’s use this. We’re going to be in the papers, let’s use this space, and just say peace instead. So what we did was we invited them to our so-called honeymoon. And they all thought we were going to make love in bed.
Ono: Why did they think that, though?
Lennon: And all the press from all around the world came. And they opened the door, and they’re fighting to get in, you know, like this with their cameras [mimes fighting to get in holding cameras], and then their faces drop when we’re sitting like angels, saying, “Hello. Peace, brother.” And all their faces dropped, and we were just in bed. And we thought it was a great practical joke that most of the world’s headline newspapers, especially the European and British, was, MARRIED COUPLE ARE IN BED. Whoopee. It makes a change.”
And here—
“John and Yoko had already tried a marriage of sorts in an artistic event they described as “An Alchemical Wedding” on December 18, 1968, at the Royal Albert Hall. Dressed entirely in white, they writhed around a bit within a large white bag while their Two Virgins tapes played away in the background.”
Tony Bramwell, Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With the Beatles, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.
In addition, May Pang makes a curious comment in her 1980 interview with Peter Brown and Steven gaines, relative to John returning to Yoko after the Lost Weekend—
“I called Yoko immediately and I wished her the best and I hope it worked out for the second time around. Which it did. We got front-page headlines”
“In the middle of a shave,” John writes in “Oh Yoko!,” “I call your name.” That’s a hard line to take seriously as a declaration of love, especially since “I Call Your Name” is one of Lennon/McCartney’s “mop top” era love songs. While there are other songs written for Yoko that feel sincere and tender, “Oh Yoko!” feels less like a sincere ode to love and more like John taking a swipe at The Beatles during his Breakup Tour — an ironic, biting commentary on the love song as a cliched trope in mainstream culture, during a time when John and Yoko were openly and stridently critical of that culture.
There’s also an interesting “emperor’s new clothes” reference in “What You Got, also on Walls and Bridges.
If you’re familiar with the story, you know that there’s some indication that John had been planning to go to New Orleans to work with Paul on what became the album Venus and Mars. Instead, he returned to Yoko. This is one of the parts of the story that, even factoring in the lovers possibility, doesn’t seem to make sense. And the lovers possibility makes Paul delivering Yoko’s message of reconcilation to John on her behalf make even less sense than it already does, as well.
And relative to “Bless You,” if John returning to Yoko instead of going back to Paul seems at odds with “Bless You” being about Paul, it is... and it also isn’t.
There are possible explanations for all of this. Again, we’ll get to all of that when we get there in the story.
This line is almost always misinterpreted and mis-written. Even on the official Beatles website, it’s written as ‘Always know, sometimes think it's me/But you know, I know when it's a dream.’ But the handwritten first draft of the lyrics on display at Strawberry Field in Liverpool makes it clear that the line is “Always, no — sometimes think it's me/But you know I know when it's a dream.” Which is a far more masterful line, because it plays with the various meanings of “no” and “know.”
May Pang's story of Yoko orchestrating the affair between May and John is s another indication that we are not dealing with a normal marriage here, relative to the “hollow ring” line
Unlike a similar phrase, " now and then,” I’m not sure there's much to talk about relative to “now and forever,” either in “Woman” or “Bless You.” Unless I'm missing something, always possible when it comes to John Lennon, it's a fairly generic reference to fidelity, which makes it not especially relevant to whether “Bless You” Is for Yoko or Paul.
Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, Bloomsbury, 1995.
“Autumn of ‘69 was the time of the Fabulous Freak — John and Yoko, the Easy Riders, the Yippies, the Vietloons, the romanticised patients of mystic psychiatrist R.D. Lang. Previously shunned for their eccentricity, freaks were seen to be ahead of their time, and given their head.”
Lyrical magpies are not, as our contemporary consumerist, ownership-based culture would have us believe, plagiarism.
Before people figured out there was money to be made with copyrights and suing for infringement, there’d been an ancient tradition of borrowing and repurposing lyrics as part of an ongoing musical conversation — maybe best known from the wandering troubadours of the Middle Ages (the same troubadours who created the Grail Legends). It’s a tradition that stretches all the way up to blues music and the folk revival of the early 1960s. What John is doing when he borrows lines from other songs to create new songs is placing himself within that ancient lineage of troubadours, in defiance of the capitalist and consumerist view of music as commercial product that must be owned by a publishing company.
John magpies musically as well. On the album Mind Games, the opening riff on “Only People” is borrowed from “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” which might or might not be another message to Paul. And the same with the opening riff of “I Know I Know,” which borrows from “I’ve Got A Feeling,” which again may be directed to Paul.
On the album Walls and Bridges, the “beep beep yeah” riff from “Drive My Car” reappears at the end of “Surprise, Surprise,” which, given it’s likely written for May Pang, is an interesting commentary on the nature of their relationship (with apologies to May Pang). And the riff from Paul’s regret-and-thus-John song “Let Me Roll It” appears in modified form in “Beef Jerky” — another answering whisper through the wall back to Band On The Run.
Paul frequently talks about his concern about John relative to drug use in his quasi-memoir Many Years From Now (H. Holt, 1997). Here are a few examples—
PAUL: “When John and I used to meet during that [breakup] period, he'd say, 'Do they try and set you against me like they try and set me against you?' And I'd say, 'Yes, often. People'll say, "Oh, did you hear that Lennon threw up before he went on stage in Toronto?" They'd always tell me the juicy things, in case I wanted to go, 'Did he? What a bastard! Well, serve him right, ha, ha, ha.' We'd hear it just as gossip and derive some petty satisfaction from it, but on a deeper level it was like, 'Yes, but the amount of drugs he was on, he would be throwing up just with the drugs, never mind anything else. He might have tried to not have his heroin that day and I guess you're going to throw up." The two of them were on heroin, and this was a fairly big shocker for us because we all thought we were far-out boys but we kind of understood that we'd never get quite that far out. I don't think people understand what was happening, but there was a lot of affection still.”
and also—
It’s easy to think of John as rebellious and edgy for his drug use, and Paul as less edgy for his caution. But that way of thinking is blind (Grail-blind, in fact) to the reality of what it would have been like for Paul to be the intimate partner — creative or romantic — of an emotionally unstable drug addict (is there any other kind?).
Paul has said that his reluctance to indulge in mind-altering drugs was because he’d heard that drugs could permanently change the way his brain worked, and that he was concerned it might disrupt his creative ability to compose. That’s a legitimate concern, especially given he’s Paul McCartney.
But Paul’s reluctance to take LSD may have been more than just his stated personal reluctance to risk his artistic abilities by messing with his consciousness.
Remember what we talked about in a prior episode — that John has acknowledged that Paul was the only one, along with Brian, who was able to keep John emotionally and psychologically stable enough to function in the band - and in life in general.
Like any codependent partner of an addict, Paul didn’t have the luxury of letting himself float away. He simply couldn't afford to indulge himself with uppers or LSD — not if he was going to be John’s emotional tether to reality. Paul had to keep his head clear — he had to, to borrow a phrase from the Beatles studies counterculture, “anchor the haze” — if he was going to keep the band together by keeping John functional and more than that, keep John alive.
I imagine Paul might have lost some sleep, when he and John weren’t physically in the same place, worrying that he might overdose, either deliberately or accidentally. As any co-dependent partner knows, that doesn’t leave room for trippy, reckless behaviour — and only someone without fluency in the language of the Grail would criticize Paul for being cautious in reaction to John’s recklessness.
All of which, btw, is perhaps a clue to Paul’s otherwise puzzling and even bizarre role in carrying Yoko’s message of reconciliation back to John during John’s Lost Weekend — when John had once again spun off into self-destructive and dangerous behavior. But we’ll get to all of that in time.
Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022. (“Too Many People”).
“This song was written a year or so after The Beatles’ breakup, at a time when John was firing missiles at me with his songs, and one or two of them were quite cruel. I don’t know what he hoped to gain, other than punching me in the face. The whole thing really annoyed me. I decided to turn my missiles on him too, but I’m not really that kind of a writer, so it was quite veiled. It was the 1970s equivalent of what we might today call a ‘diss track’. Songs like this, where you’re calling someone out on their behaviour, are do – telling me, for instance, that I ought to go into business with Allen Klein. I just got fed up with being told what to do, so I wrote this song.”
My creative partner is convinced “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” is about Paul. I’m not convinced — yes, it includes the phrase “getting better,” but “getting better” isn’t quite the same as “getting better all the time.” In this case, John is probably referencing the affirmation popularized by French psychologist Émile Coué, which was in the zeitgeist at the time — “Every day and in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
Still, the parenthetical in the title does suggest a song written for more than one person, and there is the episode of “Desert Island Discs,” in which of all possible songs, Paul selects “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” as his “John song” on the list, and then struggles to hold back tears as its played. So it’s at least possible that it’s a more conventional “double song” for Sean and for Paul.
“‘How Do You Sleep?’ is not about Paul, it's about me. I'm really attacking myself. But I regret the association, well, what's to regret? He lived through it. The only thing that matters is how he and I feel about these things and not what the writer or commentator thinks about it. Him and me are okay.”
John Lennon interview with Bob Harris, The Old Grey Whistle Test, BBC, March 1975.
“Entangled form” is a term used by Nick Cave in his book, Faith, Hope and Carnage (Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022) to describe a deeply intertwined, long-term creative partnership in which the two partners begin to take on the voice of their partner mixed with their own. This is discussed relative to Lennon/McCartney in Rabbit Hole: There’s no such thing as a ‘John song’ or a ‘Paul song.’ https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/rabbit-hole-theres-no-such-thing
Paul uses a similar device in “Here, There and Everywhere,” which perhaps not coincidentally, has been named by both John and Paul as their favourite of Paul’s Beatles songs.
John’s jealousy of Paul’s romantic partners started early.
“One time Paul had a chick in bed and John came in and got a pair of scissors and cut all her clothes into pieces and then wrecked the wardrobe.” (George Harrison quoted in Anthology, Apple/Chronicle Books, 2000.)
I need to say here that of all of the research that gets ignored in terms of its implications relative to John and Paul as a romantic couple (or at the least, John being in love with Paul), this one is easily near the top of the list.
Also, one of the pieces of research I haven’t been able to verify is a quote from Harry Nilsson, when he was asked why John didn’t like Linda. Harry’s answer allegedly was, “He didn’t want to fuck Linda, he wanted to fuck Paul.” Again, I have NOT verified this quote, so please don’t re-quote it. But if anyone out there knows the source, please let me know.
“One week and one day after Paul married Linda, I received a phone call from John. He and Yoko were at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris and wanted to get married, immediately. People believe that John’s desire to get married so soon after Paul’s marriage was a knee-jerk reaction. Perhaps it was psychologically about breaking up with Paul. When things were at their worst between them, John once said to Paul, “I want a divorce from you like I got from Cynthia.”
Peter Brown quoted in All You Need Is Love, Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, St. Martin’s Press, 2024.
The first mention is in a November 20, 1971 letter published in Melody Maker on December 7, 1971—
“You were right about New York! I do love it; it's the ONLY PLACE TO BE. (Apart from anything else, they leave you alone too!) I see you prefer Scotland! (MM) -- I'll bet you your piece of Apple you'll be living in New York by 1974 (two years is the usual time it takes you -- right?)”
The second letter is in another 1971 letter to Paul—
“Of course, the money angle is important—to all of us—especially after all the petty shit that came from your insane family/in laws—and GOD HELP YOU OUT, PAUL—see you in two years—I reckon you’ll be out then—in spite of it all, love to you both, from us two.”
NOTE: I don’t know what the “two years” reference is. It’s clearly an inside reference between John and Paul, one of many that we’re probably never going to understand.
“In an AP article dated July 20, 1986 about the auction of a Beatles promotional booklet: “In an entry noting McCartney’s marriage to Linda Eastman, Lennon crossed out “wedding” and wrote “funeral”, the Observer said.
NOTE: It’s surprisingly difficult to find the original article, but there are enough external confirmations of both the article and the “funeral” graffiti that I feel confident it’s accurate, especially since Sotheby’s auction house lists the sales price and buyer of the item (though not with a photo).
And while we’re on the subject, it’s way past time that we stop putting pieces of this story into the hands of private collectors as if they were baseball cards. Even without the mythological importance of the story, the music and story of The Beatles is easily on par with Shakespeare (and probably greater) in its cultural influence as having sparked the Love Revolution. These documents are better held in a scholarly library like the Folger Shakespeare Library than in the hands of private collectors. (and on a personal note, why would anyone want a keepsake like that anyway, given how rooted it is in grief and pain?
John Lennon, interview with Peter McCabe and Robert Shonfeld, September 4, 1971.
full quote:
“Q: But for a while you didn't get along with Linda.
JOHN: We all got along well with Linda.
Q: When did you first meet her?
JOHN: The first time was after that Apple press conference in America. We were going back to the airport and she was in the car with us. I didn't think she was particularly attractive. A bit too tweedy, you know. But she sat in the car and took photographs and that was it. And the next minute she's married him.
And a bit further down in the same interview—
Q: You and Paul had this huge falling out. Were there always huge differences between you and Paul, or was there a time when you had a lot in common?
JOHN: Well, Paul always wanted the home life, you see. He liked it with daddy and the brother... (sic) and obviously missed his mother. And his dad was the whole thing. Just simple things. He wouldn't go against his dad and wear drainpipe trousers. And his dad was always trying to get me out of the group behind me back, I found out later. He'd say to George, 'Why don't you get rid of John, he's just a lot of trouble. Cut your hair nice and wear baggy trousers,' like I was the bad influence because I was the eldest. So Paul was always like that. And I was always saying, 'Face up to your dad, tell him to fuck off. He can't hit you. You can kill him (laughs) he's an old man.' I used to say, 'Don't take that shit.' But Paul would always give in to his dad. His dad told him to get a job, he dropped the group and started working on the fucking lorries, saying, 'I need a steady career.' We couldn't believe it. Once he rang up and said he'd got this job and couldn't come to the group. So I told him on the phone, 'Either come or you're out.' So he had to make a decision between me and his dad then, and in the end he chose me. But it was a long trip.
NOTE: “Chose me.” Not “he chose the band” or even “he chose music,” but “he chose me.”
This is one of the most nonsensical time periods as the story is currency told — this incident takes place only a month after the Litherland show that kicked off Beatlemania, when the Fabs were the top band on the Merseyside and playing multiple gigs a day, and it makes no sense at all for Paul to quit the band for the reasons given. And yet, he did — and the lovers possibility gives us an answer for why. We’ll get there.
The Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized sex between men in the UK, was passed by Parliament on July 27, 1967. (though, of course, it shouldn’t go without saying that decriminalising something doesn’t remove its cultural stigma, and John would likely have cared a lot less about that stigma — and how it would have affected The Beatles, than Paul did. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.)
It’s hard to even make an educated guess as to whether either John or Paul would have been familiar with the term, but “strange love” had been a polite society euphemism for same sex love since the turn of the century.
“‘How Do You Sleep?’ is not about Paul, it's about me. I'm really attacking myself. But I regret the association, well, what's to regret? He lived through it. The only thing that matters is how he and I feel about these things and not what the writer or commentator thinks about it. Him and me are okay.”
John Lennon interview with Bob Harris, The Old Grey Whistle Test, BBC, March 1975.
NOTE: As far as I’m aware, this is the only time John has ever explicitly apologised for anything he said during his Breakup Tour. He retracts a lot of stuff, explicitly acknowledging that he deliberately lied or that he only meant it in passing. But this is his only apology, and that is in and of itself, significant relative to his relationship with Paul and to “How Do You Sleep?”
John seems to have had only a passing awareness that his words in interview had an effect on people. Despite the impact of the “Jesus comment,” he seemed perpetually surprised that people would take him seriously, and so he wasn’t careful with his words in interview, feeling like they were transitory and insubstantial rather than a permanent record of his thoughts. And he likely assumed that Paul felt the same (Paul did not feel the same.)
But songs were a different story. John knew that. John was not careless in his lyrics. He understood the weight of songs, which is why he chose lyrics as the primary way to speak his truth about himelf and how he felt about the world. So he would have understood in a way he didn’t that “How Do You Sleep?” did harm. Which is probably why it’s the only thing from his Breakup Tour that he publicly apologised for.
Another reason to put “How Do You Sleep” to sleep. It seems clear that John would have wanted it that way.
