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The Dance of Power
It makes intuitive sense that the subordinate alpha—that paradoxical creature—would recur in high-level creative pairs. Having a clear alpha lays a foundation of clarity. Yet adding a second alpha to the mix—who will defer only to his partner and, even then, with the odd, bottled-up energy of someone acting decidedly out of character—injects the dynamic with the possibility of surprise.
When I came to recognize this, I understood how the great success and great turmoil of John Lennon and Paul McCartney were both parts of the same dance: how leery regard ran alongside genuine alliance; how intimate enmity joined with rivalrous affection.
I use dance as a metaphor but it is not far from the literal truth. There were certain steps that repeated in a reliable sequence over time. Like the approach and withdrawal of an actual dance, the basic moves were challenge and accommodation. But there were also definite reversals, when the leader let the follower carry him.
Though what came before and after it was prodigious, I think it’s safe to say that there were two creative peaks in the Lennon-McCartney partnership as songwriters and bandleaders: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles (commonly known as The White Album). These records differ from each other sharply. And they were radically different experiences for the musicians, producers, and engineers involved. In popular lore, Pepper is the apogee of union between John and Paul. The White Album, which Paul called “the tension album,” looks like the peak of discord.
But as we’ve seen, unity and conflict are mingled in pairs. Opposition (and all its attendant emotions) is an integral part of creation, even more on the whole than cooperation. The goal throughout Part V has been to conceive of how to unify these qualities, how to consider them together.
Most stories will sharply demarcate enemies and require one or the other to triumph in a finite struggle. These sorts of stories are linear. You can literally draw them out on a line (as screenwriters do in a common exercise) with slashes along the way: a journey begins; challenges are met; defeats or triumphs ensue, leading to great changes.
The shape of the Lennon-McCartney relationship was more like a spiral, the repetition of a certain pattern with ascending complexity. (Imagine the spiral here as three-dimensional, like “the widening gyre” of William Butler Yeats. ) To understand their late great moves—to see just how cooperation and competition played out in their great achievements—we need to look at the pattern over time. When we do it, we see the truth is that the Sgt. Pepper sessions and the White Album sessions were very much part of the same dynamic. They just came at different points in a distinct cycle.
Back in 1957, Paul joined the band with John as its leader. He accepted those terms, perhaps in part out of political dexterity, but also because he found it natural to defer to John. “In those days,” Cynthia Lennon wrote, “Paul tried hard to impress John, posing and strutting with his hair slicked back to prove that he was cool . . . [John] was everything Paul wanted to be—laid-back, self-assured and in charge. As the schoolboy he still was, Paul could only aspire to those things.”
In the months that followed, Paul taught John guitar chords—he’d been playing banjo chords on his guitar the day they met—helped him develop as a songwriter, and began to make suggestions for the band. John was the band’s leader, but Paul and John established themselves as a unit, and Paul often operated as John’s proxy. He appointed himself the band’s PR man, for example.
The immense opportunity and vulnerability of Paul’s position is that it was never exactly clear how far John would let him go. In Hamburg, John developed a signature move: while Paul was crooning at the front of the stage, he would creep around in the back, twist up his face, and make a spectacle of himself. One time, with Paul in the midst of a serious spoken-word piece in the bridge of a song, John stopped the band cold. “They sent me up rotten,” Paul said, “especially John. They all but laughed me off the stage.” This was John letting Paul know he was boss.
By Hamburg, the complexity of their positions was growing. Casual observers tended to view Paul as the leader, said their friend Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer and artist. Paul “was by far the most popular with the fans,” she said. “He always did the talking and the announcing and the autograph bit.” When the band auditioned for Parlophone Records, George Martin considered them in the mold of rock groups with a single leader and thought, at first, that the natural frontman would be Paul.
But in the inner circle, the real locus of power was unmistakable. “John of course was the leader,” Astrid Kirchherr said. “He was far and away the strongest.”
As much as Paul pushed John—and put himself out front—he also made his deference explicit. In the band’s first-ever radio interview, a DJ named Monty Lister asked each member of the band what instrument he played. When George Harrison said “lead guitar,” Lister asked him: “Does that mean that you’re sort of the leader of the group?”
“No, no,” George said. “Just . . . well, you see, the other guitar is the rhythm. Ching, ching, ching, you see.”
Paul broke in. “He’s solo guitar, you see. John is, in fact, the leader of the group.”
But Paul often led the leader. Consider the moment Paul’s brother, Michael, cited as an illustration of his “innate sense of diplomacy.” It was in Paris in 1964. George Martin had arranged for the band to record “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in German. When the band missed their studio appointment, Martin came around to their suite at the George V hotel. They played slapstick and dived under the tables to avoid him.
“Are you coming to do it or not?” Martin said.
“No,” Lennon said. George and Ringo echoed him. Paul said nothing.
“Then a bit later,” Michael said, “Paul suddenly turned to John and said, ‘Heh, you know that so-and-so line, what if we did it this way?’ John listened to what Paul said, thought a bit, and said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’” And they headed to the studio.
How would we chart the lines of authority for this decision? You could say Lennon made the call to refuse the recording session, then reversed himself, the band following him both times. But Paul was the real mover. That he avoided a direct confrontation only underscores his operational strength. “John was the noisiest of the four,” said Tony Barrow, who helped handle press for the band. But Paul “was the most persuasive, and the one who wielded the real power with Brian Epstein. John would make a lot of noise,” Barrow said, “but not get his own way. Then Paul would go in and persuade Brian that what John had suggested was the right thing to do.”
Every pair has its own power dance, a choreography of thrusts and parries, of dips and turns, that shapes its way of moving across life’s stage. These steps may play out in an afternoon, but we can also look at their broad outline over time. For Lennon and McCartney, the pattern looked like this:
To see John reasserting control, let’s return to the matter of their songwriting credits. We’ve seen that the two quickly agreed to co-own their work. But that left the question: How would the credit line be written? According to the Beatles authority Mark Lewisohn, the contract—drafted in 1962—reflected an understanding that whoever led the effort on any given song would have his name go first on that song. Accordingly, the first contract with their music publisher, for the songs “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You,” both of which Paul had initiated, had McCartney’s name first. All of the eight originals on their first LP, Please Please Me, released in March 1963, are listed on the album as McCartney-Lennon.
Then John changed his mind. He and Brian Epstein met with Paul and told him that the credit would now read Lennon-McCartney.
From Paul’s many accounts of this conversation, it’s clear that he felt blindsided. “I said: ‘Whoooooah. What about McCartney-Lennon?’” he recalled. “They said: ‘It just sounds better as Lennon-McCartney.’ I said: ‘McCartney-Lennon sounds pretty good.’”
But he came to acquiesce. “I stepped down,” he told Coleman.
Anyone who wants to understand how Lennon-McCartney worked—how they thrived and how they suffered—should look closely at this exchange, because it not only suggests the pattern between the two of them but also points to the complex internal dynamic that each individual had with respect to power. As we survey the complications in relationships, we also need to remember that each individual is a bundle of complications, even paradoxes. The relationships take shape from those individual characteristics, and the individual characteristics are shaped by the relationship.
John Lennon was an exceptionally dominant personality who nevertheless depended, also to an exceptional degree, on connections with others. From his early childhood, he needed to be the boss of any situation. But he couldn’t stand to be alone. “Though I have yet to encounter a personality as strong and individual as John’s,” said his friend Pete Shotton, “he always had to have a partner.” As we’ve seen, he hardly felt like he existed when he was alone. He would push his friends—be rough with them, even brutal. But he could not stand to see them go.
He lived at the extremes of both dominance and submission.
Paul harbored his own paradox, which was the inverse of John’s. On the face of it, he was all deference and affable charm—and he did have a genuine willingness to take direction from prevailing winds. But this masked a determination to come out on top, and perhaps even a deep sense of isolation in his psyche. Unlike John, who went out of his way to show his aggression (it often was his way of covering up vulnerability), Paul went out of his way to keep his aggression hidden. When he was angry at his parents as a boy, he told Hunter Davies, he would sneak up to their room, rip the edge of the lace curtains, and think to himself: “That’s got them.” While Paul’s public persona is affable and diplomatic, people who know him well call him “hard to get to know” and “controlling.”
To watch how Paul has returned over the years to the credit issue is telling. In his solo years, he has raised the subject many times in interviews and has acted repeatedly to reverse the credit order. He has admitted a “slight resentment” that his name goes second on songs like “Yesterday” and insisted that “I have learned not to mind.” It’s obviously not true that he has learned not to mind; if he had, he wouldn’t keep bringing it up. He’s also told the story of his exchange with Brian and John in a variety of ways, in one instance noting that he had had the idea “since” the meeting that the songs should be credited differently; in another instance asserting that Brian and John assured him in the original meeting, “We’ll do this for now and we can change it around to be fair at any point in the future.”
An interview Paul gave for the Beatles Anthology project, in the mid-1990s, is especially revealing. McCartney gave the backstory that, before the credit issue was decided, in 1963, John and Brian had gone away on holiday to Spain. This trip has often been alluded to as an erotic adventure, and in fact John conceded several times that they had sexual contact. “John was a smart cookie,” Paul said. “Brian was gay, and John saw his opportunity to impress upon Mr. Epstein who was the boss of this group. I think that’s why he went on holiday with Brian . . . He was that kind of guy; he wanted Brian to know whom he should listen to. That was the relationship. John was very much the leader in that way, although it was never actually said.”
With John and Paul—as in so many relationships—so much was never actually said. As the dance metaphor suggests, what matters was not what they explained to each other, or even understood of each other, but how they moved with and around each other.
John’s move to claim the lead position in the credits was part of a period, from roughly 1963 to 1965, where he also asserted himself as a songwriter. Though John and Paul both had hits in this era, John had the slight edge, and considering that he had previously been the junior partner to Paul as a songwriter, it reflected a real comeback. Paul’s reaction was to elevate his own game, and they went on like this, getting better all the time.
We’re ready, now, to return to where we started in this book’s prelude—to a moment of chemistry between John Lennon and Paul McCartney so piquant that it set the tone for their whole relationship. On March 29, 1967, they spent five hours in the music room of Paul’s house on Cavendish Avenue. By the end, they had mostly finished the lyrics for a new song, one meant for Ringo Starr to sing on their next album. In between bouts of trading ideas and playing alongside each other, they horsed around with songs from their stage days in Hamburg, and Paul played for John, for the first time, the song that became “The Fool on the Hill.”
From Paul’s place to the EMI Studios on Abbey Road was a few minutes’ drive. John, Paul, George, and Ringo met there, started work around 7:00 p.m., and went until 5:45 a.m., by which time they had recorded ten takes of “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The next day, they assembled before the photographer Michael Cooper, who shot them in old-style band costumes of yellow (John), pink (Ringo), turquoise (Paul), and red (George) against a background designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth with cutouts of figures from Marilyn Monroe to Karl Marx to Stuart Sutcliffe. It was for the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
“It was a peak,” Lennon said of the album. “Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on ‘A Day in the Life.’” Indeed, that song brought into one track all the singularity and variation of their partnership. Far from the simple joining of two fragments—as lore has it—the song is two distinct pieces, but they were developed and shaped together, all in a spirit best captured by John’s remark in 1968: “Now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song.” “The way we wrote a lot of the time,” he said later, “you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.”
“A Day in the Life” showed how they could enter the same room, but from different doors. The fragment John led on looked with amazement and abstraction on the events of everyday life; Paul’s looked directly at everyday life until amazement and abstraction struck like a blow.
The Pepper sessions ran from November 1966 to April 1967 and included what the engineer Geoff Emerick estimated to be more than seven hundred studio hours, on top of copious sessions for Paul and John, in which they shaped every song on the album. John initiated “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” after he saw a drawing his son Julian made. He showed the picture to Paul—they both saw the chance to play with imagery like that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—and they finished the song together. “I offered ‘cellophane flowers’ and ‘newspaper taxis,’” Paul said, “and John replied with ‘kaleidoscope eyes’ . . . We traded words off each other, as we always did.” When Paul sang a song with the chorus “Getting better all the time,” as Paul tells it, “John just said in his laconic way, ‘It couldn’t get no worse,’ and I thought, Oh, brilliant! This is exactly why I love writing with John.”
It’s crucial that, for both men, prodigious aggressive energies had an outlet in the creative work itself. This is a critical distinction between pairs who work well with conflict and those who suffer greatly from it. I think of this quality of exchange as “domesticating the tension,” making whatever animosity exists between a pair into the work itself and thus a source of greater intimacy and creativity.
The artists Lisa and Janelle Iglesias offer another glimpse of this principle in action. Though they have individual art practices, they work together as Las Hermanas Iglesias, exploring joint interests in what Lisa called “fusion and hybrids and bi-culturality.” Janelle is a year younger, “though most of the time people think we’re twins,” Lisa told me. At first, when I asked Lisa whether they were competitive, she didn’t miss a beat: “No,” she said. “We’ve never been. We’ve always really looked up to each other and wanted to emulate each other in a lovely way.” This was one of my first interviews for the book and at the time I just thought, Hmmm. I guess some pairs don’t have that. But as I explored the Iglesias sisters’ work, I saw that the performances often played out competitive scenarios in exaggerated and silly ways. They filmed a contest to see who could put on an entire suitcase’s worth of clothes first. They competed to see who could stuff the most cherries in her mouth. They made piñatas, one for Lisa and one for Janelle, and then beat each other’s piñatas into a pulp. But what stayed with me most from the interview wasn’t the work itself—it was Lisa’s broad smile when she talked about it. This was fun. When I told her about research on how fighting can be a source of bonding, she said, “Yeah, one of the things we do when we’re having arguments is play Ping-Pong.”
“And the person who wins gets their way?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “We don’t even keep score. It’s just a way to take our aggression out.”
Paul McCartney ran the Sgt. Pepper sessions, with John by his side. One night, for instance, when they were working on “Getting Better,” the engineers played the track “over and over again,” wrote Hunter Davies, while George Harrison went off to chat with a friend. Ringo Starr was off that night; they had a backing track and intended just to do vocals. “Paul and John listened carefully,” Davies wrote. “Paul instructed the technician which levers to press, telling him what he wanted, how it should be done, which bits he liked best. George Martin looked on, giving advice where necessary. John stared into space.”
After they played the song for what seemed, to Davies, “the hundredth time,” Paul said he wasn’t happy with it and that they’d better get Ringo in to do it all over again. Then Paul suggested a new mix, and after that he said that he was pleased; they didn’t need Ringo after all.
“But we’ve just ordered Ringo on toast,” John joked.
This was typical. John and Paul brought in the songs they’d worked out in private, and, as a leadership unit—but with John as the dreamy king and Paul as the fervent deputy—they brought them to life.
The depth and character of the relationship between them can be seen in the unusual turn of events of that same session. Late that night, after they’d sung “Getting Better” for what seemed to Davies “the thousandth time, ” John rifled through his silver pillbox, where he kept a range of stimulants. “‘He would open it up,” Paul remembered, “and choose very precisely: ‘Hmm, hmmm, hmmm. What shall I have now?’”
Soon thereafter, John said he felt “very strange.” George Martin suggested some fresh air, and he took him to the roof, where John admired the stars with an enthusiasm Martin found puzzling. John had accidentally taken a large dose of LSD.
With his trip in full swing, John felt nervous—and needed a lot of reassurance. They decided to knock off at two in the morning, which was early for them in those days, and Paul brought John back to his house. John could count on this: If something went bad, Paul would take care of it. If John made an audacious request, Paul would translate it. If John said something ugly to George Martin or someone else in the studio, Paul would smooth it over. If John accidentally took a large tab of LSD, Paul would take him home.
Except, this night, Paul decided to take the next step. “I thought, ‘Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him,’” Paul remembered. “It’s been coming for a long time.”
When Paul took his tab, he recalled, “we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mind-boggling . . . It was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person.”
Like dreams or the themes that emerge in stream-of-consciousness writing, the preoccupations that come to people on acid trips can be enormously revealing. Paul spent much of his trip moving between his house and the garden. “Oh no, I’ve got to go back in,” he would tell himself. “I’ve got to do it, for my well-being.” And in the meantime, he said, “John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. . . .” Finally, after four or five hours, Paul cried uncle and said he wanted to go to bed.
“Go to bed?” John said. “You won’t sleep!”
“I know that,” Paul said. “I’ve still got to go to bed.” And as he lay there, “I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.”
The resonances here with his remarks made while quite sober are palpable: “I always idolized him,” Paul said of John. “We always did, the group. I don’t know if the others will tell you that, but he was our idol.
“We were all in love with John,” he said.
The other force that animated the creative triumph with Sgt. Pepper was external. A common enemy—as much as a common goal—can channel and dissipate tension. Just look at the sci-fi movies where enemy nations suddenly gather together to fight the Martians. For John and Paul, the Martians were a group from Southern California called the Beach Boys, whose album Pet Sounds they heard in May 1966. The album “blew me out of the water,” McCartney said. “Without Pet Sounds,” George Martin said, “Sgt. Pepper . . . wouldn’t have happened. Revolver was the beginning of the whole thing. But Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds.”
As the Beatles worked on Sgt. Pepper, the Beach Boys’ maestro, Brian Wilson, worked on his next album, Smile.
When Wilson heard the first results of the Pepper sessions—“Strawberry Fields Forever”—he was in Los Angeles driving to the Dolores Restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard for a burger and fries. He had to pull the car to the side of the road. “I locked in with it,” he said of the song. He shook his head and said to his friend in the car, “They did it already.”
“What I wanted to do with Smile. Maybe it’s too late.”
Brian Wilson ended up falling into a serious depression. Smile would take him more than thirty-five years to complete. It’s a poignant story, in part because he didn’t have anyone in his own circle who could check and balance him, challenge and buoy him, the way John and Paul did for each other. He was in his own world. And in a way, this is the problem that came to the Lennon-McCartney partnership. By beating back all competition, they led themselves into a world of their own. Where do you go from the top of the world?
This was the question that both John and Paul were asking themselves in the fall of 1967, and the answers they came up with, and the paths they went down, led them to the next phase of their relationship. It is often portrayed as the beginning of the end, but that’s not the best way to understand it. Rather, it was a continuation of the dynamics they had established essentially the moment they met.
Paul’s preoccupations were what could the band do next, what new media could they conquer, what other vistas. For a boy-king like him—twenty-five years old and among the most successful entertainers in history—there was a fine line between confidence and grandiosity, and he certainly rode that line hard in late 1967 and 1968—dreaming up a new film for the Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, that they would direct themselves, and a business enterprise, called Apple Corps, that would expand the band’s vision into record and film production, electronics, and retail.
John signed on without fuss to Paul’s plans because he had a very different goal in mind. From the time of Revolver forward, he had been preoccupied with the saving power of acid, which subdued his aggressive nature. “Even a couple of years ago,” Ivan Vaughan told Hunter Davies in 1967, “the old animosities were still there: refusing to talk to anybody, being rude, slamming the door. Now he’s just as likely to say to people, ‘Come in. Sit down.’” By the time of the Sgt. Pepper sessions, Geoff Emerick wrote, “it was evident that John’s personality was changing. Instead of being opinionated about everything, he was becoming complacent; in fact, he seemed quite content to have someone else do his thinking for him, even when he was working on one of his own songs . . .
“No doubt Paul was aware of the situation,” Emerick wrote, “and he was seizing the opportunity to step in and expand his role within the band.”
Lennon was still in his accepting phase, standing by. As much as he was pleased with Sgt. Pepper—he clearly thought it was the best thing the Beatles had ever done—he was often in a state of psychological distress, even spiritual malaise. One night, he locked himself in his bathroom and begged God to reveal himself. “I just fucking got down on me knees,” he said, “and I cried, ‘God, Jesus or whoever the fuck you are—wherever you are—will you please, just once, just tell me what the hell I’m supposed to be doing.”
It was a sign of his vulnerability that he became entranced with Alexis Mardas, a fast-talking Greek native whom John met through the scene around the Indica Gallery. Mardas was a television repairman, but he had big visions of electronic wonders, including wallpaper loudspeakers, an artificial sun, and a flying saucer he would coat with magic paint to make it invisible. John called him “Magic Alex” and he introduced him to Paul as “my new guru.” (“But I didn’t treat him that way,” Paul said. “I thought he was just some guy with interesting ideas.”)
It was George Harrison who brought the next guru into their circle, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a little dervish of a man, an inveterate giggler, an entrepreneurial wizard who developed Transcendental Meditation and began to teach it on world tours. In February 1968 all four Beatles decamped to his ashram in Rishikesh, India. Ringo stayed about two weeks; Paul about five. John and George stayed about two months and left in a rush when Magic Alex whipped up rumors that the Maharishi made advances on his female disciples. John decided it must be true and turned on the Maharishi with wrath. (The song “Sexy Sadie” articulated his anger. “I copped out,” John said, “and wouldn’t write Maharishi, what have you done, you’ve made a fool of everyone.”)
With his gurus, John played out his familiar power pattern: he made himself a pupil—but then, suddenly and aggressively, he struck out at them.
One fact of the Rishikesh adventure that gets less attention than it should is how John and Paul spent much of their time—which was singing and playing acoustic guitars and writing. At least fifteen Lennon-McCartney songs that would appear on Beatles albums, including a good portion of The White Album, were written in that time.
When the studio sessions began for The White Album, John Lennon was in a new frame of mind. The sleepy, spacy quality in evidence during Pepper was gone, replaced by a trenchant and overtly hostile quality. Now he called Pepper “the biggest load of shit we’ve ever done” and insisted that these new recordings would need to be honest and raw, without elaborate production. “There was an aggressiveness I had never seen in him before,” Geoff Emerick said of the first session. “By the end of the night he was almost psychotic.”
From John’s point of view, he was just taking charge again. “I was again becoming as creative and dominating as I had been in the early days,” Lennon said, “after lying fallow for a couple of years.” Though it was obviously causing tension in the studio, John read that as evidence that he was doing what he needed to do. “It upset the applecart,” John said. “I was awake again and they weren’t used to it.”