“Watching the Wheels”

#83, December 8th, 2005

Watching the Wheels

I agree with Yoko Ono. I think she was right when she indicated to John Lennon that the reason his music wasn’t covered as frequently as Paul McCartney’s was because his music was a little more sophisticated than Paul’s. I believe she said at the British Q Awards ceremony, “You're a good songwriter. It's not just 'June with spoon' that you write. You're a good singer, and most musicians are probably a little bit nervous about covering your songs.”

She very quickly retracted this statement, but I think there is some truth to it. Paul’s songs are more melodious and commercial than John’s tended to be. John had a darker side that would dissuade artists from covering his songs, unless it was in homage to him after his death. I think, too, that John’s contribution to the Beatles was more significant than Paul's. I think the Beatles without John Lennon would be Wings; the Beatles without Paul McCartney would have been something akin to The Rolling Stones.

This piece was written for Histrionyx. I reproduce it here as it is the 25th anniversary of Lennon’s death.

I gotta ask you comrades and brothers

How do you treat your own woman

back home?

– John Lennon, “Power to the People”

In “How do you sleep?”, one of his early songs after the break-up of the Beatles, John Lennon wrote dismissively of Paul McCartney (or at least he seemed to be doing so): “The only thing you done was yesterday.” Now this could be read a number of ways (if we accept that it is indeed a comment about Sir Paul): first, all Paul’s good work was done while he was with the Beatles, under the influence of John; second, the only good song Paul wrote was “Yesterday,” the rest weren’t really worth considering; third, the only song Paul really wrote was “Yesterday,” the rest was really John’s output. I think we can safely discard the third possibility. John would have been crazy to say that Paul wrote nothing. It seems fairly evident that the songs or parts of songs in which Paul sung featured his composition, and likewise for John. So we have “A Day in the Life,” where the main body is composed by John (“I read the news today, Oh boy,” etc.), and the interlude, or bridge (“Woke up, got out of bed”) is contributed by Paul.

This leaves us with the first or second possibility. John probably thought Paul was all washed up (if not dead), and that his best creations were a thing of the past (and to some extent this is not too far off the mark – “Band on the Run” and “Jet” really don’t amount to stirring music when compared to “Eleanor Rigby” and “Hey Jude”). But, I want to go with the second possibility – that John was focusing on “Yesterday” as an especially significant piece of music, which he liked perhaps because it echoed sentiments more commonly found in his own songs than in Paul’s.

If we may over-generalize somewhat, we can suggest that Paul’s songs were of two kinds: some pretty straight love songs (and he would say, “what’s wrong with that, I’d like to know, ‘cos here I go again...”), or some ballads or stories (as in his contribution to “A Day in the Life,” or “Penny Lane,” or “Eleanor Rigby,” or “Fixing a Hole” – the list is very long). John by contrast is mainly writing (at least in the early years) a not-so-straight, slightly harrowing, potentially violent, love (if that word is at all appropriate) song.

“Yesterday,” which Paul wrote while on the Alpine set of the film “Help” and which, I believe, he originally called “Scrambled Eggs,” is in some ways a cross-over into John’s territory. “Yesterday,” Paul sings:

All my troubles seemed so far away

Now it looks as though they’re here to stay

O I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be

There’s a shadow hanging over me

O Yesterday came suddenly

Why she had to go, I don’t know

She wouldn’t say

I said, something wrong

Now I long for Yesterday.

Such thoughts of lost manhood, brought on by the spurning by a woman are not often found in Paul’s songs, but are run of the mill for John. John, while many people want to focus on his life as the “working class hero” or radical (though this is not irrelevant to the question of gender), was clearly preoccupied with his relationships with women and what they signified about his masculinity.[1]

And that such a cross-over should have taken place by Paul at this time is not altogether surprising given the extent of John’s output in this area. Looking at the album “Help” alone, it is quite staggering the sentiments John leaves one with in contrast with those emanating from Paul.

This insight was facilitated by the re-release of “Help” in the United States. My original copy dating from 1965, I suppose, featured the songs from the movie on one side, and various others on the B side. The newer American release has altered this so that all the Lennon creations (with the exception of “Ticket to Ride” which certainly doesn’t deviate in theme) appear together. McCartney’s songs, along with those of Harrison, and the covers are placed together. The net effect of listening closely to the words of all the Lennon songs is quite dismal and depressing.

The Lennon songs in question include “Help”, “You've got to hide your love away,” “You're going to lose that girl,” and “It’s only love.” “You're going to lose that girl” seems like an answer to McCartney's easier going, sweeter, “Another girl.” Paul talks of meeting the right girl and hitting it off, and not wanting to mislead the one he is with, while John assumes conflict and mistreatment, and that he will step in to take a girl away from someone else who is abusing her. What he does when he gets her clearly dictates how he assumes other men must be treating women. “It’s only love” tells us about this. It is a bifurcated song, with Lennon’s feelings of shyness when faced by a particular woman in the first verse, followed by:

Is it right that you and I should fight

Every night?

Just the sight of you makes night time bright

very bright

Haven’t I the right to make it up girl.

“It's so hard, loving you” follows quite easily from this. And, not surprisingly, the “girl” runs off (briefly), “but she hasn't got the nerve to walk out and make me lonely, which is all that I deserve.” John admits that he is wrong. But there isn’t much that he can do about it.

If we generalize further still, we might suggest that the Beatles combined two different American musical traditions (alongside influences from British music hall and Irish ballads), helping to displace artists in both traditions and thereby contributing to their own phenomenal success. Paul’s tradition was one that had witnessed the arrival of girl groups coming out of Motown.[2] John's roots were to be found more in Blues music. Paul’s songs, in some ways seemingly immature, were also more respectful of women. Sir Paul is a nice guy; he doesn't have to work too hard to control his emotions and create an amicable respectful relationship. When one hears from him (in a song) that “he used to beat his woman” it doesn't seem to ring true, and you wonder whether this is a line that John inserted into one of his songs, or perhaps he’s observing John in action.

But, ironically, out of John's misogyny comes a brand of feminism (and it is he, not Paul, who might be labeled a feminist). He is clearly working hard suppressing certain emotions and, if he doesn't binge too much on hallucinogens, controlling certain vicious behavior. But he is just a “Jealous guy”, and he begins “to lose control”:

I didn’t mean to hurt you

I’m sorry that I made you cry

Oh well, I didn’t want to hurt you

I'm just a jealous guy.

I was feeling insecure

You might not love me anymore

I was shivering inside…

His struggles clearly led to some lean years, but by the time of “Double Fantasy” in 1980 he appears to have come through alright.

In this last, collaborative album, the “working-class hero” turns house-husband. The songs are about “starting over” with Yoko Ono to whom he is in debt, about his commitment and love as a father for his son, and, dealing with the ribbing he gets from those who feel that he's turned his back on “playing the game” and the political limelight. “Watching the wheels go round and round” offers a politics of its own. Not as stirring, no doubt, as “Imagine” or “Give Peace a Chance;” but more honest to the sentiments found earlier in “All you need is Love.” There’s a “masculine thrust” towards the world in Lennon’s political songs that, taken out of the context of the time, seem somewhat oppressive and restrictive. These last songs are humble and recognize his limits. He seems to have learned from Yoko that he may be a working-class hero from Liverpool, but he is also male and white. This was what he was teaching throughout the 1970s (he was a white man crossing racial boundaries, an act that many people in England at the time would find hard to forgive), but this didn’t mean that he himself had fully understood it.

Mark David Chapman, Lennon’s assassin, came to believe that Lennon had sold out; he was just another “phony.”[3] Lennon, however, was singing about the same old things he had always done. He just provided different resolutions for the conflicts that he lived and witnessed. His life ended, but the narratives – fragmented, contradictory, unfinished – continue.