John Lennon Accused Paul McCartney of Plagiarizing 1 of His Biggest Hits in Vicious, Unreleased Lyrics

In 1971, John Lennon released “How Do You Sleep?,” a scathing song about former bandmate Paul McCartney. McCartney wrote a dig about Lennon in the song “Too Many People,” and Lennon went scorched Earth in his response. The original version of the song was even harsher though. Lennon accused McCartney of plagiarizing one of his biggest Beatles songs.

John Lennon’s original version of ‘How Do You Sleep?’ took harsher shots at Paul McCartney

In response to “Too Many People,” Lennon wrote a flagrant and caustic attack on McCartney in “How Do You Sleep?.” 

“Well, it was like Dylan doing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, one of his nasty songs,” Lennon said, per Beatles Bible. “It’s using somebody as an object to create something. I wasn’t really feeling that vicious at the time, but I was using my resentment towards Paul to create a song. Let’s put it that way.”

The song attacks McCartney from its opening verse.

“So Sgt. Pepper took you by surprise / You better see right through that mother’s eye / Those freaks was right when they said you was dead / The one mistake you made was in your head,” Lennon sang.

He also included the couplet, “the only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’ve gone you’re just another day.” In the original version of the song, Lennon wrote, “You probably pinched that b**** anyway.” The song’s melody famously came to McCartney in a dream, and Lennon cast doubt on the idea that it was something McCartney came up with himself.

During a recording session, Lennon also sang, “How do you sleep, you c***?”

Ringo Starr convinced him to tone down the song 

According to Felix Dennis, a friend of Lennon’s, the singer slung around many insults while recording the song.

“Some of it was absolutely puerile,” Dennis said in the book Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “Thank God a lot of it never actually got recorded because it was highly, highly personal, like a bunch of schoolboys standing in the lavatory making scatological jokes.”

Ringo Starr and George Harrison were in the recording studio with Lennon. The drummer was visibly uncomfortable with the lyrics, and eventually told Lennon to tone it down.

“I remember Ringo getting more and more upset by this,” Dennis said. “At one point I have a clear memory of him saying, ‘That’s enough, John.’”

Paul McCartney said he didn’t want to respond to the John Lennon song

McCartney, unsurprisingly, found “How Do You Sleep?” hurtful. He took major issue with the fact that Lennon said the only good song he’d written was “Yesterday.” Still, he did not want to respond with further insults.

“I didn’t want to get into a slanging match,” McCartney said. “I had the option of going for equal time and doing all the interviews or deciding not to take up the gauntlet. And I remember consciously thinking, ‘No, I really mustn’t.’”

Within a few years, Lennon and McCartney’s relationship had reached a much more peaceful place.