John Lennon Said Paul McCartney and George Harrison Were Resentful of His Creativity
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison wrote the majority of The Beatles’ songs. While Lennon and McCartney were the primary writers in The Beatles’ early years, Harrison made more contributions later on. They were all competitive with one another, which typically pushed their creative output. Still, Lennon claimed the competition between them led McCartney and Lennon to resent him.
John Lennon said Paul McCartney and George Harrison resented his creativity
In the mid-1960s, Lennon said he dealt with a creative slump. He pulled back his songwriting contributions, but he continued writing more in the later years of the decade. One of the songs he was excited about in 1968 was “Revolution.” Harrison and McCartney didn’t seem to share the sentiment.
“When George and Paul and all of them were on holiday, I made ‘Revolution’ which is on the LP,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “I wanted to put it out as a single, but they said it wasn’t good enough. We put out ‘Hey Jude’, which was worthy — but we could have had both.”
Lennon said he believed they were reacting to the band’s generally strained dynamic more than they were to the song itself.
“We recorded the song twice. The Beatles were getting real tense with each other,” Lennon said. “The first take, George and Paul were resentful and said it wasn’t fast enough. Now, if you go into the details of what a hit record is and isn’t, maybe. But The Beatles could have afforded to put out the slow, understandable version of ‘Revolution’ as a single, whether it was a gold record or a wooden record.”
Lennon believed his bandmates had a problem with his flourishing creativity.
“But, because they were so upset over the Yoko thing and the fact that I was again becoming as creative and dominating as I was in the early days (after lying fallow for a couple of years), it upset the applecart,” Lennon said. “I was awake again and they weren’t used to it.”
Lennon was in a crisis in the years before this
In the years before Lennon had his creative resurgence, he felt lost. He wrote songs that functioned as cries for help.
“The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension,” he said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “I was eating and drinking like a pig and I was fat as a pig, dissatisfied with myself, and subconsciously I was crying for help.”
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison all relied on one another
Though the three bandmates were competitive with one another, they still relied on each other to push their work further. Lennon’s classmate said he was always visibly excited to work with McCartney.
“Paul would have a school notebook and he’d be scribbling down words,” Lennon’s classmate Helen Anderson said in the book Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. “Those sessions could be intense because John was used to getting his way by being aggressive — but Paul would stand his ground … Paul seemed to make John come alive when they were together.”
Harrison had many problems with the way Lennon and McCartney treated him, but he still said they aided his songwriting. He wasn’t sure he ever would have started writing if hadn’t met them.
“To get it straight, if I hadn’t been with John and Paul I probably wouldn’t have thought about writing a song, at least not until much later,” he told Guitar World in 1992. “They were writing all these songs, many of which I thought were great. Some were just average, but, obviously, a high percentage were quality material. I thought to myself, If they can do it, I’m going to have a go.”
