John Lennon Wrestled a Pig as a Way to Make Fun of Paul McCartney
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were not on the best terms. They jabbed at each other through song lyrics and spoke negatively about each other in interviews. Lennon was particularly vitriolic and made it his goal to have his solo work perform better than McCartney’s. While shooting footage for the 1972 Imagine film, Lennon took photos with a pig as a way to parody McCartney’s album Ram.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney were angry at each other after The Beatles broke up
After The Beatles broke up, McCartney sued the band so that manager Allen Klein wouldn’t have ownership over their work. The legal battle aired out the band’s complicated dynamic, and they began to speak about each other in interviews. After one interview with McCartney, Lennon wrote him an angry letter.
“It’s all very well playing ‘simple, honest ole’ human Paul’ in Melody Maker,” Lennon wrote, per the New York Post, “[but] if you’re not the aggressor (as you claim), who the hell took us to court and s*** all over us in public?”
They began to write about one another in their solo work. McCartney admitted that the lyrics were meant to sting.
“We were writing songs at each other,” McCartney said on The Howard Stern Show. “Like weaponizing songs.”
He wrestled a pig in order to poke fun at his former bandmate
In 1971, McCartney and his wife Linda released the album Ram. Critics did not receive the album well, and Lennon expressed his distaste for it. He also attempted to parody it through his own work.
On the cover of Ram, McCartney holds a ram by the horns. While working on his album Imagine and the accompanying film, Lennon wanted to mimic the image but with a pig.
“It was John’s notion to parody the album jacket photograph on Paul McCartney’s Ram, which showed Paul wrestling with a ram; John would wrestle with a pig,” his girlfriend May Pang wrote in the book Loving John. “We all went outside and stared at the large surly animal. It was much bigger than any of us had expected. John circled the animal warily. He liked the idea, but he didn’t like the hog.”
Everyone on set encouraged him to climb on the pig’s back. Lennon agreed but told them they had one shot at getting the image.
“John climbed on the animal’s back and grabbed its ears,” Pang wrote. “The animal shrieked. Dan [Richter] snapped the camera. John jumped off the pig and headed for the house, Yoko [Ono] behind him.”
McCartney later commented on the image.
“If John had really wanted to get at me, I would have thought he’d have done a much better job than that,” he told Record Mirror in 1971, per The Paul McCartney Project. “It really doesn’t bother me too much. I thought the photograph of John and the pig was a nice picture.”
John Lennon and Paul McCartney eventually repaired their friendship
Though relations between the former bandmates were tense for a time, they repaired their friendship before Lennon’s death in 1980. McCartney recalled that one of their final conversations was friendly and relatively mundane.
“I was baking bread and got quite good at it,” he recalled to Stern. “So when I heard John was doing it, it was great. We could just talk about something so ordinary.”
He was grateful that they’d reestablished a friendly rapport.
“It was really nice, and I was so glad that we got back to that relationship that we always had,” McCartney added. “We’d lived in each other’s pockets for so long that it was great to get back to that.”
