John Lennon Wrote a Beatles Lyric Because He Felt Guilty for Leaving Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney was the first Beatle to publicly announce that he wasn’t returning to the band, but by this point John Lennon had already told the group that he was quitting. Lennon had grown tired of working with the band and was ready for a new project with his new wife, Yoko Ono. His decision to move on came after years of working closely with McCartney. Though they had a fraught public relationship after The Beatles broke up, Lennon admitted that he felt guilty about leaving McCartney.
John Lennon left The Beatles before Paul McCartney
Though McCartney has long shouldered the blame for breaking up The Beatles, Lennon left the group first. The band had been dealing with simmering tensions and resentments for a while, and they reached a fracturing point when Lennon announced he was quitting.
“John walked into the room one day and said, ‘I’m leaving the Beatles,’” McCartney recalled on BBC Radio 4, per CNN. “And he said, ‘It’s quite thrilling. It’s rather like a divorce.’ And then we were left to pick up the pieces.”
McCartney said that, at this point, he hadn’t wanted to leave the band.
“The Beatles were breaking up and this was my band, this was my job, this was my life,” he said. “I wanted it to continue. I thought we were doing some pretty good stuff — you know, ‘Abbey Road,’ ‘Let It Be,’ not bad.”
John Lennon said a Beatles song was a tribute to Paul McCartney
Though Lennon knew it was time for him to move on and described the split as “thrilling,” he still felt guilt over it. In the song “Glass Onion,” he included the line, “The Walrus was Paul.” This was, in part, a joke at the expense of fans who pored over lyrics searching for hidden meaning.
“I threw the line in — ‘the Walrus was Paul’ — just to confuse everybody a bit more,” he said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “And I thought Walrus has now become me, meaning ‘I am the one.’ Only it didn’t mean that in this song … It could have been ‘the fox terrier is Paul,’ you know. I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. It was just thrown in like that.”
Though it was mostly an intentionally confusing line, Lennon said it also addressed his guilty conscience at moving on from his partnership with McCartney.
“The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul,” he said. “I was trying — I don’t know. It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul, you know, ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion, this — this stroke, because I’m leaving.’”
They had a better relationship than people might think
After The Beatles officially broke up, Lennon and McCartney publicly feuded. They wrote songs about each other and traded insults in interviews. Despite this, Lennon’s son Sean said people made too big a deal out of their disagreements.
“Those were crabby moments, but people made too big a deal of it,” he told The New Yorker. “It didn’t reach the level of Tupac telling Biggie Smalls that he’d slept with his wife [in ‘Hit ‘Em Up’].”
He’s right. People love a story of anger and betrayal, especially when it’s between the most prolific writing partners of all time. Lennon’s guilt at leaving The Beatles, and McCartney in particular, proves their dynamic was nowhere near as black and white as people thought. While they argued, they also held a great deal of love and respect for one another. This made it difficult for Lennon to leave The Beatles, even though he knew he was ready.
