The Nearest Paul McCartney and John Lennon Came to a Dry Songwriting Session
Paul McCartney and John Lennon came close to a dry songwriting session only once. Thankfully, the partners got the creative juices flowing again and wrote a hit tune. Besides that one time, every Lennon-McCartney session went by in a flash, and more Beatles songs were born.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon started their songwriting sessions as teenagers
During an interview on The Howard Stern Show, Paul said no one had been interested in his songwriting until he met John. The pair met in 1957 at a church festival and instantly connected. Weeks later, John invited Paul to join The Quarry Men.
When Paul joined, he and John became inseparable, living inside each other’s pockets. In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he showed his new friend how to tune his guitar. The pair also taught themselves how to play their heroes’ songs.
“I would have played him ‘I Lost My Little Girl‘ a while later, when I’d got my courage up to share it, and he started showing me his songs,” Paul wrote. “And that’s where it all began.”
Once Paul and John began their songwriting sessions, they knew they wanted to be known as Lennon-McCartney. “It was because we’d heard of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein,” Paul added. “Lennon and McCartney. That’s good. There are two of us, and we can fall into that pattern.”
They put their early songs in a notebook, the first Lennon McCartney manuscript. However, Paul claims he lost it.
The nearest Paul and John came to a dry songwriting session
Eventually, The Quarry Men became The Beatles, and Paul and John got better at writing songs. They wrote a song a day and took a week to record an album.
Once The Beatles started writing hits, their songs came even easier. In The Lyrics, Paul wrote that the nearest he and John ever got to a dry songwriting session was with a song called “Golden Rings.” Paul brought a version of the song to John’s house and they stalled when they got to the lines “You can buy me golden rings / Get me all that kind of thing.”
“We kept singing that over and over and couldn’t get beyond it because it was so shockingly bad,” Paul explained. Part of their problem was that they’d already had a diamond ring in “Can’t Buy Me Love.” Paul continued, “‘Golden rings’ was unoriginal and uninspiring. We couldn’t get past it.”
So, the pair left it, and went and had a cup of tea. When they returned, they started thinking of the woman as an LA girl who wanted a chauffeur. That improved things.
“Once you get into creating a narrative and storytelling, it’s so much more entertaining,” Paul said. “It draws you forward so much more easily. Now we were dramatising the interviewing of a chauffeur; we got over that dry moment and finished the song.”
The result was “Drive My Car,” and it became “one that didn’t get away.” All Paul and John had to do was get rid of “golden rings” and add “Baby, you can drive my car.”
The bandmates knew how to help each other in the songwriting process
A dry songwriting session was rare for Paul and John because they knew how to help each other. If one were stuck, the other would know how to help.
“A lot of what we had going for us was that we were both good at noticing the stuff that just pops up, and grabbing it,” Paul wrote. “And the other thing is that John and I had each other. If he was sort of stuck for a line, I could finish it. If I was stuck for somewhere to go, he could make a suggestion.
“We could suggest the way out of the maze to each other, which was a very handy thing to have. We inspired each other.”
Many times, one of them would add something the other hadn’t thought of that made the whole song. “One of us would come up with that little magic thing. It allowed the song to become what it needed to be,” Paul said.
Thankfully, Paul and John only nearly had one dry songwriting session. What if they hadn’t returned from their tea break? What if they’d had an actual dry session and given up entirely?
