Paul McCartney Admitted 1 Song Was a ‘Little Dig’ at John Lennon and Yoko Ono — and Lennon Knew It
After The Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney and John Lennon spent the next several years at each others’ throats. McCartney sued The Beatles because of their manager, Allen Klein, and Lennon felt a great deal of resentment over the way his former bandmates treated Yoko Ono. McCartney admitted he wrote a song about Lennon and Ono. While it wasn’t as blatant as Lennon’s eventual response, Lennon could tell the song was about him.
Paul McCartney admitted he wrote a song directed at John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Relations between McCartney and Lennon had so degraded by the 1970s that they began expressing their frustrations through song. McCartney said Lennon’s political preaching began to grate on his nerves.
“I was looking at my second solo album, Ram, the other day and I remember there was one tiny little reference to John in the whole thing,” McCartney told Playboy in 1984 (per Beatles Interviews). “He’d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit.”
He wrote the song “Too Many People” about Lennon and Ono.
“In one song, I wrote, ‘Too many people preaching practices,’ I think is the line. I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn’t anything else on it that was about them. Oh, there was ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two.’”
John Lennon reacted angrily to the Paul McCartney song
While the reference was relatively vague, Lennon did not miss it.
“I heard Paul’s messages in Ram – yes there are dear reader! Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh! I mean Yoko Ono, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things,” Lennon wrote in response, per Beatles Bible. “So to have some fun, I must thank Allen Klein publicly for the line ‘just another day.’ A real poet! Some people don’t see the funny side of it. Too bad. What am I supposed to do, make you laugh? It’s what you might call an ‘angry letter,’ sung – get it?”
He responded by writing “How Do You Sleep?,” which was a significantly more vicious — and blatant — dig at McCartney.
“Well, it was like Dylan doing ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, one of his nasty songs,” Lennon said. “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.”
McCartney said it didn’t surprise him that Lennon’s response was so venomous.
“They’d take one small dig out of proportion and then come back at us in their next album,” he said. “Then we’d say, ‘Hey, we only did two percent. They did 200 percent’ and we’d go through all of that insanity.”
Paul McCartney didn’t want to respond
While “How Do You Sleep?” stung, McCartney didn’t want to respond. He didn’t want to push the feud any further.
“I didn’t want to get into a slanging match,” Paul said in the book Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “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.’”
