Paul McCartney Wrote The Beatles’ ‘Carry That Weight’ When He Couldn’t ‘Be Upbeat Anymore’
TL;DR:
- Paul McCartney said he wrote The Beatles’ “Carry That Weight” when he was not enjoying life.
- He had negative feelings about The Beatles’ manager because of something Mick Jagger told him.
- “Carry That Weight” appeared on a massively successful album.
John Lennon said The Beatles‘ “Carry That Weight” was inspired by pressures Paul McCartney was feeling. Subsequently, Paul revealed John was correct. The cute Beatle explained why he was feeling down when he wrote “Carry That Weight.”
John Lennon said The Beatles’ ‘Carry That Weight’ was entirely Paul McCartney’s work
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, John was asked about “Carry That Weight.”
He said the song was Paul’s. He believed it was inspired by the cute Beatle dealing with a lot of pressure during that time.
Paul McCartney said the atmosphere around The Beatles was ‘heavy’ in a bad way at that time
In the 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul discussed the creation of “Carry That Weight.” “I’m generally quite upbeat but at certain times things get to me so much that I just can’t be upbeat anymore and that was one of the times,” he said.
“We were taking so much acid and doing so much drugs and all this [Allen] Klein s*** was going on and getting crazier and crazier and crazier,” he said. “Carry that weight a long time: like forever! That’s what I meant.” For context, Klein was The Beatles’ manager at the time. Paul was suspicious of Klein because Mick Jagger told him Klein was a “crook” in his dealings with The Rolling Stones.
Paul further elaborated on the situation that led him to write “Carry That Weight.” “There was what my Aunty Jin would have called a bad atmosphere, ‘Oh, I can feel the atmosphere in this house, love,'” he said. “It wasn’t difficult, she wouldn’t have liked it there. It was ‘heavy.’
“‘Heavy’ was a very operative word at that time, ‘Heavy, man’ but now it actually felt heavy,” he added. “That’s what ‘Carry That Weight’ was about: not the light, rather easy-going heaviness, albeit witty and sometimes cruel, but with an edge you could exist within and which always had a place for you to be.” Paul said the song was inspired by his own paranoia.
How ‘Carry That Weight’ performed on the charts
“Carry That Weight” was not a single, so it did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100. The tune appeared on the album Abbey Road. The album reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for 11 of its 488 weeks on the chart.
According to The Official Charts Company, “Carry That Weight” was not a charting single in the United Kingdom either. On the other hand, Abbey Road peaked at No. 1 in the U.K. for 17 weeks. It stayed on the chart for 97 weeks in total.
“Carry That Weight” is not one of The Beatles’ most famous songs or even one of their most famous albums track but it gives fans insight into Paul’s mindset in the late 1960s.
