Viewers Thought Paul McCartney Was the Lead Singer of The Beatles After Watching ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’
The Beatles didn’t have a lead singer, but viewers of The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 thought Paul McCartney filled the role. The band’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was crucial to their success. It sparked Beatlemania in The United States and established them as the biggest band of the decade. Despite this, the audio quality on the show was far from perfect. As a result, McCartney’s role in the band seemed a bit more prominent than it actually was.
Viewers incorrectly thought Paul McCartney was The Beatles’ lead singer
The Beatles set themselves apart from other bands of the time because they had four singers instead of one. While McCartney and John Lennon sang most of the band’s songs, the group thought it was important for everyone to sing at least one song on their albums. When they performed on Ed Sullivan, though, this didn’t come across to viewers. Ringo Starr explained that the sound quality was not what they had hoped for.
“TV had such bad sound equipment (it has still today, usually, but then it was really bad) that we would tape our rehearsals and then go up and mess with the dials in the control booth,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “We got it all set with the engineer there, and then we went off for a break. The story has it that while we were out, the cleaner came in to clean the room and the console, thought, ‘What are all these chalk marks?’ and wiped them all off. So our plans just went out the window. We had a real hasty time trying to get the sound right.”
Unfortunately, they couldn’t perfect the sound before they performed. Per Rolling Stone, Lennon’s microphone was “barely audible” throughout the performance. McCartney’s voice came through clearly, though.
McCartney also sang to the cameras, making him seem more important to the much larger audience watching on TV at home. Lennon and George Harrison, by contrast, played to the studio audience.
The Beatles benefited from not having a lead singer
While the individual Beatles held varying degrees of power in the band, they had no true lead singer. This was a benefit to the group.
Each member — with the exception of Starr — wanted to experience being at the front of the band. Lennon and McCartney’s resistance to letting Harrison do this would cause problems for the group in the latter half of the 1960s.
If they had all still functioned as songwriters but established one lead singer, resentment would have built up quickly. It doesn’t seem likely that the band would have stayed together for long if they had one frontman.
Did Paul McCartney sing the most lead vocals for The Beatles?
Lennon and McCartney jockeyed for control over The Beatles for the entirety of their time with the band. They wrote and sang the most songs by far. But who specifically sang lead on the most songs for The Beatles?
Per Ultimate Classic Rock, Lennon sang lead on 109 Beatles songs. McCartney was a close second with 98 songs, followed much further behind by Harrison with 39. Unsurprisingly, Starr sang the least, with just 14.
