Though the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney will go down in history as one of the greatest musical collaborations, there’s a grey area for some songs.
Songs that are registered as a Lennon-McCartney credit aren’t all that they seem, with some songs written more heavily by one songwriter than the other. Though most of The Beatles‘ songs would feature the credit, songs like Strawberry Fields Forever and Yesterday were written primarily by Lennon and McCartney separately. But there are other songs in the band’s discography that were given the joint songwriting tag despite there being little to no overlap in the writing process. Speaking of this overlap with Playboy Magazine shortly before his death, Lennon shared another song that had been swept up in the collaborative tag.
Playboy Magazine asked: “When you talk about working together on a single lyric like We Can Work It Out, it suggests that you and Paul worked a lot more closely than you’ve admitted in the past. Haven’t you said that you wrote most of your songs separately, despite putting both of your names on them?”
Lennon replied: “Yeah, I was lying. It was when I felt resentful, so I felt that we did everything apart. But, actually, a lot of the songs we did eyeball to eyeball.” Despite writing those songs “eyeball to eyeball,” the credit has long been a sore spot for McCartney, who actually tried to have the Lennon-McCartney credit flipped.
The move was not received well by Yoko Ono and Ringo Starr, who both suggested that the change wouldn’t matter. Veteran drummer Starr called McCartney’s actions “petty and silly,” and while the Wings frontman has cooled off on the credit controversy, people are still outraged.
McCartney has made it clear it is not the credit he dislikes but the shorthand for it, which on streaming services and iPod devices will often cut his name off for the sake of screen space. He has since accepted it’s an unchangeable part of music history, with the credit applied to songs McCartney or Lennon wrote both as a team, and by themselves.
McCartney once said: “Lennon and McCartney is still the rock’n’roll trademark I’m proud to be a part of – in the order it has always been.” But a year before his statement, he caused controversy by flipping the credit on his live album, Back in the U.S., much to the annoyance of Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono. Even peace-loving Starr weighed in on the credit controversy, saying McCartney’s actions were “petty and silly.”
Ono would bring a threat of legal action to McCartney, who backed down and has accepted the credit is stuck for good. Speaking to The Guardian at the time, McCartney said: “It snowballed. People were phoning me up saying, ‘You’re doing yourself no favours with this, you know.’
“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Well, you know, you want to knock John’s name out. He’s dead. It’s terrible: you’re walking on a dead man’s grave.’ I was like, ‘Get the fuck out of here.'”
The veteran drummer said: “An attitude came over John and Paul of ‘We’re the grooves and you two, just watch it’. They never said that or did anything, but it was over a period of time. … In a way, I felt like an observer of the Beatles, even though I was in them. Whereas, I think, John and Paul were the stars of the Beatles.”
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