{"id":235683,"date":"2025-10-24T00:37:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T00:37:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/235683\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T00:37:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T00:37:13","slug":"did-john-lennon-think-paul-mccartney-wrote-this-song-to-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/235683\/","title":{"rendered":"Did John Lennon think Paul McCartney wrote this song to him?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Beatles\u2019 breakup brought about a years-long hiatus in the friendship of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. With their hit-making songwriting partnership<\/a> legally dissolved \u2014 each had been writing on his own for years, despite the Lennon-McCartney credit attached to their Beatles\u2019 output \u2014 there was no longer any doubt about who was the main writer behind their songs.<\/p>\n

As their simmering feud went on display in media interviews \u2014 similar to the ongoing animosity between Pink Floyd alumni David Gilmour and Roger Waters<\/a> \u2014 it was only a matter of time before it played out in their solo songs.<\/p>\n

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McCartney delivered the first salvo with \u201cToo Many People.\u201d Co-written with his wife, Linda, for 1971\u2019s Ram, the song was a veiled slap at Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, for their political and social activism.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHe\u2019d been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit,\u201d McCartney told Playboy<\/a> in 1984. \u201cI wrote [in the song], \u2018Too many people preaching practices.\u2019 I felt John and Yoko were telling everyone what to do. And I felt we didn\u2019t need to be told what to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole tenor of the Beatles thing had been, like, to each his own. Freedom. Suddenly, it was \u2018You should do this.\u2019 It was just a bit of the wagging finger, and I was pissed off with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ram came out on May 17. Lennon clearly got the message. Almost immediately, he began composing his retort in the form of \u201cHow Do You Sleep?,” from his 1971 album, Imagine. \u201cThose freaks was right when they said you was dead,\u201d he sang in one of its most famous verses, a not-at-all-veiled reference to the conspiracy theory that the real Paul McCartney had died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike.<\/p>\n

The fact that the track featured George Harrison peeling off a blistering electric guitar<\/a> solo \u2014 performed with a slide <\/a>\u2014 was surely salt in the wound. Lennon had, after all, been vocal in the Beatles\u2019 final months about how poorly they had treated Harrison, and had even pitched a proposal to give him a more equitable share of songwriting<\/a> on future albums, to McCartney\u2019s displeasure. The thought of his old mates teaming up against him on a recording caused him pain.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou see the atmosphere of ‘Let\u2019s get Paul. Let\u2019s nail him in a song,\u2019\u201d he told British GQ<\/a> in 2020. \u201cAnd those things were pretty hurtful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roughly three years on, however, both men were eager to put their feud behind them.<\/p>\n

In 1974, while Lennon was separated from Ono and in the midst of his infamous Lost Weekend period, he and McCartney reunited in Los Angeles. Soon after, they were traipsing around together in New York City, where they spent a late night with David Bowie.<\/a><\/p>\n

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But McCartney apparently couldn\u2019t resist one last \u2014 albeit much softer \u2014 dig at his old friend.<\/p>\n

For years, critics had been complaining about his soppy love songs, which grew in frequency once he became a family man and formed Wings with Linda. Lennon had been leading the chorus against McCartney\u2019s lighter fare for years. He infamously derided Macca\u2019s old-timey music hall\u2013inspired fare \u2014 \u201cWhen I\u2019m Sixty-Four,\u201d \u201cYour Mother Should Know\u201d and \u201cMaxwell\u2019s Silver Hammer\u201d and the like \u2014 which he reportedly referred to as \u201cPaul\u2019s Granny tunes.\u201d<\/p>\n

As McCartney revealed in his 2023 book, The Lyrics, Lennon had given him some guff about his \u201csilly love songs\u201d as well.<\/p>\n

How Do You Sleep? (Remastered 2010) – YouTube
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\u201cThere were accusations in the mid-1970s, including one from John, that I was just writing \u2018silly love songs,\u2019\u201d McCartney wrote. \u201cI suppose the idea was that I should be a bit tougher, a bit more worldly.\u201d<\/p>\n

He intended to compose a song rebutting that claim, until he thought it made more sense to plant his flag on that ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suddenly realized, that\u2019s exactly what love is. It\u2019s worldly. \u2018Some people want to fill the world\/With silly love songs.\u2019 I\u2019d been given that reputation, and I had to stand up for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Released in 1976, \u201cSilly Love Songs\u201d was a poppy, disco-tinged retort to his critics that simply asked what was wrong with writing songs about love. The world apparently agreed with him and promptly sent it to the number one spot on the U.S. charts, making it McCartney\u2019s 27th trip there in his career.<\/p>\n

Did Lennon understand that McCartney was talking to him with the song? That\u2019s up for debate.<\/p>\n

Back in 2010, a member of the Steve Hoffman forum said Lennon\u2019s friend, the New York City photographer Bob Gruen<\/a>, told him John thought the song\u2019s refrain, \u201cI love you,\u201d was a message to him: \u201cJohn took the song quite personally,\u201d the writer claims,<\/a> \u201cand saw it as Paul sending a message to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The message has been repeated many times online. It\u2019s a nice thought, but is it accurate?<\/p>\n

Reached for comment, Gruen told Guitar Player he couldn\u2019t remember Lennon making that remark.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do remember that I said that I thought it was Paul\u2019s answer to John\u2019s \u2018How Do You Sleep,\u2019\u201d he says, \u201cand that the \u2018I love you\u2019 was directed to John, but I don\u2019t remember John saying it.\u201d<\/p>\n

By then, of course, it hardly mattered. The two friends had long ago made up. McCartney was a frequent visitor to Lennon and Ono\u2019s home in the Dakotas, and they had even flirted about making an impromptu visit to Saturday Night Live that never materialized<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They would meet at least one more time, according to Lennon\u2019s friend Elliot Mintz, <\/a>in 1978. By then, the days of talking to each other through their songs seems to have been long passed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Beatles\u2019 breakup brought about a years-long hiatus in the friendship of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. With…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235684,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-235683","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235683\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}