"John is in fact the leader of the group" - Paul McCartney, 10/28/62

I always felt that there was more Paul on Abbey Road than John. However, I have been doing some calculations and if we take each song as having a primary songwriter, including Her Majesty, then the time allocation as a % breakdown is as follows:
John 41.7%
Paul 39.2%
George 13%
Ringo 6.1%

I am a little surprised. John was still getting the lion's share at the end and clearly had more of the White Album. So following Paul's emegence and dominance of Revolver and Pepper, we have John reasserting himself.

 

The absence (or minimal musical contributions) of John on George's songs doesn't necessarily mean John wasn't supportive in other ways. Maybe John was good at giving George encouragement in non musical ways.

Or maybe George didn't want John to play on his songs, not the other way around? Maybe George waited until John wasn't around before he attempted to record his stuff? We'll never know for sure...

What we do know is that George didn't find Paul to be supportive, despite the fact that Paul's fingerprints are all over George's songs. That says a lot, actually.

 

By the latter half of The Beatles' career George Harrison -as much as I love the guy- had a chip on his shoulder that was bigger than his feet. To a certain degree you can't blame him, they did give him a bit of short shrift as far as his songwriting and musicianship went, but his generally negative attitude toward the band in general post-1966 tended to colour his view on just about everything Beatle-related.

Generally speaking, I think that as far as George's songs went, John just wasn't a fan of his stuff. Witness his "I wouldn't play that kind of music at home" regarding All Things Must Pass...I think Lennon tended to find George's compositions complicated and difficult to play, not just due to Lennon's stoned out laziness, but because George's songs simply weren't to Lennon's own musical tastes. That might have something to do with why Lennon tended to make himself scarce or to make minimal contributions to George's songs in the studio. The irony is that when it came to Lennon's songs George almost always rose to the occasion and offered up some tasty guitar parts, right up to George's parts on the Imagine album- some of Harrison's best guitar playing in his entire career.

As for George not finding Paul to be supportive, I think he was talking out of his asss a bit there. Indeed, McCartney made some sterling multi-instrumental contributions to quite a few of Hari's songs. Even if some of George's songs might not have been to Paul's taste, unlike Lennon Paul still kept an open mind and was able to contribute, sometimes to the point where his contributions to the songs almost overshadowed George's own parts. In retrospect it makes George's post-Beatles "I could never play in a band with Paul McCartney/I'd rather have Willlie Weeks on bass than Paul" remarks seem like quite the slap in the face. Whether Lennon or Harrison would care to admit it or not, McCartney had an innate ability to bring some of their trickier compositions to realization.

 

I have to wonder how you've assigned the songs then, because I find 6 John songs and 8 Paul songs on Abbey Road, which comes out to 35.3 % for John and 47.1 % for Paul. (Also, George's 2 songs out of 17 makes it 11.8 % for him and Ringo's 1 song gives him 5.8 %.)

John:
Come Together
I Want You
Because
Sun King
Mean Mr Mustard
Polythene Pam

Paul:
Maxwell's Silver Hammer
Oh! Darling
You Never Give Me Your Money
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
Golden Slumbers
Carry That Weight
The End
Her Majesty

Edit: Now I see you talk about the time allocation. That makes a difference of course, since "I Want You" is so much longer than everything else, and "Come Together" is the second longest song on the album.

Don't know that I'd say that a songwriter dominates an album because he writes longer songs than everyone else, though...

 

I did.

 

Well, IMO, in the case of the Beatles, it's part of the equation indicating Paul's musical doninance in the studio......all he did for those great Lennon songs.....HELP! (arranging the call and response vocals, speeding up the tempo), Strawberry Fields and LSD (those intros--with LSD the intro is the backbone of the track), pretty much outright arranging Come Together, Don't Let Me Down, Ticket to Ride, Tomorrow Never Knows........deeper musical contributions than John gave Paul. John would suggest lyrics and a few counter-melody "middle-eights" but other than Ob-La-Di, there are virtually no reported examples of John shaping the arrangement of an entire Paul song.

 

I'm a younger fan, and I myself and other younger fans have always perceived John as the 'leader', the frontman ala Jagger or such. My question is, when you have a band which really had in a sense two frontmen in John and Paul, why did the public image of the band tend to portray John as the leader of the group? In actuality from around 1967 onward Paul was writing more of the songs and was more involved in the musical direction of the group, whereas before it seems to have been 50/50,

Or prior to '67:
John - 40%
Paul - 40%
George - 15%
Ringo - 5%

 

He was the tallest with had razor sharp wit.

 

He was the more outspoken of the bunch. Although I don't really see the media portraying him as the leader, per se.

 

It's true that McCartney was the leader from 1967 onward (except for the White Album), but that's only because John lost interest and let him take over.

Prior to that John was the true leader, musically and otherwise.

 

simple, he was.

 

Because he secretly always wore one of these:

 

John was older and started the group, so he was the initial "leader". He was in charge from the start prior to Paul and George and Ringo joining (although Ringo was the oldest, but he joined last). John, to his credit, realized that making Paul an equal would make the group better.

 

He and Paul were both leaders in their own way. John was the adventurous, rebellious, intellectual one. Paul was the one who made sure the music machine stayed on the tracks.

 

I believe Paul was the tallest.

I don't think John was ever 'really' the leader; it only seemed that way because he had the biggest mouth. Paul emerged as the best PR man very quickly and by 1966 (at the time of the Jesus comments), Paul was in control, smoothing things over and presenting the band's 'corporate face': it was also around this time that Paul became de facto leader and by the end of 1967, he was leader in all but name.

 

Because he was the one who took them to the Toppermost of the Poppermost.

At one time, the band called themselves Johnny and the Moondogs.

Note, they never entertained the name Paulie and the Moondogs.

 

But they almost went out undercover as Ricky And The Red Streaks.

 

It all depends on how you define "leader" I suppose. I would argue that Paul was never the leader, because at no point in time would either John or George have said he was the leader. You can't be a leader if the people you are supposedly leading do not acknowledge your authority in any way.

The person in a group who offers up the most ideas or who encourages the others to go in a certain direction is not necessarily the leader, even if his suggestions are often taken. The leader is the one who has the ultimate power to make (or allow) things to happen. Lennon was the one the others looked to for approval. He had the natural alpha personality in that group. That was consistent across their time together.

I remember in grad school, I took a class on marriage therapy. One day they showed us a video clip of a couple in therapy. The wife was doing all the talking, bitching about how awful the husband was, complaining about the things he did and did not do. The husband just sat there apathetically, and said little. After a few minutes, the instructor stopped the tape and said "Now, who has the power in this relationship?" She did a show of hands, and most of us voted that the wife had the power. She told us we were wrong. The husband, by withholding his participation, was the one with the power. He knew what his wife thought. She had no idea what he thought or felt. She could not make him do anything. In restrospect, that clip reminds me of Lennon in Let it Be. Just because a leader is refusing to lead, that doesn't make them no longer the leader.

 

I don't think that's a valid analogy. Of course, there are many kinds of leadership, but at some point Paul was leading the Beatles in some way or another, being the creative force behind projects like Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or Let It Be. Those are his ideas, and the other three took part in them, reluctantly or not.

Even in the years in which they were at each others' throats, in the early 70s, Lennon admitted that Paul lead the band trying to fill in Epstein's shoes, although he thought that Paul was leading them "in circles".

 

Out of interest, this is a good listen / watch. BBC-hosted version, and YouTube-hosted version. Check around 30-mins in, for a bit of chat from Paul about 'stories about the Beatles'.

 

Paul wasn't the tallest. Rather famously, John Paul and George were all 5'11"

 

Nah, Clarence was the leader, but they got rid of him. They also stole his song "She Loves You, Man".

 

But John had the tightest trousers; hence he was the leader....

 

As a young Beatles fan in 64 there was no doubt that John was the leader. It was his group. The fanzines verified this!

 

Yoko, is that you? You still believe that nonsense? They were both adventurous, rebellious, and intellectual.