Rare Lennon interview who wrote what ? Lennon and McCartney

This is a great question, and there are so many others. But, you know something? I met Paul once in LA in 1993, pre-Anthology so there were many questions among Beatle fans. Well, there I was, one on one with a hero of mine, and I couldn't think of anything to say, so I asked him if he was playing any surprise gigs while in LA (answer: no, not this time), and I asked him for his autograph ( answer: sure!)

 

I imagine that I would freeze as well.

In any case, I don't expect fans to ask him, but I think that a music journalist should. Paul is asked the same things so often, that I imagine that he would appreciate a new question.

 

By the way thread readers, I really apologize for all the misspellings, periods instead of commas, etc., in my posts here and others lately. When the weather is really nice in the summer, I'm outside virtually all day until dark, so I'm posting from my iPhone, and...thats not a good thing.
I get back to my PC and read some of my posts and think...geez, what a mess.

 

n 0 pro Ble m.

 

Geez, what a mess. Wait a minute. You ARE theMess.

 

thanks Arnie that has always been my understanding and i have no idea why they waited a month to release it...maybe they were really considering Cold Turkey lol lol !!

 

now as you know i am inclined to believe that Paul may indeed have had a small part in writing A hard days night causing much upset and trolling lol, will i get the same abuse for saying I always assumed he had very little to to with Help if at all ! in fact I'd be much more inclined to agree with somebody who said Help was all John than A hard days night.

However again the creative process , especially when they got to the studio would have given both of them many opportunities to legitimately claim assistance of many of the others songs so who knows, look at the songs John claims assist's on that we may have always assumed were pure Paul !!??

 

Spot on, it was the creative process I was referring to, especially in the studio as they would run through songs one or other had presented and worked on them. As such very few songs up until the White Album probably do not have any collaborations from one or the other, and even from the WA on more songs could be co-contributed than we may assume

And there is the example of Hey Jude, Paul was going to re-write the Shoulder line until John told him it was the best line in the song, so here ( like Teddy Sheringham lol ) John can even be said to have contributed without contributing !!!

 

There is even a quote somewhere from John in which he describes how Paul and him got together (maybe at Paul's house in London) and worked on the Abbey Road Side 2 medley. They used each other as sounding boards really until the very end of the group. They may have stopped writing as a 50-50 collaboration, but they still had access to each other for "fine-tuning" of their respective songs. And even though that fine-tuning may have been only say 5-10% of a song, it may have helped make the song into a greater song. Even a minor change of adding or removing a chord here or there, or switching the order of some lines in a verse, would have been important to a song's greatness (although small if it is judged in a strict %-wise accounting).

Arnie

 

once again, spot on Arnie !

 

I believe that in John's way of thinking the Beatles next single would not have been a track from the album. They hadn't anything new out since May. They hadn't released anything from Pepper or the White Album and would not have done so in 1969 either if anything else was available, hence his desire to get Cold Turkey out. I do believe that Come Together/ Something was only released as a single in the UK as an afterthought. I don't think they intended to release that at all. I seem to remember somewhere that it was Allen Klein's decision to do this. The success or failure of a single in America wouldn't have made any difference. They had several big singles in the USA which never came out in the UK. When it became apparent that nothing new was being recorded, it prompted Klein (or the Beatles) to rush release the double A-side.

 

You do see how odd, and a bit untruthful John is here, don't you? First of all, Revolution 2? and Revolution 9 weren't lying around for years... just until the album they were recorded for was released. And "THEY" were right neither version was commercial or good enough to be singles. Did John really think stations would play Revolution 9? And any perceived delay in releasing them had NOTHING to do with coming back from Holiday either. The sessions for the White Album commenced AFTER the Holidays. Sometimes John just said things for affect, knowing the interviewer and intended audience would have no idea about the facts. The comment about Cold Turkey seems the same to me. A casual "offered to the Beatles" but they weren't ready to record a single line. Ya think? After spending months and months in the studio John all of a sudden has a new song he wants to record AND release immediately. And a song about heroin withdrawal at that? C'mon! Just because John says something does NOT make it factual. In fact, quite often he tells untruths thinking no one would ever challenge him on the facts. I suppose we all do that from time to time. Ron

 

i agree although in the UK it was not a double A, it does smack of a Klein-ism otherwise they would have put the single out earlier, or not at all, Cold Turkey may have been a suggestion or at least in John's head to do a single to co-incide with AR but not off it but he also probably knew that there was no practical chance of getting all the Beatles in the studio in time to work on it. Also the Beatles rarely went into the studio to do one track, they usually did a series of recordings, even the singles usually came from Album sessions, with no other songs we know about to work on again John would have known he had no chance of getting the others into the studio at short notice to do Cold Turkey. He may have offered it to them but i suspect he just thought about offering to them but knowing there would be no chance for them just did it anyway but in his mind he could easlily have originally regarded it as a potential Beatles single/project

 

Poor John. IF the Beatles had decided to record Cold Turkey, EMI would have pushed for Come And Get It to be the A-side. Can you imagine THAT?! Ron

 

As recorded by the Beatles, though (as opposed to the versions we know), that could have been a great single. We'll never know what the group approach might have done to improve each song. Another great McCartney/Lennon single in the tradition of "Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever", and "Hey Jude"/"Revolution"?

 

I agree completely. In addition, there's his laziness, which he himself has acknowledged. I think his laziness applied to mental tasks as well as physical, even extending to conversational replies. He can't be dragged down to go searching his memory bank for a factual detail. Let some assistant do that; he's an artist. A brilliant, beloved, lazy artist.

 

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/john-lennon-talks-about-abbey-road.282742/

In his promotion for Abbey Rd I think John Lennon mentions about this Something/Come Together being a planned release for the next single.
Been a while since I heard this.

 

The only odd part is John referring to "Revolution 1" as "Revolution 2."

He's correct about the others going on holiday at that time — George and Ringo from June 7 to 18 and Paul from June 20 to 25.

I don't see how there can be any debate whether John wanted to record a single immediately after completing Abbey Road, since that's exactly what he ended up doing.

 

Some quotes from John in 1969 that pertain to how they still worked as songwriting collaborators up to the end of the band. I bolded some of the type, but left in the whole paragraphs of John's quotes so you can get his context:

---"You can't say Paul and I are writing separately these days. We do both. When it comes to needing 500 songs by Friday, you gotta get together. I definitely find I work better when I've got a deadline to meet. It really frightens you and you've got to churn them out. All the time I'm sort of arranging things in my mind."

---"Paul and I are now working on a kind of song montage that we might do as one piece on one side. We've got two weeks to finish the whole thing so we're really working at it. All the songs we're doing sound normal to me, but probably they might sound unusual to you. There's no 'Revolution #9' there, but there's a few heavy sounds. I couldn't pin us down to being on a heavy scene, or a commercial pop scene, or a straight tuneful scene. We're just on whatever's going. Just rockin' along."

Arnie

 

John was more about feeling than logic and details. He's not being untruthful at all in what you posted, he's truthful to his own reality at that moment. The gist of the feeling is what he's communicating, not some important Beatle factoid that obsessives like us will cite 45 years on. (Believe me, I could cite dozens of "untruths" by your favorite Beatle as well... as well as by George and by Richy. But I give them latitude 'cuz they're artists, not politicians or historians.)

Now carry on, gentlemen. I really don't understand the point in this Cold Turkey debate but some of the discussions of other songs have brought really interesting points to light.

 

Goodnight.
Mal Evans" John & Paul wrote this sad, wistful song for Ringo to sing".

 

I don't think John was lazy tho. He wrote recorded and released Give Peace A chance fairly quickly. Wanted the same for Cold Turkey and again with Instant Karma.

 

So you're saying that you don't believe John had a new song he wanted to record and release immediately, despite the fact that he recorded and released "Cold Turkey" immediately? So not only is Lennon lying, so is the historical record?

 

Mal got this one wrong. In the interview he gave in 1968, Paul says that this was purely John's song, which it is.

 

Not disputing what you say. But he mentions it in his white album review in november 68'issue of Beatles monthly.