Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm delighted to be chatting with Ian Leslie. He has a new book out which I just loved. It is called John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. And if you know anything about Ian or about me, you will know that John and Paul is John Lennon and Paul McCartney, namely a big part of the Beatles. Ian in fact has many other accomplishments and writings, but today is not generalist day. Today is Beatles Day. So, Ian, welcome to the show.

Hello, Tyler. It is an honor to be here.

I have so many questions. How is it that John got to be such a great songwriter so quickly? If you look at the early songs like If I Fell, Not a Second Time, Please, Please Me, It Won't Be Long, All I've Got to Do, they seem to come from nowhere. So Paul builds up and eventually is doing Hey Jude, Golden Slumbers. But John, who supposedly is lazy, just starts with incredible creations. How does that happen?

It's a good question, and I don't have a definitive answer, but perhaps it's connected to what you were saying. John was less methodical than Paul, perhaps a little less analytical in the way he thought about songs and song structures, and more prepared to just sort of blunder his way into, into things and see what happened. And of course, he had wonderful intuitions. He had some kind of innate talent and he'd been raised on different forms of music, as had Paul, both rock and roll and blues and skiffle, but also he was introduced to the Great American Songbook by Julia, by watching movies and so on. And, but he had this incredible, I guess what we'd call today, sense of agency, this sense that, well, I'm just gonna do it this way. The very first time Paul saw John playing, was a Wilton Village fete. They met properly for the first time afterwards. And Paul was thrilled by how John got the words wrong to a song that they both knew, that Paul knew. And it took me a while to work out why Paul was so thrilled by John getting the words wrong. And I think he was taking from John this sense that, yes, this is American music, but we don't just have to imitate it. We can actually do it in our own way. We could do it wrong and it'll come out right. And so, I think John was the kind of first to get onto that in a really strong way. And that's probably what pushed him furthest ahead in those early years.

What's your model of how lazy John was? Because in the Get Back movie, he seems detached. In the middle years, it seems it's always Paul driving them into the studio. How is he so agentic and possibly so lazy at the same time?

That's a great question. I think if the Get Back movie had been shot while they were recording Revolver, for instance, a couple of years earlier, we would have seen a very different John, much more voluble, much more energetic, obviously kind of charismatic. But I do think that even then, he had this kind of different attitude to work, which was, I'm going to just— when I get the time to lie around and do nothing, I'm going to do that. And maybe I'll take some drugs at the same time. Whereas Paul was much more, oh, come on, guys, let's go to work. Let's write some songs. Let's play. Now, this is all relative. They both, they all worked hard, right? You look at their schedule during the '60s, it's absolutely crazy. But when they got time off, John was often quite happy just lying around on a sofa. But from his point of view, he was just kind of going deep into the recesses of his mind, sometimes enhanced by drugs, and pulling things out. Whereas Paul was always on and kind of looking out. And I think John thought Paul was missing something and Paul thought John was missing something. And they're two different kind of attitudes to the world, come together and create this incredible new thing.

With what song, in your view, did the Beatles really start as an entity? So many people would say "Please Please Me." I have a slightly different and surprising nomination, but what's your view? When do you say, "This is the Beatles"?

Well, now, I would— I'm going to give the— you've made my answer sound really boring because I think "Please Please Me" is the point when they turn into a kind of pop machine. Both create something which is emotionally truthful because it's full of jealousy and yearning. It's got real kind of authentic emotion in it, but it's also this absolutely incredibly hooky pop song. It's got tremendous propulsive force, and I think it's sort of slightly underrated in the Beatles repertoire. And of course, it's, you know, it's the second single that they released. But you tell me yours.

Well, it's a strange nomination, but it's when they're backing Tony Sheridan, but they do Ain't She Sweet with John singing.

Oh yeah.

Which I feel he sings with total confidence and it fully sounds like the Beatles. And they did plenty of covers early on, as you well know, so we can't rule it out on those grounds. But if Ain't She Sweet were on, say, what Americans call the Beatles' second album, I wouldn't think twice about it. I wouldn't think, oh, that song doesn't belong there.

Yeah. And it's, it's typically, it's quite an odd song to cover. You know, I don't think many other bands, if any, would have, or singers, would have considered covering that. It's one of those kind of strange, quite hard to see, so, you know, why would you do that? And yet those are the songs they often kind of sought out. They were often making deliberately weird choices in the songs they covered. And of course, as you allude to, nearly all the songs they played before they got famous were covers, or, you know, 90% of them. The, the songwriting and, well, the songwriting started earlier, but actually performing the that they'd written started relatively late, really just before they got famous.

In terms of the recordings, which do you think are their least successful covers? And again, I have my own nominations here.

Well, ooh, good question. Maybe we should talk about yours first. I mean, I'm thinking of Mr. Moonlight, but as everyone says that, I'm sort of loath to mention it. Give me yours.

Well, the two Chuck Berry songs, I think Roll Over Beethoven The George vocal is somewhat weak. It's not nearly as good or as interesting as Chuck's version.

Oh yeah.

And then rock and roll music, which John does quite energetically. But again, Chuck's is just more interesting. And Chuck is the one early rock and roll figure who in that sense defeated them. So I think Mr. Moonlight's fantastic. I might nominate it as their best cover. It's so much better than the original. It's one of John's best vocals. It's done with complete conviction. And the notion that it sounds ugly and the organ is weird, I think they were just doubling down on everything and that it works. It's one of the Beatles songs I listen to most often, in fact.

Okay, I'm persuaded by that. I wouldn't actually go that far in that I don't often listen to it, but I do think his vocal is so bizarre that it absolutely is incredibly memorable and kind of cuts through. I would agree on— I actually like rock and roll music, because again, I think he sounds so committed to it. I think I would agree with George's version of Roll Over Beethoven. I would just— it's kind of limp. But you know, George was lagging behind as a vocalist and as a, you know, as a performer, and then at the time as a songwriter as well. But since almost everybody else in the world was, I don't really blame him for that. And of course, he started to catch up.

And I think "Words of Love" is slightly weak. Like "Rock and Roll Music," I think it's done well, but it's not better than the Buddy Holly original, nor is "Rock and Roll Music," I think, better than the Chuck Berry original. It doesn't quite add some special thing in either case. Whereas Anna does. Anna's a great cover.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because maybe they were less good on when they were covering artists whom they really, really respected and loved. You know, the closer they got to that, the harder it was for them to get distance on them. And it's interesting, for instance, that they covered very little, if any, now I think about it, Elvis Presley songs. And of course, there were huge Elvis Presley songs. So I think they found it harder with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, who were their kind of formative influences, harder to kind of take a step back and say, well, how can we do this differently? And ended up producing these slightly weaker, I mean, I still, still great in my mind, but slightly weaker kind of imitative versions.

That's a good point. You know, Noam Dorman and I agree that either Paul McCartney or Wings covers of Beatles songs are almost uniformly mediocre. They're sort of faithful. They're well executed, but I never want to hear them. I can't think of a case where they improved on anything or gave it much of a new slant. Do you agree with that, or is there a really good Maka or Wings cover of a Beatles song?

Oh, I think some of the performances on Wings Over America are pretty good, but I generally agree. And I think it leads me, or at least sort of leads my mind to this kind of larger point, which is that part of the reason they were so incredibly, incredibly innovative in the first place was that they were British and therefore had this distance from American music. They were not part, you know, organically part of the American traditions of blues and jazz and gospel that fed into rock and roll. And so this music was a kind of alien language to them. It connected to some of the music from home, but it was in other senses wildly different. And that enabled them to see things about it and to perhaps be a little bit more analytical about it because they had this distance on it. And to say, well, why can't this go with that? Why can't we mix up this style with that style? Or why can't we change this chord structure so it's not like the normal one? In a way that perhaps Native American artists at the time were not doing, were not able to do it with the same facility. So I think that that sense of distance from it is actually what creates the innovation.

Two of the best covers for me are You've Really Got a Hold on Me, sung by John, and Paul doing Long Tall Sally. I think those are just amazing, much better than the originals.

And I think Please Mr. Postman as well is one of my favorite. And again, it's a lot of the early ones. It's just the sheer incredible commitment of the vocal— Long Tall Sally, Paul, Please Mr. Postman, and others for John. And they kind of find the emotional heart of these songs in a way that sometimes the originals, you know, which are a bit neater, have the kind of edges sawn off, were not able to do. And I think that just is what makes them really so powerful.

I have some questions about joint composition. These may be matters of opinion, but how much of Help do you think Paul actually wrote?

Tell me why you asked the question, because otherwise we'll be sort of going through the track listing and I'm trying to remember.

Well, Paul has claimed, I stress the word claimed, that he wrote parts of Help and helped John with the melody. Now, that could mean many different things.

The song as opposed to the album.

Yeah, the song. It does sound to me truly joint the way, say, "From Me to You" is truly joint, whereas a John song, I don't mean to sound negative, but John melodies are more monotonous in the sense that "I Am the Walrus" or parts of "In My Life" just run on and push on. And "Help" to me has some Paul-like chord changes, but I'm not sure. What's your view?

Yeah, it could be. And it's always very hard to tell because they were so— their principal influences apart from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and girl groups and doo-wop and everything else, Bob Dylan, their principal influences were each other. And so they're kind of stealing things from each other all the time. So you might be right, it might have been a Paul contribution or it might be just John saying, let me run kind of Paul software in my head now, what would he do? The thing that I think we do know that Paul contributed to Help was those backing vocals. You know, and now those days are gone. And, you know, the backing vocals kind of act as this counter melody, and they do this odd thing which is quite, it's quite unusual, which is they start before the lead line, right? So that, so the backing vocals kind of announce the line, and then John comes in and sings, and it creates this lovely effect of, of as if John's friends are anticipating his thoughts, you know. So creates this incredible empathy that I think that's one of the most sort of powerful effects of that song.

I have another hypothesis. Tell me if you agree. Now, I'm not talking here about pieced together bits like Side 2 of Abbey Road or Cry Baby Cry, but genuine joint composition. And I think of Baby You're a Rich Man as maybe the last genuinely joint John Paul composition.

Right. Oh, I see. So I've Got a Feeling wouldn't count in your book because it was two separate songs and Paul said, let's put these together.

And it was wonderful, but it wasn't jointly composed.

Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think now, after 1967, if there are examples of those truly jointly composed songs. And I'm not sure. So you might be right. I mean, I don't think— sometimes this is exaggerated and people say, well, you know, they basically became independent forces after 1967. People put it on different dates. I actually think they were writing together all the way through. It's just that some of the contributions are very subtle, kind of good. And actually, you saw that in, in the Get Back movie, even when Paul's writing the lyrics to, to Get Back, the song, you know, Paul is kind of throwing in little ideas, and Paul is using him as a sounding board. But yeah, I, I think those kind of absolutely fluid, where, where, where what, you know, can't tell where one person's contribution starts and the other's ends. Those songs, I, yeah, you're probably right, they, they didn't really happen after 1967.

You know, Flying is the only song I believe credited to all four Beatles, but who do you think actually wrote it?

I would imagine Paul, although, although maybe kind of a collaboration between Paul and George, because, you know, Paul— George was involved in some of the kind of wackiest stuff around that period. He hadn't actually been that present during the making of Sgt Pepper, but he kind of came back renewed from, uh, sort of Magical Mystery Tour onwards. So I don't know, what's your guess?

I agree with your hypothesis. Parts of Flying remind me of Zoo Gang. And some other weird McCartney B-sides of the early to mid-'70s, like Lunchbox Odd Socks.

Yeah.

And then there's something else in there, which seems to me more George than John. So I think we agree completely. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're right. I mean, anytime there's some sort of weird, really avant-garde thing to do, we should be thinking about Paul. Not, not always the case, of course, cuz there are tracks like Tomorrow Never Knows where John really kind of goes full blast, but even then it's in partnership.

That's a Paul song in my view, in a funny way. Like John did the composition and the vocal, but I think Paul did the arranging, the orchestration, worked with George Martin to do the production.

Yeah. Well, it's an interesting example of like where the crew, the composition starts and where the production starts, because you might say it's a John composition and vision, and Paul executes it incredibly. I, I think what John wanted from the song was to create a psychedelic experience so that the song was not just about the void. It was just— it wasn't just about a psychedelic experience, it was a psychedelic experience, you know. He wanted it to embody it, and I think he successfully communicated that vision to Paul and the others. And of course, then Paul is incredibly well-placed to deliver on that because he's been thinking and he's been immersed in that world of avant-garde noise production. So he knows exactly where to take it. So, yeah, I see what you mean. It's almost a Paul song, but I do think it's John's vision. It wouldn't have happened without John.

Do you think that— this is now pre-Yoko— did John care, John Lennon care about John Cage in the way that Paul did, or did he just think it was silly? Like this isn't music?

I don't think he thought it was silly. I've never detected that. I think there's some sort of quote where he says, "Oh, avant-garde is French for bullshit." Yeah, I don't think he really believed that. And I've seen more quotes from 1966, 1967 where he's talking about, "Me and Paul are into this," you know, or, "Paul played me this." And so then we listened to— we started listening to Indian music or we started listening to avant-garde stuff. No, I don't think he kind of got it. He was quite as into it in the way that Paul was, but I think he was open-minded and curious, and he loved to check out new noises too.

Was John as impressed by Brian Wilson as Paul was?

It's a good question. I mean, it clearly had more of an influence on Paul, partly because, you know, they were both bass players. They both had these kind of expansive melodic gifts. So you can see the affinity more clearly. It's harder for me to see what the connection between Brian and John is, but I also, I've never seen John deprecating the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson either. And of course, he was quite capable of doing so. So I'm not sure. Have you got a feeling for that?

My sense is he felt it as distant, not negative, impressed in the abstract, but somehow not sad in the right way. And in some ways, too much of a false cheeriness for John, who was willing to just dig in and be negative. And emotionally, I doubt if it resonated with him, but that's speculation. I don't know.

Yeah, that's a really great point there, because I think what John always John looked for, and that they all, they both did, but John perhaps more than anyone, was a visceral emotional connection, a physical kind of feeling that kind of comes off the song like flame. And I think in the Beach Boys, you're right, I can imagine he listened to the Beach Boys and thought, this is very clever and very melodic and very beautiful, but it's not breaking my heart, or it's not making me want to dance. And so therefore it feels a little distant, whereas Paul was more likely to be seduced by the complex and extraordinary beauty of Brian Wilson's composition. So yeah, I think what you're saying makes sense.

And I view Brian Wilson as embracing sadness, whereas John uses anger to deny sadness. On average.

Yeah. Well, John always throws sadness together either with anger or humour or both. And he didn't deny sadness, you know, necessarily. If you think about the songs on The White Album, you know, Your Blues, he's literally talking about being lonely and wanting to kill himself. I mean, there isn't much more of an ex—

But it turns into suicide rather quickly, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so it's kind of theatrical, but I think it's also very heartfelt. I, I don't— so, so when we sense that there's some humor going on in a John song, we shouldn't think, oh, therefore he's just having a laugh, he doesn't really mean it. You should actually think the opposite. You should think, oh my God, if he's joking about it, he's really, really, really feeling it.

Do you think Paul's song Yesterday is excessively sentimental?

No, I don't. I think it is— I mean, first of all, it's not really sentimental in any way. I mean, I can see— I think it got acquired this reputation because it does seem to come from a different tradition, a kind of perhaps a more easy listening tradition in the first instance, although I can hear echoes of music going you know, far back from that in history. But as a song about this person, this woman has left me and I have no idea why. It doesn't then sort of go on to describe how wonderful this girl is. Just says she's gone and I don't know why. It's bleak, you know, and the way he sings it is more of a kind of It's clipped, it's brusque, it's northern. There's almost this kind of northern folk sound to the way he sings it. He doesn't— and the arrangement, the string arrangement, he made sure that it wasn't sentimental. He said to George Martin explicitly, you know, we've got to find a way of not making this sound saccharine. And so they asked— George Martin asked the players not to play with vibrato or to play with very little vibrato. So yeah, I think it's very unsentimental and in a way it's not that far off from "No One," which is a kind of anti-sentimental song where there's—

Or "Another Girl" even, right?

Yeah.

So the girls are leaving all the time in that song and it's quite brutally about something very particular.

Yeah, it's interesting because I think in that year, 1965, 'With Another Girl' and 'I'm Looking Through You,' he is really soaking up, I think, from John, or the night before. He's leaning into his John-ness in the sense of, like, he's finding some anger and some hostility. And 'You Won't See Me.' Yeah, 'You Won't See Me' most of all, where— whereas before he really had kind of two modes. He was like full-on rock and roll, I Saw Her Standing There, or this beautiful kind of romantic reflective side, Things We Said Today. By 1965, mainly because of John, partly because of Dylan, who was this incredibly kind of, you know, boiling with hostility and anger at times anyway, McCartney was really uncovering that side of himself as well and pouring that into songs. So, and actually, yeah, you're right, I don't think Yesterday is that far from from some of those more ostensibly kind of negative songs.

Do you ever in Paul hear the influence of Dylan, and if so, where?

Yeah, I think you can hear it in, in those songs. I like I'm Looking Through You, you know, just this, the, the willingness to put his insecurities and his jealousy and almost kind of spitefulness into a song, which of course Dylan was just fantastically willing to do, to put a kind of more complex kind of character into a song. I think you could see even earlier in I'll Follow the Sun, you know, that sense of just keeping, keep on keeping on, you know, just the sense of a troubadour with a guitar who's just going to keep playing and it will never get too attached to anybody. I think maybe he gets a little bit of Dylan into his repertoire there. Yeah, I think you see quite a lot of Dylan. So it's most often talked about in terms of Dylan's influence on John, but I think Paul— well, I think Paul was the first to get into Dylan and introduced Dylan to the others.

Do you hear any Dylan in Hey Jude?

I don't.

Just making the song long, right?

Yeah.

Oh, okay. This is the era Blonde on Blonde is coming.

That's a great point.

Yeah, yeah. Something about the cascading—

Yeah.

Extension, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think that cascading extension, well, I mean, it's very different from Desolation Row or those long songs in that it's just, it's not one long song, but neither is it one song welded onto another because in the first part of the song, he's foreshadowing it. When he says, na na na na, yeah, hey Jude. So he's kind of like giving you a little hint of what's to come. And part of, I think, part of what makes that song such an incredible achievement, I think, is it's, we're moving into another chapter, but we're taking what was planted in the first chapter with us so that it actually feels integrated even as it kind of takes off like a rocket.

What's the Indian influence on Hey Jude? I don't know.

What is the Indian influence on Hey Jude? I might have written about that and completely forgotten it, but so—

There's something in your book and you could express it better than I could. But again, the way the vocals develop reminds me of some parts of South Indian Carnatic music. And Paul always had more interest in Indian music than he let on, right? You hear this in the guitar solo on Taxman, which of course is Paul, not George.

Yeah.

And the ala—

Yeah, you can hear, I agree, you can hear Paul kind of taking things from Indian music. You can hear it in, so in I Want to Tell You, he often contributed Indian-flavored things to George's songs. So Taxman, I Want to Tell You, he does some kind of wonderful vocal melismas there. Hey Jude, maybe. I, so just the kind of fluidity of the melody, it might be kind of Indian influenced. I don't know, there may be other examples in songs that are quite subtle. So, I mean, this is not John and Paul, but I think you can hear Indian music in songs like Here Comes the Sun, right? So George's song Here Comes the Sun, it's almost like he'd kind of digested and absorbed the influence by that time and had returned to Western music, but with a subtle kind of those rhythms are quite— those kind of da-da-da-da-da-da and the kind of fluidity of the melodic line. So I'm really fascinated by how the Indian influences work themselves into Beatles music in non-obvious ways as well as the more overt ways.

A more obvious way is the song Cosmically Conscious, which, as I'm sure you know, was written in 1968, though it doesn't come out until, what, the mid-'90s. On Paul's Off the Ground album. But that's a wonderful song. Do you think it would've been better as a Beatles song?

You know, you got me there. I actually didn't know that song. So your Paul nerdery has exceeded mine, which is no surprise to me.

My Paul nerdery is hard to beat. Yeah. But it's a great song. It's online. Cosmically conscious.

He had quite a lot of the Indian influence in his Fireman albums. As well from the '90s. So it obviously stayed with him at quite a deep level. You know, he wasn't doing that just to signal, you know, I'm kind of hip anymore. This is way, way after that. So I think you're right. It became a part of his musical soul.

You know, the 1968 Beatles version is called Child of Nature, written by John. It later becomes Jealous Guy. On John's Imagine album. Do you think it would have been better as a Beatles song?

I think everything would be better as a Beatles song. I mean, I, because I, I, I think that they, when they played together, there was just this magic thing that happened. And I, I, I think there's just no question that with Ringo, George, and, and, and Paul, it, it would have sounded better. I'm really glad he turned it into Jealous Guy. Child of Nature is just a really terrible song. And it obviously has this pretty melody, but it's so sort of awkwardly gawkish and sentimental. And Jealous Guy is just John at his best in that he was just able to tell the truth in a way that's very simple sometimes. So sometimes he can write these kind of incredibly surreal, baroque, complicated word pictures like I Am the Walrus. And other times he could just say, I'm just a jealous guy, and make the words fit the melody in such a perfect way that it just goes straight to your heart. He always kind of bypasses the music altogether. So Jealous Guy is, yeah, I think one of his greatest solo songs.

This is a very important question, and I think we maybe disagree on this. So if I think of junk, Written by Paul in '68, but of course it appears on the McCartney album in what, 1970. George's Isn't It a Pity, which Paul kept off Beatles albums. I think they're better on the solo albums. And I actually think it was efficient that the Beatles split up when they did. I'm glad they did. I didn't think that as a kid, but I feel we got more first quality output and that they would've been getting in each other's way. Say in the '70 through '74 or '75 period? No, I think— Do you disagree? Like, All Things Must Pass is a great album, but we never would have had it if George was rationed to like 2 cuts or whatever.

That is doubtless true. I think the kind of better version, better alternative history might have been George does All Things Must Pass and John does Imagine, Paul does Ram. And then the next year they get to do a Beatles album. And then the year after that they do their solo projects and they come back and do a Beatles album, right? So they would be kind of going back and forth. And they did discuss something like that very briefly. You see it in the Get Back documentary. But I'm kind of glad they didn't. I mean, I think part of the eternal power and resonance of the Beatles story is that they are 7 years and out. You know, there's this incredible narrative tightness to what happens. They get famous, they change the world, they change music, and then they split at the top of their game. So I can't think of many other groups, if any, who split up after recording one of their best albums. I mean, Abbey Road is the last album they record, right? It's not like they've just, you know, declined in form and they're thinking, well, we're not that good anymore, we've got to split up, which is what most groups do. They're making this really, I think, the first album of the '70s. And then they split up. And they split up on after the end, you know, at the end of a medley. The god of narrative just said, this is the way it shall be. And I'm very glad that they didn't sort of then dribble on, as you say, kind of reforming and forming, getting back together, maybe getting another member in, maybe someone leaves and all that kind of narrative junk that most bands go through. They didn't do that. They just exploded and then they flamed out.

And there's this free rider problem, which they already had toward the end, that if you're getting back together again, you save your best songs for your solo album, right? Maybe George was doing a bit of that.

No, I think that's right. So, All Things Must Pass, you know, he had that at the sessions and you see him rehearsing it with the others during Get Back. And it's sometimes said, well, you know, John and Paul should have realized how great that song was. Isn't that, isn't it a pity? But I actually think it was George thinking, now I'm going to keep that one for my solo album. So you're right, there would have been this sort of divided loyalty as far as for all of them, naturally, right? So yeah, it's a great point.

Is there a great unreleased Beatles track or not?

Unreleased now?

No. No, no. Unreleased during their tenure. So all the demos have come out, but is there one where you hear it and you think, my goodness, they should have put that one on one of the albums? I don't have a strong candidate. I think my lead would be What's the New Mary Jane, that if you had given Paul his way with it, you know, over the course of a week, he might have turned it into something great, even though it's a John song. But I don't have a clear nomination. Do you?

I like Come and Get It. I don't think there's like a truly great song that should have been released. I mean, some of the songs that just refer to our previous bit about that ended up on solo albums, like Maybe I'm Amazed, not Maybe I'm Amazed, but Backseat of My Car were kind of floating around and maybe they could have been on one of the final albums, but no, I, generally, that's better as a pure Paul song, I think.

Just Paul and Linda, you know, deeply in love, and John and George get in the way.

It's a defiance. It really becomes about the breakup in a sense. So I don't, I don't really think so. And I think it goes to one of the extraordinary things about them is that they had incredible taste and they were very good at judging their own work. And if you listen to the demos that get released and the offcuts, you very rarely think, A, that song should have been in an album. You know, as you do with Dylan, for instance, you often think, well, you know, Blind Willie McTell obviously should have been on an album. You don't really get that with the Beatles. And you also never think, oh, that earlier take should have been the album cut. Or you very rarely think that. So they pretty much had a perfect record of choosing the best cut and the best songs for each album.

How good is Free as a Bird?

I quite like it. All the kind of, all those kind of post-Beatles, Beatles songs, I, I, I think there's a kind of poignancy to them and I like George's playing and I like Paul's middle 8 actually on that song. Is it a song that I really need to listen to? Not really. Do you like it?

I like it. One of my hypotheses is that if you had had a Beatle reunion, It would have sounded— I mean, that is a Beatles reunion in a sense, a lot like Free as a Bird, which is Paul completely in charge. The others contribute bits. Paul might even, in terms of vocals, subordinate himself to the others, but it would be fairly artificial, as is Now and Then, which I also like, but it doesn't thrill me. I don't sit down and think I need to hear Now and Then. Maybe I feel that now and then, but I think that is a kind of template for the Beatles reunion.

Yeah.

Paul being the boss and pretending he's being subordinate.

Yeah. And I think I agree. And I think this points us to one of the fundamental truths about the Beatles, which I talk about in the book, which is the music was really rooted in the personal chemistry between them. You know, it wasn't just that they had these talents and abilities and then they bring the talents and abilities together and they collaborate and they make something really good. It was spending time together and knowing each other intimately that created this extraordinary music. And so this is why the model of them kind of going apart and then coming back together, getting into a studio and leaving and never seeing each other again for a year, it would have been very unlikely to work. They needed to be in this kind of intense hothouse atmosphere where they're pressing it, particularly John and Paul. When John and Paul were not in physical proximity to each other, they just found it much harder to, to have a creative connection. The creativity and the personal relationship are inextricable for those two.

Do you agree with the common view that in 1969, something very bad and damaging happens between John and Paul, and John becomes so upset or hurt by Paul. Do you think that's true? And if so, what was the reason?

I don't think there is a thing, really. I don't think there is. I don't think Paul hurt John in any kind of concrete way. So John talks about being wounded but nobody's quite sure what he means by that. Even Yoko, you know, when Yoko was interviewed by Philip Norman, I think in the kind of, I'm not sure if it's the '80s or '90s, she was like, you know, John used to talk about how Paul had hurt him more than anyone else in the world, but I was never sure what he was talking about. I couldn't work it out. I think there was a kind of pivotal moment. I really think that India was the turning point, and the aftermath of India was the point at which John kind of— something inside John kind of snapped. And John was always on the verge of snapping, right? Because he had this incredibly volatile personality. His childhood was just wild, you know, so difficult and unstable. And so, he was sort of plagued by insecurities and all sorts of personality problems. And India, he goes into India feeling very close to Paul, very close to the others, he comes out of it quite bitter and angry, and there's a kind of element of a wildness to him and a sort of malignancy that wasn't as prominent before. It certainly hadn't been for a few years. It actually been relatively kind of calm the few years previously, a couple of years previously. So something happens around then, but I think, as I think it happened inside John's head, You know, I don't think there is a concrete thing that happened. I think it was just the way he was feeling, and particularly the way he was feeling about his relationship with Paul. He started to feel, I'm never going to be as close to Paul as I would like to be. I think he had this vision of them as completely wrapped up in a personal and creative relationship in which he could be blissfully happy. And I think around that— well, I think during India, for whatever reason, perhaps because he was just spending a lot of time meditating and, well, actually just by himself thinking, and then Paul goes home and he's sort of bereft because he spends the last couple of weeks, last few weeks by himself. I think that tips him over into a personal crisis. And out of that comes, you know, Blues and I'm So Tired, some of those miserable songs which afterwards he said, you know, I really meant those songs. And he also, you know, sexy Sadie. And he really, he takes a lot, starts taking a lot more drugs. He gets drunk a lot, splits up with Cynthia in a horrible way, gets together with Yoko. And there he is. So I think that is the kind of turning point.

You mentioned what good taste the Beatles had, and I agree with that. Why is it they were not better judges of talent at Apple Records? Because other than Bad Finger, it seems pretty weak to me.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

And Bad Finger's best song was written by Paul.

Well, I mean, I guess there's James Taylor, Billy Preston, Mary Hopkins. I mean, I agree they're not like heavyweights. I don't know if that's because they were— but were they turning away great talents? They would have had loads of applicants, right? But I don't know if there was a good filtering process because there was no process whatsoever at Apple. So in a way, that might have been the problem. There was nobody kind of being the stage one filter. And so they had a kind of lot of randomness in the process.

If Paul was so upset about the Phil Spector arrangement of The Long and Winding Road with all the strings, why did he play more or less the same arrangement in concert for so many years?

I agree. I mean, it's a pretty good string arrangement. And you're right, he plays it with taking the best kind of melodic phrase from that string arrangement from Phil Spector. So I think he was upset at Spector just more generally for, you know, having the arrogance to come in and change the Beatles' music in any way without Paul's permission. Paul hated, you know, anybody who was going to mess around with the Beatles and his music without his say-so. So I understand why he was angry, but I think you're right. I think in that case, I expect he did a good job.

What was Paul like as a collaborator with Denny Lane in Wings?

You know, it's a difficult relationship. Denny Lane was very good, a good singer, decent guitarist, but he obviously was not a talent anywhere on the same scale as Paul or as John. Or indeed of George. And so there was always this kind of— and of course, Paul was the next Beatle— there was always this kind of inbuilt imbalance. But he did stick with him all the way through the '70s until the, you know, 1980s, very early 1980s. So it was an enduring musical collaboration, if not an equal one. But there was also this question of like the money, you know, So Denny was being paid by Paul rather than them both kind of getting royalties. Although Paul did kind of co-write Mull of Kintyre with him. I don't know how much of Mull of Kintyre was contributed by Denny, but that might have been Paul's, you know, letting Denny in, as it were.

And No Words they co-wrote on Bandit on the Run. I think I can hear which is the Denny part and which is the Paul part. And the Paul part just makes the song become magical. The Denny part is good, but I wonder how that was for Denny.

Yeah, to say, look, here's my song, and then Paul takes it and just sort of takes it to another level. Yeah, I agree. And I do think the result is really beautiful and a really underrated song from Paul's post-Beatles career.

What was John like as a collaborator with Harry Nilsson?

Well, he was very professional and workmanlike, which is slightly surprising, but in a sense not surprising because he'd grown up as a recording artist in the Abbey Road studio where everything ran like clockwork. But Harry Nilsson said, yeah, he was always in the studio in the morning and then saying, right, let's get to work. And they did work, but then in the afternoon or the evening, they were then kind of go crazy and go on drinking bouts and take drugs. But I think he was a pretty kind of efficient and professional producer. I'm not sure they produced great work together.

What was Paul like collaborating with his brother, Mike McGear? People have forgotten about that album somehow, but it's quite interesting. I don't know that it's good. Paul is deferring too much. I think he should have just taken over. But he does, I think, only in the one song called All My Loving, which sounds quite like Paul. And the title itself tells you something.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it sounds much more of its time than anything the Beatles did. That's probably because, as you say, Paul was not really pushing it and perhaps was being a little bit careful not to be the dominant voice in the room with people who he didn't know very well. And, you know, perhaps he was eager not to be like the big guy, you know, in front of his brother. But yeah, I don't know. I think your answer is as good as any.

What do you think is the most underrated Paul album? Paul or Wings or any combination?

Ooh. I think maybe Venus and Mars I really like. Trying to think which ones are underrated. A lot of them are underrated. Give me your answer.

I would say Red Rose Speedway, and then I know this is not an album, but YouTube cuts of Wings playing live with Jimmy McCulloch on guitar, I think are generally better than Wings Over America, which is quite good for a live album. But to see Jimmy and Paul on YouTube, those are just phenomenal performances. Songs like Magneto and Titanium Man. Quite come to life on YouTube Live, whereas it's only pretty good on Venus and Mars, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

Or Letting Go or Call Me Back Again. Just, they become phenomenal blues cuts on YouTube.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the very underrated ones, because very obscure ones, are the Fireman albums, including Rushes, which is this almost totally instrumental album that he records in the wake of Linda's death, and it is very poignant. And the, the, the kind of few words and, and sort of fragments of recordings from life that you do hear are very moving when you know the context. And it's typically Paul in that I think it's one of his most personal and raw albums, and he says very little in it, you know, so it's kind of hidden away. And in fact, it's under another name altogether. So, you know, and I think that's the kind of fascinating thing about Paul as an artist is that, and if we're thinking about him in comparison to John, it's particularly fascinating that Paul is emotionally complex, but with the complexity hidden inside brilliantly simple, powerful pop songs a lot of the time. So I'm not talking about The Firemen now, that is like a sort of more avant-garde example, but Just something like Penny Lane, you know, it seems like this bright breezy pop song and then you go to Strawberry Fields and it's like so obviously radical and weird and odd. But there are layers of complexity to Paul's songs that are not obvious to the naked eye and they reward a kind of, as you would put it, a Straussian reading. So, you know, a song like Oh Darling, which appears to be a love song, is, and I think it's partly about him splitting up with John, as I write about that in the book, but it's also this, he overloads it with emotion. This is something he does in a song now and again. He'll kind of write a simple pop song and then he'll kind of like turn up the emotion somehow in the way he sings in a way that distorts the song and puts it on and takes it into this strange place. So this kind of screaming vocal in Oh Darling, I hear in it a lot of anger. You know, I don't just hear love and sadness and loss. I hear anger in it and all, you know, a subcurrent of violence, actually. And I think you could read it, you know, a feminist reading of that song would be that Paul is kind of exposing the possessiveness and sometimes the violent possessiveness that underlies some of these male rock and roll songs about don't you leave me, baby, you know. Run for Your Life.

It's his version of John's Run for Your Life.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

But hardly anyone knows that. What's the most underrated John album?

I, I think Walls and Bridges is really pretty good. I, I, I'm not a huge fan, uh, with the exception of Imagine and the Plastic Ono Band, I'm not a huge fan of his subsequent albums. But I do think Walls and Bridges and Mind Games are pretty good. But I didn't have strong feelings about them.

I would say Mind Games.

You would say Mind Games. Why?

There's a lot of songs on it like Meat City or I Know That You Know that seem forgotten, but they're very good. I think the production is systematically weak, but the songs are excellent. If he had brought Paul in, it would've been an incredible album. I think maybe better than Imagine. I don't feel all of Imagine has worn that well.

I think one of the problems is that, I don't know if you agree with me on this, but I think John kind of lost his voice much sooner than Paul, lost the top kind of level of his voice. Not unsurprisingly, because he was, he'd been screaming in songs and in therapy so much, he was shredding his vocal cords. He'd obviously been smoking a lot, he'd been taking drugs and so on. And I think quite quickly from the early '70s onwards, his voice is thinner and to me not nearly as powerful. It was so on the Rock and Roll album that he makes in 1973, whatever it is. I think part of the reason it's not very good is that his voice is just not there anymore. It's no longer this incredible instrument that it was through the '60s into the very early '70s.

And there's not enough diversity of sound on that album. I feel it was great he did two albums with Phil Spector, but should have moved on and looked for someone else, and that it kept on sounding the same too much. And when you do that, when you're doing covers and your voice is somewhat subpar, a lot of things went wrong there.

Yeah, I would agree.

I like John's contributions to Pussycats. So you can debate who did what on Pussycats, but Too Many Rivers to Cross. In Subterranean Homesick Blues, I think of them as, as much John songs as Harry songs. Yeah, that's debatable, but they're two of the highlights of his solo career. Harry didn't— never did anything like those on his own.

Yeah, there were little glimpses of John's brilliance throughout the recordings he made in the '70s, but overall I'm just struck by how much he missed that really annoying guy telling him to, you know, try this or do that or how about this or come on, John, let's go to work. And George did too, of course. So they spent the last sort of couple of years of the Beatles having a bit of a moan about Paul. But without Paul, they wouldn't have made some of the incredible music they made at the end of the '60s and through the '70s. They very quickly kind of lose momentum. And he, while Paul kind of just tunnels on, not always brilliantly, right? In fact, his solo and Wings records are kind of erratic, but my God, he's productive. He just keeps going.

Now you've studied this one artistic collaboration in great, great detail. What do you feel you've learned about artistic collaboration in general, or how do you now look at other artistic collaborations through a different lens.

There's so much to say about that. So I'm gonna narrow the lens a little bit and say, I, I, I think it's really interesting that there are very few creative male romantic but platonic relationships that are, that are very creative. I think this is a particular type of relationship that you see recurring a few times throughout history and often makes a big difference. There's a kind of big leap forward to some sort of creative or intellectual revolution that happens. And I think it's kind of distinctive to, to this relationship where they're not lovers, they're not just mates, you know, and they're not homosexual, but they are two men who have very, very intense feelings for each other, and that feeds into the creativity I was thinking about a couple of examples recently. One is Wordsworth and Coleridge, you know, and in some ways it mirrors John and Paul. They're a couple of years apart. Coleridge is a bit younger. They've got very different personalities. Coleridge is flamboyant, voluble. He talks a lot. He's wild. He takes drugs. Wordsworth is a little bit more distant and a little bit cooler and a bit more methodical., but they really sort of, they turn each other on, right? And they spend a lot of time thinking and writing poetry together and really kind of birth the Romantic poetry movement together. And then the other example I was thinking about, the best 20th century analogy for John and Paul, I think, is Kahneman and Tversky. You know, if you read Michael Lewis's book, The Undoing Project, as I have, the similarities are just too strong to ignore. And here it's Tversky who's this kind of wild font of insight and speech. And Kahneman is a little bit calmer, more reflective, but they're completely in love with each other. You know, Kahneman says, said to Michael Lewis, well, you know, I've been in love and all, but with Amos, I was just wrapped. You know, I couldn't, you know, I was completely compelled by him. I was lost. And they just spent hours and hours together. Just wanted to be with each other all the time. You know, Kahneman's wife said this is much more intense than a marriage. And of course, when something is really intense like that, it's going to explode. And in all these cases, the partnership kind of splinters and sparks and falls apart at some point. And then there's this great aftermath of sadness. But it's kind of inevitable because they're really kind of two ends of a relationship. You can have a sustainable, steady, this marriage-type relationship where you love each other in this wonderful kind of loving, calm way, or you can have this wildly creative, impulsive, sort of dramatic and volatile relationship, but that can't last forever.

One thing that struck me is just how few examples there are. Another one that occurs to me is Picasso and Braque. Obviously that doesn't last. You have a lot of examples where the people do quite different things. So like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Or Stravinsky with both Balanchine and Diaghilev. Those work, but they're not competing against each other at all, right? They're just working together. And I think of Jagger-Richards as ultimately sort of a business relationship where they're quite happy to give up being creative just to make a lot of money.

That's exactly right.

And it becomes not interesting for 50 years.

Yeah, exactly. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I think Jagger and Richards is much more like a marriage, right? Versus a love affair. They love each other, but they're not like wildly compelled by each other. I'm not sure they ever were. They always thought, yeah, this is the guy I want to write, make music with. He's obviously great and our talents fit together. Let's get married. But it was nothing like this kind of intense, jealousy-ridden, tempestuous, conflicted, hot John and Paul relationship. And I think there's other examples. Like Picasso and Braque, I don't think they were like John and Paul either. You know, they were just partnerships who came together, you know, got on with each other, but kind of turned to each other creatively and then kind of spun apart and that was it. I doubt that Picasso gave Braque much of a thought after they stopped working together and probably vice versa. Whereas John and Paul's relationship was much deeper. And I think that's important because actually I think the scale of the achievement of what they did together was rooted in that incredibly rich and deep deep relationship. It wasn't just a byproduct or, you know, coincidence.

It's striking to me that what to me is the very closest example comes from the same place and broadly the same period, and that's Monty Python, which is truly collaborative and they compete with each other, you know, whose skit gets to be done. They do TV, they do movies. It has a brilliant peak. At some point it collapses. Members have quite different skills, but they're truly working together. That's the other British Beatles, I think.

Yeah, and there's that wonderful link between them as well via George Harrison, who becomes friends with them and funds, I think, The Life of Brian. So, I would buy that. And of course, it reminds me of this other aspect of The Beatles which we haven't touched on, but it's another thing that's so unique about them, is that they were a comedy group as well. You know, can you think of any other groups where laughter is so important, where humour is so important? And again, that's primarily John and Paul, right? They were all funny, right? George could be very dryly funny, but that sense of antic, overflowing, childlike glee and humour that runs all the way through the Beatles is John and Paul, and it's not true of any other group. So the link between music and comedy is, you know, is just so interesting.

Before my last question, let me just plug your book again, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. I loved it. It's one of those books I started it and I didn't really get up till I finished it. Just read it straight through.

That's great.

Final question, what will you do next?

I am going to spend the spring and summer talking about John and Paul. I'm going to love every minute of it. It is just wonderful to hang out with John and Paul and the Beatles and a great thing to talk about where there's lots of other darker stuff going on in the world. I'm going to keep writing my newsletter, The Ruffian, my Substack, and I'm going to think about what to write next, and I have no idea. All suggestions welcome.

Ian Leslie, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.