Was It Just A Dream?

Paul's Early Resolution

“I really remember looking around the estate where I lived and thinking what's the main problem here cause I'm gonna have to face it. And it was lack of money. Nobody had money, you know, and they were always arguing husband and wife over that. I thought if I can avoid that, this will be good.” Paul McCartney, 2012

And I remember thinking very consciously, ‘Okay, I’ll solve that; I will try to get money.’ That set me off on the ‘Let’s not have too many problems with money’ trail. – Paul McCartney, 2020

The Chocolate Bar

Paul says, ‘That’s where the Beatles started. That’s where John gave me half his chocolate bar.’ And now Bono’s like, ‘What chocolate bar? I’ve never heard of any chocolate bar.’ And Paul says, ‘John had a chocolate bar, and he shared it with me. And he didn’t give me some of his chocolate bar. He didn’t give me a square of his chocolate bar. He didn’t give me a quarter of his chocolate bar. He gave me half of his chocolate bar. And that’s why the Beatles started right there.’ – Matt Damon, 2022

The First Shared Dream

[I once had] one really big one about thousands of half-crowns all around me, and finding lots of money in old houses and just as much of the stuff as you could carry. I could never carry enough. I used to put it in my pockets and in my hands and in sacks, only I could still never carry as much as I wanted. -- John Lennon, 1966

I remember when John and I were first hanging out together, I had a dream about digging in the garden with my hands. I’d dreamt that before but I’d never found anything other than an old tin can. But in this dream, I found a gold coin. I kept digging and I found another. And another. The next day I told John about this amazing dream I’d had and he said, ‘That’s funny, I had the same dream.’ So both of us had this dream of finding this treasure. And I suppose you could say it came true. -- Paul McCartney, 2012

Jam etc.

I can still see them now; Paul and John having toast and John wanting jam on the toast and Paul telling him off: 'John, you must be mad! It's a penny extra.’ – Allan Williams 2019

It always struck me as odd that Paul is having a panic attack over John's penny. I know he's crazy money-conscious, but still. It's John's penny. What, did they have a shared bank account or something? Don't be ridiculous. But lately I've been wondering if maybe there was something like that going on.

Every Tuesday, Paul and I used to go to the pictures. One night, John, Paul and I went out for something to eat to a little cafe. We had nearly finished the main course and they both winked at each other and then they started to have this terrible row across the table. I'm thinking, what's going on? They were shouting at each other until we all got thrown out so we didn't have to pay. – Iris Caldwell 2012

Paris

And so he said "what are we gonna do?" so I said, "we could hitch-hike. And then, you could spend the money as we go, you know." So we did. -- Paul McCartney, 2026

Why is Paul so confident here in spending this huge windfall John got so frivolously? He's never frivolous with money ever once in his life, and before, he was shouting at John for spending a penny on jam for toast. What was up?

And Paul and I also did the same thing, once. We just cancelled. . . . Paul and I just cancelled all the engagements, and left for Paris . . . — John Lennon, 1976

Northern Songs and other Companies

Under Northern Songs, first organized in 1963, John and Paul each held 750k shares exactly.

Under The Beatles Ltd., first organized in 1963, all four Beatles were "individuals sharing their income."

Under Lenmac Ltd., their royalties company, NEMS owned 20%, John owned 40%, and Paul owned 40%.

Under Maclen (music) Ltd., their publishing company in America, first organized in 1965, NEMS owned 20%, John owned 40%, and Paul owned 40%.

Under The Beatles and Co., the Beatles became "apart from songwriting royalties, which would be paid directly to the authors of the individual songs, all the money earned by the group would be" pooled into the company.

Under Apple Corps, each Beatle owned 5% of the company separately, and then jointly they held the other 80% together. All their money from recording and performing went straight into Apple. Songwriters would be paid individually for royalties, and as Lennon/McCartney were a partnership, they would be paid together for their royalties.

The Family Way

I copped money for Family Way, the film music that Paul wrote while I was out of the country making How I Won the War," said Lennon, laughing. "I said to Paul, 'You'd better keep that', and he said, 'Don't be soft.'

A Few Extra Shares

According to Peter Brown, "Paul and John had always had an unwritten agreement that neither of them would own more shares than the other in their music publishing company. It was that simple."

So when John found out that Paul had bought a thousand extra shares (remember, they each owned 750k shares, so in the grand scheme of things, this is tiny), Peter Brown says John "felt he'd been betrayed," and "became enraged, no doubt egged on by Klein." Brown remembers John "slamming a table" as "Barbs were exchanged."

“You bastard!” John spit. “You’ve been buying up stock behind our backs!” Paul blushed and shrugged limply. “Ooops, sorry!” he smiled. “This is fuckin’ low!” John said. “This is the first time any of us have gone behind each other’s backs.” Paul shrugged again. “I felt like I had some beanies and I wanted some more,” he said.

Peter Brown then says John stormed out of the meeting.

So to me, this is another lace curtains, burnt condom type moment. Paul is extremely hurt when John says his vote against Klein doesn't matter. To him, that was when he knew it was over. (so I think that must have to do with the promise too). So what does Paul do? he's got this thing, where he can get his revenge. He knows it will hurt John, but it will just look like this little tiny thing. No one but them two will know what a big deal it was.

Paul Only Cares About Money

PLAYBOY: "You're talking about records, of course."

LENNON: "Yeah, to churn them out because I was expected to, like so many people who put out an album every six months because they're supposed to."

PLAYBOY: "Would you be referring to Paul McCartney?"

LENNON: "Not only Paul. But I had lost the initial freedom of the artist by becoming enslaved to the image of what the artist is supposed to do.

John's Dropout

PLAYBOY: "Why did you become a househusband?"

LENNON: "There were many reasons. I had been under obligation or contract from the time I was 22 until well into my 30s. After all those years, it was all I knew.

The Beatles, even after they publicly broke up, were contractually obligated to continue the Apple arrangement of pooling their money until the divorce papers were signed, at which point, they could all take their piece of the pie and go as Paul put it. AKOM points out, without really digging into the money issue, that John's disappearance from his career as a popular musician happens directly after the papers are signed. As soon as he is no longer pooling his money with Paul, he loses all motivation to be a contributing member, pulling his weight. He stops putting out albums to make money. ((((I am not saying this is the only reason. John's mental health and his baby would've also played huge roles. I am saying it could be part of it.)))) And then he reemerges when he feels that Paul has invited him back. When he thinks they're ready to "start over" again.

SOURCES

The Paul McCartney Project

John's 1980 Playboy interview

John's 1971 Rolling Stone interview

Peter Brown and the Beatles Bible

My own quote doc which compiles lots of interviews

John Lennon & Paul McCartney photographed taking Martha for a walk in London, April 13, 1967.

Paul: You gotta remember, you know, we grew up, we were kids together. Howard: Your father, by the way, did not want you hanging around with John Lennon. Paul: Uhh, he didn't mind, he didn't mind John, you know... Howard: Didn't he say that John was a bad influence and you almost had to sneak out and meet with John when you guys were young kids? Paul: Well, almost*, you know, but by the time I met John, uhh, I had a little say in the matter. Howard: I think your father was right. You should have stayed away from him. Really, very upsetting guy.

It's funny how Paul has always been hesitant to admit that his father didn't like John and that he had to sneak around to meet him, or even that they would meet in his house while Jim was away. Because you would think that for most people it would be quite easy and casual to just laugh and say, "Yeah, we would sneak around behind our parents' backs. We were just two silly, rebellious kids, lol. Good times." And Paul didn't really have that much say in the matter for quite some time, given how Jim made a rule that Paul couldn't be alone in the house with John. (And btw, what's up with the "almost" *? He either sneaked out to meet him or he didn't, lol. There is no "almost".)

over, over again I'll be in love with you

It was the 6th July 1957, that's a definite. It was at Woolton, a small town which sits snug and unassuming on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was a heatwave, or at least that's what the paper said. A scorcher; perfect for a picnic, or in this case -- a fete.

It is easy to imagine the scene on that fete day: the melting icing off the fairy cakes, men sprawled in their deckchairs, red faces shielded from the sun glare by damp flannels. Push chairs and prams and coconut shies and hook-a-ducks and trying not to think about the howling bombs and the young men in uniform who never came home.

A fete of course needed entertainment. This time, imagination is not our only tool of time travel as the programme has survived remarkably intact. At first glance, its offerings of scheduled fun in the form of a sedate dinner dance and watching a little local girl in a scratchy costume, picking her nose, be paraded around as the Rose Queen seem borderline offensively inoffensive. Indeed, anyone reading it would be forgiven for skimming through the list before casting it from their mind, returning it to its seemingly natural state of a forgotten moment in time. But to look a little closer, to peer between the Cheshire Yeomanry and the police dog show would reveal, hidden in plain sight, a 4:15 performance of The Quarrymen: the forerunner to arguably the most influential band to ever exist, fronted by a boy who would later grow to become one of the most celebrated, parodied, idolised, despised and ultimately discussed men of the twentieth century: John Lennon.

Of all the miracles of that particularly miraculous day, one of the most surprising is that a photo of the Quarrymen's afternoon slot was taken and preserved for us to see. Looking at the photo, it is hard to marry the image of the teenager in the centre with his teddy boy curls and check top with the mop-topper or the peace protester that he has no idea he will one day be. We know from interviews though that he is already imagining a better world, at least for himself. Life had not been kind to him, leaving him sore to touch, to handle. But he has a dream or four. That day, his dream is to be a rock 'n' roller. We can see he's already got the essentials. He has the hair, the band and the crowd, even if it is made up of only vaguely interested fete goers and the odd supportive or unsupportive relative. He even has the cool arrogant rock'n'roll glare towards the crowd down pat, though this may be more from his refusal to wear glasses and the fact that he has had a beer or two. Myopic, drunk and brittle, our view of him from photographs is very different to what would have been seen by the crowd that day, but to him it would have made little difference. The crowd can see him, as we can, but to him all is a blur of motion.

John can't see, and we can't see but we know there is somewhere in that crowd, a teenager. A plump 15-year-old in an oatmeal-coloured jacket and hair that had perhaps until recently been likened to his mother's, but was now just his own. It must be hot for him in that oatmeal jacket. Why he's wearing it in the first place is contentious. The oatmeal-jacketed boy, when he is a man, will say that he was there to pick up a girl. His friend Ivan Vaughn next to him will say there was no girl and the suit and the hair and the everything were for the eyes of the boy onstage who, for maybe the last time ever, is completely unaware of him.

On the other hand the boy in the oatmeal jacket, whose name is Paul, can see John as clear as if the sun that day rested only on his curls. Paul will relish telling interviewers throughout the coming decades about that moment, of seeing and listening to this cool-looking older boy standing there, notionally singing 'Come Go With Me', a song that had come sneaking in through the docks from America and into the sitting rooms and bedrooms of only a select few in Liverpool. More impressive to Paul than the obscure song is the fact that John has got the words wrong and is playing on the banjo chords his mother taught him. Yet, somehow, it doesn't seem to matter. Through his bravado, the boy singing now of penitentiaries has turned a wrong into an almost right. Its a sublime, funny, exciting knife-edge, thrilling to a teenager who had learnt too soon the fragility of all around them. Paul will be less keen to tell interviewers, but will tell friends that really it didn't matter what the boy did onstage that day. He already knew what he wanted, had known since he had seen the boy at the chippy, on his paper-round and on the bus where he had stolen glances at the back of his curly head. He wanted to be in a band with that boy, and he was going to make it happen.

Time shifts, skips and judders as we move away from the song to later in the day at St Peter's just a few minutes away from the fete ground. St Peter's today looks very different than it did on the day of the fete. There are no queues, no plaques, no rope marking the stage, no pieces dismantled and stolen as relics for shrines of a very different type of worship. This is all because what is about to happen hasn't happened yet. The future starts only with the boy Ivan walking through the door with Paul in tow to meet the sweaty and exhausted Quarrymen, who had, unbeknownst to themselves, already taken their allocated places in the church hall for this moment in music legend.

For a turning point in world history, it began with little ceremony. By all accounts of those present, the first pleasantries exchanged were about what you'd expect from a bunch of hot, tired and slightly drunk boys meeting a younger boy too busy nervously shuffling his feet and perspiring for any meaningful conversation.

The moment becomes the moment when Paul with an attempt at nonchalance, requests he play a tune or two on John's guitar. John, with his own affected indifference, hands him the instrument, eyes narrowed, leaning so close that Paul can feel his beer breath puff against his face. The second Paul has the guitar in hand, he retunes it, flips it and bursts into a sudden rendition of 'Twenty Flight Rock', his voice soaring to the ceiling of the hall and filling the nook and cranny of the space with his echoes. To us looking in through folds of time, the boy Paul recalls a skiffle pop Orpheus, each note summoning the dead to life with his music. For those there at the time who were not yet figures of history but drunk teenagers on a hot day in a church hall, opinions were far more mixed.

To Chris the boy looks like nothing, because he was on the loo at the time and missed the whole thing.

To Pete Shotton standing next to John, biting his lip raw, the boy looks like the sudden, unceremonious end of childhood.

To John Lennon, perplexingly, he looks like Elvis.

Why John Lennon thought that the sweaty boy in front of him clinging to his last residue of puppy fat looked like the American King of Rock and Roll has been the subject of much debate. It could have been the heady combination of booze, nearsightedness and the heat of the day. Perhaps in fairness the boy with his oatmeal suit and his dark hair and his swagger did look like a young recreation of the king; and if the king can come in Memphis, why not in Liverpool? Or did this brilliant boy with his dancing fingers seem like the messiah, King of Kings, whose coming promised a way out of their war-hemorrhaged city? Or maybe all dreams of salvation were irrelevant and the boy was simply beautiful, just beautiful. And to a 50's tender hearted teddy boy there was nothing quite so beautiful as Elvis.

The song ends and begins here -- their story from here on shifting and splitting into millions of viewpoints, multiplying and mutating on and on into infinity. It will be the job of later biographers and writers and singers to try to fit so many eyes into one needle of coherent narrative. But that is the concern for historians and screenwriters and disgruntled biographers. Let them hash that out forever. Let us linger here instead, right here in this rare moment of certain uncertainty with Paul finishing his final note: the definite moment where the two boys' eyes meet and the future unfurls around them. Their shared look is not love, not yet. It's not even acceptance. But it is something, a feeling as fragile and tender as a bird wing, of being on the cusp of flight.

In the end, I think John had some tough breaks. He used to say, "Everyone is on the McCartney bandwagon." He wrote "I’m Just A Jealous Guy," and he said that the song was about me. So I think it was just some kind of jealousy. I had to try and forgive John because I sort of knew where he was coming from. I knew that he was trying to get rid of the Beatles in order to say to Yoko, "Look, I’ve even given that up for you. I’m ready to devote myself to you and to the avant-garde." I don’t know if it’s true. One thing I’m really glad about is that I didn’t answer him back. It’s very difficult to do that when someone is attacking you. But I would have felt sick as a dog now if I had.

"Steven Gaines: John was the leader of the band, but Brian was also sweet on John. "Cynthia Lennon: I wouldn't say no to that. The fact [was] that they went to Spain together. "SG: ...Did John ever talk about how besotted Brian was with him? Did he every say that Brian came on to him? "CL: No, no, no. "SG: You said that Brian was no match for the 'international leeches.' "CL: He wasn't. "SG: What did those people do? Who were those people? "CL: Whenever you went to Brian's apartment, you'd be surrounded by [them]... he fancied that kind... "Peter Brown: But they were the kind of people who were using John. "CL: Using him, and John liked it, 'cus he was at a certain point a masochist."—All You Need Is Love by Peter Brown