Meeting Paul in person at the listening party really crystallised something for me.
Paul is everything you want Paul McCartney to be: funny, warm, generous, up for a laugh, but also completely understated. There are no airs and graces. He has that quality where, despite being Paul McCartney, it somehow feels like you’re listening to your neighbour talk. He’s a constant optimist — he even said he hates writing sad songs — and he clearly loves babies, which came through in the really sweet story attached to “Life Is Hard.”
And I suppose that made me understand something about John in 1968.
I can see how, to a dysregulated John Lennon, Paul might have looked almost replaceable. Not because Paul was ordinary — obviously he wasn’t — but because his extraordinary qualities were wrapped in such calm, domestic, normal warmth. Paul was funny, kind, musical, family-oriented, generous, and steady. He didn’t arrive like a thunderstorm. He didn’t look like rupture or reinvention. He looked like home.
And maybe, to John in 1968, home didn’t feel exciting. Maybe it felt suffocating, or dull, or too safe to trust.
I also think Linda and later Nancy helped Paul become more openly romantic, or maybe helped him feel safer expressing romance inside committed relationships. So in the sixties, Paul’s love may not have looked dramatic enough for someone like John, who was restless, wounded, and constantly looking for something shiny enough to distract him from himself.
So I can understand how 1968 John — dysregulated, frightened, self-destructive, hungry for transformation — looked at Paul, this calm, beautiful genius who liked families and babies and ordinary people, and thought: no, I’ll go with the stalker. I’ll go with the strange, intense, destabilising thing. I’ll go with the person who feels like escape rather than the person who feels like safety.
And the tragedy is that by 1980, I think John was beginning to understand how important Paul was that not everyone is kind and funny and musically brilliant. Not everyone has songs flowing out of them. Not everyone can make genius feel as natural as breathing. Not everyone loves babies and families and normal people while still being one of the most gifted artists alive.