Brie✨

Can you guys picture Paul saying stuff like this today? Because I definitely can't, lol:

"Then also we were like married, so you got the bitterness. It’s not a woman scorned this time, it’s two men scorned — probably even worse. And I had to make way for Yoko. My relationship with John could not have remained as it was and Yoko feel secure." (1984) "Really all that happened was that John fell in love. With Yoko. And so, with such a powerful alliance like that, it was difficult for him to still be seeing me. It was as if I was another girlfriend, almost." (1985)

As I've said before, it's so intriguing how all these marriage and romantic "metaphors" whenever he was explaining his relationship with John just completely vanished from his vocabulary since the 90s, even though he candidly and openly used them so many times during the 80s. Just like he randomly revealed (also in the 80s) that John told him that Jealous Guy was about him, but he has never brought it up again. I feel like this isn't talked about enough...

Hope you’re doing well. I was wondering what your favorite moments or quotes about John and Paul being together were. Just anything you found cute, sweet or funny in regard to John and Paul’s relationship.

Love your blog ❤️☮️

Thanks!

"Paul told countless stories about the echo chamber. He said he’d hide out there with John, kind of giggling and laughing when there would be another session in another studio. If you solo’d any of those tracks you’d probably hear them laughing." (Greg Kurstin)

"Lennon uses others to bring him out of his moodiness. The one who does it best is Paul." (someone who worked on the set of Help!)

"Lennon and McCartney were spotted together, chatting and laughing backstage, at the sixteenth annual Grammy Awards at the Hollywood Palladium [1974]." (Tom Doyle)

"Every week there was a rumor that the Beatles were going to get back together. It had nothing to do with it. But I didn't notice any animosity between John and Paul. The sessions at the Record Plant [in 1972] were interrupted whenever Paul called. They spent hours talking. The next day, an article appeared in the newspaper saying that they hated each other." (Gary Van Scyoc)

"John and Paul were inseparable that night, like Siamese twins. It was like the rest of us didn’t exist. They spent most of the evening talking, conducting a whispery summit in one corner. In the middle of the party they went out, ostensibly looking for a cigarette machine, and appeared some time after carrying a cocky-watchman’s lamp. The next morning, when it was time to leave, we couldn’t get out of the house because they had put cement stolen from the roadworks into the mortise lock so the front door wouldn’t open. And we had to escape through a window.” (Charles Robert)

"They were so tapped into what the other was doing and could sense their partner's next move, they just read each other like a book." (Johnny Gentle)

“Paul and John would come to my father’s place, go upstairs and lock themselves in for hours and hours, listening to records and thumping about up there.” (Julia Baird)

"Paul and John were the best pals. They spent all their time together and stuff, and they had individual lives. But in the end they were the final sort of arbiters of everything between themselves." (John Dunbar)

"Paul and John were so tight it was like one person at times." (Roger McGuinn)

“I was fortunate enough to see them together many times in the late 60’s, and have always been fascinated by what I saw/heard: they finished each other’s sentences, laughed together, just seemed totally in sync. I was a 15-year-old girl, but I did notice that about the two of them and will never forget it.” (Lizzie Bravo)

"The wife of an important member of their movie crew told me, "Paul and John have a way of turning out the others when they're on. George and Ringo sometimes sort of wander away." I observed this too. John and Paul, the songwriters, are often a duet, with George and Ringo acting as loners." (Phyllis Batelle)

"In 1964 the Beatles stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel on the banks of Loch Earn [...] They went to bed early - on Tuesday morning - and slept long after sunrise. John and Paul, who shared a chalet, were out and about first.They took a short walk on the shores of Loch Earn, whetting their appetite for lunch. They found the invigorating fresh air a bit chilly, but waited to try to entice a dog into the loch by throwing sticks for it to retrieve. They later tried their hand at boating and went out on Loch Earn. After some confusion at the start, until everyone had learned how to drive their boats, they went off and beat up the loch for half-an-hour or so. Later on Tuesday a party was held for the four Liverpool tourists by the manager of the hotel and his friends. Paul retired first and John followed." (X)

"They were intensely close, remember, and Paul would do almost anything for John. So, once they were safely inside, Paul took a tablet of LSD for the first time. 'So I could get with John to be with him in his misery and fear.' (George Martin)

"He asked me to join the group, and so we began our trip together. We wrote our first songs together, we grew up together and we lived our lives together. And when we’d do it together, something special would happen. There’d be that little magic spark." (Paul)

But really, they did almost the opposite. Paul escaped to the countryside of Scotland with Linda, distancing himself from the music world and the pressures that had followed him for years. John, moved to New York, placing himself right in the middle of a vibrant artistic and political community, joining protests and becoming involved in causes beyond music.

I like to think of it as them unconsciously searching for something the other had given them. Paul seemed to be looking for the freedom, simplicity, and dry humor that John carried so naturally, the ability to step away from expectations and not take everything so seriously. And John, in his own way, seemed to be searching for the connection, creativity, and sense of belonging that Paul had always brought into his life: the feeling of being part of something bigger than himself.

They always end up mirroring each other, no matter how hard they try to drift apart.

That’s fantastic!

That’s just what I wanted!

Keep going, it’s lovely!

Fantastic!

That was marvellous.

Sure!

There are songs like Two Of Us that most of us believe are about both John and Linda, but Paul has never acknowledged this (he always states it’s a love song for Linda) though he has said he understands why people think otherwise. However, whenever he discusses the song, such as in The Lyrics book where he breaks down almost every line, he completely skips over the lyric: "You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead." I think it makes sense why he avoids it; that line doesn't fit Linda at the time, given they had only been together for less than a year. Interestingly, while breaking down the line "You and me sending postcards, writing letters..." in that same book, he randomly notes that John was a "great postcard sender, so you would get some great stuff from him." It is interesting that he would casually bring John up if the song truly had nothing to do with him. Why else would that detail be relevant?

With Dear Friend, Paul was actually, at first, much less straightforward. He never openly admitted the song was a direct message to John until the 80s ("It was about John, to John"). In the 70s, he only said, "It’s just about a dear friend, whatever it means to you." Also in the 70s, when asked if there was a song on Wild Life that served as a reply to John, he claimed:

"I don't write anything consciously. Sometimes when I'm pissed off with John over Apple business a line might creep in. I suppose I wrote 'too many people preaching practices / don't let them tell you what you want to be' was at him. If there is something on this album, 'Dear Friend' is the nearest thing to that."

Regarding Too Many People, Paul claimed in a 1984 interview that only two lines in the song were actually about John: "Too many people preaching practices" and "You took your lucky break and broke it in two." He added, "There wasn't anything else on it that was about [John and Yoko]." If you actually read the lyrics, it’s glaringly obvious this isn't true, but typical Paul. (In The Lyrics, he finally discusses the track in a more general sense as a reaction to John "firing his missiles" at him through songs). In that same 1984 interview, he insisted those two lines were the only "tiny reference" to John on the entire RAM album. (Sigh).

Then there are the songs he rarely or never publicly acknowledges, almost acting as if they don't even exist. Perfect examples are Oh! Darling and Call Me Back Again. He has never performed "Oh! Darling" at his own concerts (the sole exception being a single performance at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert, simply because Hawkins loved the track). Paul has only ever made two real commentary about the song back in the 90s, and it strictly focused on technical aspects: how he wanted his voice to sound like he’d been singing all week. In Many Years From Now, he merely notes that what he "mainly remembers" is trying to get the vocals right. That was it. It was also the only one of his songs from Abbey Road that he completely excluded from The Lyrics. As for Call Me Back Again, the only time he ever discussed it was in 1975, offering brief technical details. He sang it live from 1975 to 1976, but has never performed it since, nor has he ever acknowledged it again to my knowledge. It was also left out of The Lyrics.

Now Let Me Roll It. The first time an interviewer asked him about his vocals sounding like John's style, Paul was very dismissive, saying, "I still don't think it sounds like him, but that's your opinion." As the years passed, he shifted his narrative, admitting that when he heard the completed track for the first time, he immediately thought it sounded like John, though he claimed it wasn't intentional, before adding that the song was about nothing more than "rolling a joint." Finally, in The Lyrics, the truth changes again: he admits he used the tape echo on his voice intentionally to "acknowledge" the fact that John loved tape echo. For the first time, he also confesses that Let Me Roll It is primarily a love song "about wanting to reach out to someone" but being "hesitant" to express your feelings.

As for Arrow Through Me, he did include it in The Lyrics, but he spends about 90% of the entry talking about everything except the song itself. In the final paragraph, he drops a cryptic commentary stating that the "character" in the song has been wounded, and that it could have been "a great relationship," before adding that there was nobody "more down" than him at the moment of writing it. This is fascinating context, because Wings drummer Steve Holley noted that during the 1979 recording sessions for this song, Paul was deeply depressed and missing John intensely, describing it as "a huge hole in his life."

With Coming Up (which I agree with John on interpreting it as a personal message to him), Paul has never acknowledged the subtext or any deliberate nod to John. He only ever likes to recall how much John loved the track and how it partly motivated him to get back into the studio for Double Fantasy. Tug of War practically screams John (at least to me), yet Paul has always refused to admit it was inspired by him. He says he understands why the public thinks it is, but he oddly uses the defense that the song was written before John’s death rather than after, using the timeline to imply he wasn't thinking of John at all when he wrote it, lol. Here Today is the first track where he acknowledged the subject matter from the very beginning without any downplaying, though he has claimed on at least two separate occasions that this was the first song he "EVER" wrote about John. (Sigh). Even then, he noted that he "could always deny the song was about him" and "burn the tapes."

Of course, the most recent example is "The Boys of Dungeon Lane." He surprisingly and unprompted stated that the middle verse from Days We Left Behind was about his memories with John, yet he hasn't openly dedicated a single full song on the album to him. Meanwhile, he has openly identified which tracks are about George, Ringo, his parents, Nancy, and even a childhood crush. The songs on that album that sound the most potentially connected to John are precisely the ones he hasn't discussed beyond basic technical details.