Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Only a month after the album's release, however, Lennon went on a vacation to Spain with Beatles manager Brian Epstein. Though many have speculated over the years that a sexual liaison happened on the trip, McCartney theorized that Lennon's real purpose for traveling with Epstein was to consolidate his political power in the band. Coincidentally or not, it was around this time that the group decided "Lennon-McCartney" had a better ring to it than the other way around.
"I wanted it to be 'McCartney-Lennon,' but John had the stronger personality, and I think he fixed things with Brian before I got there," McCartney recalled in "The Beatles Anthology" book. "I remember going to a meeting and being told: 'We think you should credit the songs to "Lennon-McCartney."' ... I had to say, 'Oh, all right, sod it!' -- although we agreed that if we ever wanted it could be changed around to make me equal."
McCartney's 1976 credit reversal felt like an afterthought, the final punctuation mark on what had been his most successful year since the Fab Four's breakup. At that time, McCartney had little cause to worry that his contributions to the Beatles would be overlooked by historians. After all, it was during this period that a British journalist took an old photo of the Beatles around to British teenagers and got the mind-boggling response: "Who are those three guys with Paul McCartney?"
It's easy to forget now, but while McCartney was dominating the pop charts in the mid- to late 1970s, Lennon was funked out and plagued by writer's block. After releasing two of the most acclaimed rock albums of the early '70s -- "Plastic Ono Band" and "Imagine" -- Lennon had limped through a series of halfhearted projects, finally retreating from the music business in 1975. When a May 1979 open letter from John and Yoko stirred anticipation that Lennon might be ending his self-imposed creative exile, Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh urged him to avoid embarrassment by staying retired. The following year, when Lennon and Ono reemerged with the musical dialogue, "Double Fantasy," immediate reaction was largely scathing. The Real Paper, a now-defunct Boston weekly, was only slightly more extreme than the consensus view when it deemed the record a self-obsessed disaster and recommended that the Lennons return to dairy farming.
But on Dec. 8, 1980, only three weeks after the album's release, the public perception of Lennon changed overnight, thanks to the intervention of a disturbed young man named Mark David Chapman. A conflicted, moody man in life, Lennon became the messiah of peace in death. And although McCartney was the lone ex-Beatle who'd made overtures to rock's emerging new wave -- even organizing the 1979 "Concerts for Kampuchea," which included the Clash, Elvis Costello and the Pretenders -- Lennon was now routinely lauded as the only Beatle with any relevance to punk. Even his five-year recording sabbatical, born out of creative lethargy, now looked like an act of defiance: a middle-finger salute to the industry sharks who wanted to control him.
As Lennon's myth grew, McCartney's stature shrunk in the public eye. It didn't help that his most prominent releases of the early '80s were all sappy duets: with Stevie Wonder on "Ebony & Ivory," and with Michael Jackson on "The Girl Is Mine" and "Say Say Say." As MTV reconfigured the pop landscape in the '80s, McCartney officially became a wimpy old fart.
By 1986, he was fed up. Beginning with a Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Loder that year, he launched a P.R. counteroffensive. The message: I was the avant-garde Beatle, I was the guy who dreamed up "Sgt. Pepper"; I was the swinging London bachelor when John was a bored suburban family man.
McCartney's campaign has been unrelenting, finding its way into his concert programs, his interviews for the "Beatles Anthology" and -- most forcefully -- into Barry Miles' McCartney bio, "Many Years From Now." This comment about the groundbreaking Beatles track "Tomorrow Never Knows" is typical: "People tend to credit John with the backwards recordings, the loops and the weird sound effects, but the tape loops were my thing."
Such obsessive hair-splitting never really factored into songwriting teams like Leiber-Stoller or Jagger-Richards, but Lennon and McCartney were different. They were competitors -- albeit friendly competitors -- more than they were partners, tending to write apart and use each other for editing help. More important, their collaboration ended bitterly -- with very public recriminations.
Seeing the mid-'90s "Beatles Anthology" releases as an attempt to rectify the historical record, McCartney asked Ono if his name could be placed ahead of Lennon's, if only for the song "Yesterday." He had good reason to think she would acquiesce. In 1994, she had provided the three surviving Beatles with Lennon's demos for the unreleased songs "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love." That same year, McCartney inducted Lennon into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and greeted Yoko onstage with a hug so effusive it could rival Al and Tipper Gore at the 2000 Democratic Convention. In 1995, he even produced a track for Ono at his home recording studio.
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