Ian Leslie’s John & Paul is that rarity, a book about music that is well-written and worth reading. This is because Ian Leslie is not a music writer. He is a behavioralist whose previous books include studies of the social functions of lying and curiosity, and the formation and resolution of social conflict. His exploration of the Lennon-McCartney relationship rests on a single and incisive assumption. For both Lennon and McCartney, their relationship was the deepest and most important they had with any living person after the deaths of their mothers when they were teenagers.
“Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy,” Leslie writes. “This volatile, conflicted, madly creative quasi-marriage escapes our neatly drawn categories, and so has been deeply misunderstood.” We should not be misled by the dualistic characterizations of 1960s press cuttings or Lennon’s 1970s sneering, or even by McCartney’s painful attempts to affirm his crucial role in completing Lennon’s compositions. The John-Paul relationship was “a duet, not a duel.” The facts of their lives and work prove it.
They were joined for life in 1962 when they agreed to share their songwriting credits. That formed a union that no lawyer may break asunder unto death and well beyond. Before that, however, they were friends, sharing musical passions and the sudden loss of their mothers. They saw themselves in each other, and they became themselves through intimate proximity, leaning over their guitars by the fire at Paul’s house, squeezing into the closed front porch at John’s aunt Mimi’s to harmonize face to face, roughing it in shared rooms and vehicles. Playing music is a physical experience. When you share a microphone, you smell the other man’s breath and feel his saliva on your face. On the road in the winter of 1962, the band kept each other warm by lying on top of each other in the van.
“Love is composed of a single soul in two bodies,” Aristotle had written. John and Paul completed each other musically and, in the early years, emotionally, too. They finished each other’s verses and chord sequences. Their voices were so compatible that they sounded like a single voice. All this bloomed into the mirror imagery of left-handed McCartney and right-handed Lennon at the same microphone, dressed in the same suits with the same mop-top haircuts, their voices merging and splitting as the song unfolded. It also produced their intuitive feel for completing each other’s compositions. Their harmonizing was so equable that they effectively sang double lead lines.
Paul’s range was higher in pitch than John’s, so Paul’s lead picked up where John’s left off. Consider “A Hard Day’s Night.” John leads with a moaning, bluesy verse in G major, and then Paul takes over at the bridge (“When I’m home / Everything seems to be right”). The shift is so sudden and uplifting that it doesn’t matter that he’s singing over minor chords. It is as though the sun has come out. A “technical necessity,” the singers’ vocal ranges, resulted, Leslie writes, in “the distinct and thrilling effect of two men who share the same ‘I’—the same consciousness.” Apart from evoking the “camaraderie” of a band of brothers, it also “evoked how two people can slip in and out of each other’s subjectivity: the way we internalize the voices of those we know and love.”
Bound by ambition as well as love, John and Paul applied their shared subjectivity to their task. They would “strum and chatter in a dreamy, seemingly aimless state until the germ of an idea emerged, at which point they went to work.” “From Me to You” emerged like this on the bus between York and Shrewsbury in early 1963. They began “She Loves You” on the bus in June 1963 and completed it that night after the show, in a “twin-bed hotel room in Newcastle.” They had come across Existentialists in Hamburg, and Paul had the idea of a movie-type song in which the protagonist was not a lover but the third wheel; Truffaut’s Jules et Jim had been released in Britain a month earlier. “She Loves You” is a boy-girl song, but it’s also a boy-boy song. Paul’s male protagonist is telling his male friend that he is loved and should be glad.
“The narrator presents himself as a detached and rational friend but is more deeply invested in this triangular story than he knows,” Leslie writes. “‘She Loves You’ secretly wants you to notice how much I love you.” Later, when John was falling in love with Yoko, Paul would use the same device on “Hey Jude,” and tell his male friend to cheer up and “go out and get her.” Both lyrics mask their emotional complexity in near-nonsensical affirmation (“Yeah, yeah, yeah” and “Na, na na, na-na na-na”). But by “Hey Jude,” the romance of John and Paul had curdled.
After 1966, John and Paul resemble René Magritte’s “The Lovers II” (1928). They kiss with their heads entirely veiled. They are deeply intimate and thoroughly depersonalized. In Leslie’s telling, John’s belligerence and insecurity stemmed from jealousy of Paul’s swelling talent. This was compounded by John’s massive ingestion of LSD and his musical limitations, and by Paul’s convenient belief that producing industrial quantities of the best possible music would not imbalance the founding pact that John, who was a bit older and much louder, was the leader.
Both of them felt their loss and could not fully describe it. The recent Get Back documentary shows the pair running through “Two of Us.” Paul has said that he came up with the idea while driving around the countryside with Linda, who was pregnant with their first child. But the lyric is an elegy. As Paul admitted later, the song is “more about trying to get in touch with the people we once were.” Paul and Linda, Leslie notes, did not have “memories / Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.” That was Paul and John. It was also Paul and John who had stood “wearing raincoats … solo in the sun,” at the bus stop in Penny Lane, and who were “chasing paper” with the lawyers as the band fell apart.
They run through the songs at a single microphone, truly face to face for one of the last times. Paul stops and says to John that their new songs seem to be telling a bigger story: “Two of Us,” “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Oh! Darling.”
“It’s like you and me are lovers,” John replies.
Paul cannot find the words but grunts his assent. They both flick their hair. Then they run through “Two of Us” again, with Elvis impersonations and Scottish accents. They keep joking until they are ready, Leslie writes, to play it “totally straight,” but also “entirely heartfelt.”
Leslie concludes that one reason we misunderstand the ballad of John and Paul is that we see intimate male friendships only in terms of competition or homosexuality. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes describes how a pair of friends can be “lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy.” But Liverpool was not ancient Athens. John and Paul did amazing things with their intimacy, but they lost each other as they went.
One night in Hamburg in 1962, John caught Paul in bed with a girl and cut up her clothes. Nine years later, John came across a promotional booklet for Apple, saw the entry on Paul’s marriage to Linda, and scrawled “funeral” over “wedding.” Under a photo of him and Paul, he wrote, “The minutes are crumbling away.” John felt so rejected by Paul, and so guilty about his anger, that he wrote both an assault and an apology, “How Do You Sleep?” and “Jealous Guy.” Paul sniped more cryptically, and conquered America all over again with Wings while John was smacked out at the Dakota. Still, in March 1974, Paul played the “She Loves You” script for a third time, and finally in real life, by delivering the message from Yoko that reunited her and John after his “lost weekend” with Ono’s assistant May Pang.
“He was always thinking I was cunning and devious,” Paul complained in 1981, a few months after John’s murder. “I never set out to screw him, never.” Then he said, “I realize now we never got to the bottom of each other’s souls.” There was no time.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
by Ian Leslie
Celadon Books, 448 pp., $32
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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