Inside John Lennon and Paul McCartney's partnership and the song that shifted the 'balance of power'

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07-04-2025

For the record:12:27 p.m. April 6, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the year Paul McCartney wrote 'Yesterday' and the year Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,000 to appear on 'Saturday Night Live.'
It's the greatest story often told. The Beatles are not just the most successful musical act of all time; they are perhaps the most analyzed, deconstructed and dissected entertainers since the dawn of recorded music.
We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs,' is, astonishingly, one of the few to offer a detailed narrative of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's partnership. And it's a revelation. Leslie gives a complete portrait of this remarkably fecund and frequently tortured creative partnership, which began in Liverpool in 1957 and ended in New York City on Dec. 8, 1980, with Lennon's murder.
The basic facts of their first encounter are well known. They met in the summer of 1957 at a garden party in the Liverpool suburb of Woolton, where 17-year-old Lennon was performing with his skiffle band the Quarrymen. McCartney was there to scout Lennon, who was already establishing a reputation as a riveting stage performer. McCartney, 15, ginned up the courage to approach Lennon after his set; their bond was forged over a mutual passion for Little Richard and Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel.'
They took to songwriting with alacrity, driven by an urge to create their own material at a time when there was no precedent for a band to write its own songs. 'It entailed the two of them educating each other in the art of songwriting and doing so from scratch,' Leslie writes. 'And there was no division of labor.' One of their first joint compositions was 'Love Me Do,' which was written in 1958, four years before the Beatles recorded it. All of their songs, whether fully realized or half-baked, were dutifully logged by McCartney into an exercise book he had swiped from school.
The early songs that fans know by rote — 'She Loves You' and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' among others — came fast, in a mad swirl of ideas tied to a steady work ethic. Lennon and McCartney were so bound together that Leslie writes of a 'double consciousness' whereby the pair alternated vocals on the same song, as in 'A Hard Day's Night,' or twined them together into a first-person confessional like 'If I Fell.' This equipoise held for four very productive years, but there comes a moment in all love stories when one partner gets fidgety and starts to pull away. According to Leslie, that moment came in 1965, when McCartney wrote 'Yesterday' with no input from Lennon.
' 'Yesterday' feels like a shift in the balance of power,' says Leslie. 'From the beginning they were equals, and 'Yesterday' wasn't only just a hit, but the song that more artists covered than any other Beatles song. Paul even sang it onstage by himself when they performed. And it triggered John's insecurities.'
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A further separation occurred in 1967 when Lennon, along with George Harrison and Ringo Starr, moved out of London into the suburbs while McCartney stayed behind, soaking in the beau monde of the city's arts scene. Leslie also writes of Lennon's use of LSD and McCartney's reluctance to follow suit. 'They weren't living near each other anymore and songwriting became more like a job with set hours,' says Leslie. But 'even as they were starting to drift apart, the songs were still astonishing.'
One-upmanship between the partners became a spur for Lennon to try harder, with McCartney responding in kind. When Lennon presented McCartney with 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' a woozy reverie loosely based on his childhood, McCartney wrote his own memory piece, 'Penny Lane.' Lennon wrote 'Imagine' a year after the Beatles broke up and thought he may have finally topped McCartney. 'When he played it for people to get feedback, the question he asked was, 'Is it better than 'Yesterday?,' ' says Leslie.
Yet even as they were rewriting the rules of pop music, the dynamic between the two began to fray, especially after the death of their manager Brian Epstein. When their revenue stream was threatened by Epstein's brother, who wanted to sell 25% of the band's future earnings to a group of merchant bankers, it sparked a multipronged legal battle in which McCartney chose his brother-in-law John L. Eastman to represent him in court proceedings, while the other three cast their lot with the brash Allen Klein. It was the beginning of the end, as has been well documented.
But it wasn't quite over. According to Leslie, there were numerous social occasions when Lennon and McCartney enjoyed each other's company after the Beatles broke up. Leslie writes that it was McCartney who helped broker a rapprochement between Lennon and his estranged wife, Yoko Ono, in 1974 during Lennon's 'Lost Weekend' period in Los Angeles, visiting Lennon at his Santa Monica beach house to deliver the news that Ono wanted to get back together. There was also a strange moment in 1976, when Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $3,000 to reunite on 'Saturday Night Live.' McCartney happened to be visiting Lennon in New York at the time and they briefly considered shocking the world by hightailing it down to Rockefeller Center, but the idea was abandoned.
'Despite their differences, there was always this feeling with John that perhaps one day they might get together again,' says Leslie. 'John had the greatest admiration for Paul's musicianship and songwriting, and there was always this mutual respect, even when they were fighting in court. There was this unspoken dialogue between them, long after they stopped writing together.'
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.