Not everyone liked The Beatles

Pop Hates The Beatles

These guys hate The Beatles because they love them too much. No wonder the song sucks

yes, of course; forgot about that one. 

I won't "link" to anything, but I can certainly tell you exactly which books and people I'm citing.

The thing is, once the idea that Lennon/McCartney did sometimes write separately became widely known, this aspect of their partnership was perhaps an over-emphasised by Beatles' authors in the '70s and '80s. But, with the publication of books like Mark Lewishon's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head, and McCartney's own Many Years from Now in the '90s, along with evidence in Hunter Davis's authorised biography of the Beatles from the late '60s, it's clear that the majority of the songs credited to Lennon/McCartney were actually written by the two of them. There are quite a lot that weren't, of course, especially in the post-Sgt. Pepper era, but still, across the Beatles' entire oeuvre, there are more that were than weren't.





This is all true, except for the bolded statement, which is only partially correct. The truth is that on many occasions, the person who sang the lead vocals wrote the majority of the song or had the initial idea for the song, but not necessarily that they wrote it entirely by themselves.

Just to get a bit technical and semi-legal for a moment, what constitutes songwriting in the eyes of the law are the lyrics, chords, melody and any readily-identifiable riff in a song. Things like guitar solos, drums, bass-lines, horn sections, string arrangements etc are all arrangement contributions, not songwriting ones.

You mention that a Lennon/McCartnety collaboration like "A Day in the Life" was rare by the time that the band got to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it wasn't as rare as you might think. No less than six of the songs credited to Lennon/McCartney on the Sgt. Pepper album were indeed written by the pair of them. The songs that are true Lennon/McCartney compositions on Sgt. Pepper are...

• "With a Little Help from My Friends" (written together as a "Ringo song", while sat at a piano)
• "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (mostly written by Lennon, but McCartney actually helped write quite a lot of the surrealistic lyrics, which you might assume were all John's)
• "Getting Better" (the bulk of it was written by McCartney, but the refrain and attendant answering vocals were written by Lennon)
• "She's Leaving Home" (the initial idea for the song was McCartney's, and he wrote the verses, but Lennon wrote the "She... (we gave her most of our lives), is leaving... (sacrificed most of our lives)" bits)
• "Good Morning, Good Morning" (mostly Lennon, but McCartney helped out with the music by changing a few chords here and there)
• "A Day in the Life" (as we've already discussed)

So, you see that, even as late as 1967, Lennon and McCartney did still write a fair few songs together. Of course, this became less and less the case as the band moved into 1968 and 1969, but overall, for most of the band's professional career (1962-1970), the majority of Lennon and McCartney songs were indeed written by the two of them.

That said, the eyeball-to-eyeball writing that the pair engaged in throughout much of their pre-fame partnership (in the Goffin-King or Rogers-Hammerstein mold) had all but stopped by 1964. Although, having said that, songs like "With a Little Help from My Friends" and "Birthday" prove that they did still write that way later on in their career, on occasion. But nonetheless, they still wrote most of the Lennon/McCartney songbook together, with each contributing chords, lyrics, melody and/or riffs to each other's basic ideas. And this is particularly true from 1962 until, say, 1967.

The Beatles And Mad Magazine


I recall a mad movie parody from the 1960s for one of the James Bond films. A panel has Bond in the offices of M. M tells him "James, with the British empire losing its colonies and the British Pound getting devalued, you and The Beatles are all we have left"








That final image with Ringo I recall was the back cover to Mad # 100, a parody on a popular shampoo ad from . Can't make out the artist's signature but I believe it was Frank Frazetta with his final Mad contribution. I don't think he did much, if anything, previously

Here's a link to that Hit Parader interview with Lennon . It says it's the "full text" but it looks more like a summary to me, but I haven't had a chance to look at it closely yet.

One thing I meant to mention earlier about the Beatles songs in general: they were the first band I ever found myself singing or humming along to the bass-line on many songs rather than the vocal melody - Eight Days a Week, for example; She Loves You comes to kind as well, off the top of my head.