303: John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs with Ian Leslie

Summary

Podcast Summary: Something About the Beatles – Episode 303: "John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs with Ian Leslie"

Release Date: April 22, 2025

Introduction

In Episode 303 of "Something About the Beatles," hosted by award-winning author Robert Rodriguez, the conversation centers on Ian Leslie's insightful book, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. The episode delves deep into the intricate relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, exploring how their profound friendship and creative partnership were reflected and sometimes strained through their music.

Overview of Ian Leslie’s Book

Robert Rodriguez introduces Ian Leslie, praising his work as "terrifically written" and highlighting its significant contribution to Beatles scholarship. Leslie’s book offers a unique psychological examination of John and Paul’s relationship, portraying it as an intense male friendship that transcended conventional boundaries.

Robert Rodriguez [05:34]: "We're used to the idea of men being good friends or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We're thrown by a relationship that isn't sexual but is romantic..."

Filling the Gap in Beatles Scholarship

Leslie explains his motivation for writing the book, emphasizing the scarcity of comprehensive analyses on the Lennon-McCartney dynamic beyond superficial friendships or rivalries.

Ian Leslie [06:23]: "The depth and richness and strangeness of it has been underexplored... I just had a feeling... someone who has read not as many as you, but I've read quite a lot of the books and a lot of the kind of articles that nobody's quite done this justice..."

The Complex Relationship between John and Paul

The heart of the discussion revolves around the nuanced relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Leslie argues that their bond was unlike any other, combining intense friendship with creative synergy that neither fully understood at the time.

Ian Leslie [08:01]: "Sometimes you get these intense male friendships... these incredibly intense and incredibly creative partnerships where the personal and the creative are merged."

Impact of Personal Trauma and Creative Expression

Both John and Paul experienced significant personal traumas—Paul losing his mother and John grappling with multiple losses and insecurities. Leslie posits that these experiences fueled their creative expressions, often serving as outlets for emotions they couldn't verbalize.

Ian Leslie [56:44]: "You can draw a line from that back to the fact that they both had these maternal bereavements at a young age... they were already inclined to think that... we're different, we're special, only we understand each other."

Songs as Communication Tools

A central thesis of Leslie’s book, as discussed in the podcast, is that John and Paul used their songwriting as a means to communicate their deepest feelings and conflicts. Their music became a canvas for expressing what they couldn't say directly, creating a profound connection with each other and their audience.

Ian Leslie [41:14]: "These guys thought and felt in music, in songs. That was where they lived their emotional life... you can't actually understand the relationship without looking at the songs, and vice versa."

Key Song Analyses

1. "Don't Let Me Down"

   • Explores the vulnerability in John and Paul's relationship.
   • Highlights how personal insecurities were projected into their music.

2. "Yesterday"

   • Marks a pivotal moment where Paul’s solo work began to change the group dynamics.
   • John’s discomfort with Paul’s solo success hinted at underlying tensions.

3. "She Loves You"

   • Demonstrates the innovative musical techniques John and Paul employed to convey complex emotions.
   • Leslie emphasizes the song’s narrative depth and harmonic sophistication.

Ian Leslie [50:51]: "It's telling a story. Introducing this kind of set of characters. It's not just a first person. I love you. Why don't you love me?"

Influence of Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney

The introduction of Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney into John and Paul's lives, respectively, is examined as a significant factor that altered their dynamic. Leslie suggests that these relationships served as both creative collaborations and emotional buffers, inadvertently distancing John and Paul from each other.

Ian Leslie [60:06]: "She was a tremendously energetic, creative artist... what is interesting is that they both realized they were too kind of intensely entangled with each other."

Solo Careers and Ongoing Musical Dialogue

Even after the Beatles disbanded, John and Paul's solo careers continued to reflect their complex relationship. Their songs often served as back-and-forth dialogues, subtly addressing their past and ongoing emotional undercurrents.

Ian Leslie [71:21]: "They each thought that the other one was the most brilliant person in the world... it's incredibly difficult for them to regain the personal closeness that they had."

Mythology and Public Perception

The podcast touches upon how the public narrative, heavily influenced by John’s intense media presence, often overshadowed Paul’s contributions. Leslie advocates for a rebalanced perception that honors both artists’ multifaceted talents and their intertwined legacy.

Robert Rodriguez [78:25]: "I just think all these relationships between these two did have something different... overall I just want people to come away re-astonished by what they did."

Concluding Insights

Leslie emphasizes the importance of understanding John and Paul’s relationship not just as historical facts but as a living, evolving narrative that continues to influence their music and personal lives. He calls for listeners to revisit their songs with a new perspective, uncovering the layers of emotion and complexity woven into their melodies.

Ian Leslie [80:10]: "They missed it and they would have missed it the rest of their lives anyway... the ultimate message, I suppose."

Key Takeaways

• Depth of Friendship: John and Paul shared an unparalleled friendship that was both creatively fruitful and personally tumultuous.
• Music as Expression: Their songwriting was a primary medium for expressing and navigating their complex emotions and relationship dynamics.
• Influence of Personal Loss: Personal traumas significantly influenced their creative outputs and their bond.
• Public vs. Private Narratives: Public perceptions often misrepresented the true nature of their relationship, necessitating a reevaluation of their legacy.
• Continued Dialogue Through Music: Even in their solo careers, John and Paul maintained a musical dialogue that reflected their enduring connection.

Notable Quotes

• Robert Rodriguez [05:15]:

  "It’s an intelligent but entertaining examination of The Beatles' music and career. Smart, funny and surprising - just like the Fab Four."

• Paul McCartney [12:01]:

  "In people like me have to say it themselves... I'm the real artist."

• Robert Rodriguez [67:02]:

  "Why was that so important to him at the same time diminishing Paul?"

• Paul McCartney [67:46]:

  "I don't really see, really, the music of the Beatles without understanding the evolution of the relationship."

Conclusion

Episode 303 of "Something About the Beatles" offers a profound exploration of John Lennon and Paul McCartney's relationship through Ian Leslie’s scholarly lens. By intertwining their personal histories with their musical masterpieces, the podcast provides listeners with a deeper understanding of how their bond shaped not only the Beatles' legacy but also the broader landscape of modern music.

Transcript

[Robert Rodriguez]

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[Ian Leslie]

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[Robert Rodriguez]

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[Ian Leslie]

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[Robert Rodriguez]

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[Ian Leslie]

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[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, so there's a story and there's another one.

[Ian Leslie]

Don't let me down oh darling, I'll never let you down it's like you're.

[Paul McCartney]

A mere lovers.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Hello and welcome to episode 303 of Something about the Beatles Podcast. My guest today is Ian Leslie, author of John and A Love Story and Songs Now Eddie Fans paying attention have surely been seeing the publicity this book's been getting, a lot of online reviews and a lot of attention. This is what I will say about that. It's a terrifically written book. Ian is a great guest. I really enjoyed having him on the show and talking with him. In fact, we've talked about reconvening some point down the road when his life is less hectic to cover some of the things that we didn't in this conversation and there were things I felt I could have pulled more information out of him that I got a sense in real time that conversation was going long and he seemed like he was getting a bit tired and I didn't want to push that too hard. But he did say in a subsequent communication that he is open to coming back on the show once the reader and listener reaction has come to respond to that. So that's great. I hope it happens. But for anybody who doesn't know, it's an examination of through their art, the relationship between John and Paul has been covered a ton. There are entire podcasts about this, what some have termed a bromance between them, certainly in their creative partnership as well as their psychological dynamic. And Ian is somebody who has written about psychology in the past without being a psychologist himself, so there's that added insight. His writing chops are stellar and so I would recommend to anybody who has an interest do read it. At least read it in a library if you have to, but it is absolutely worth reading. I've seen some people call it the most essential and groundbreaking scholarship since A Revolution in the head by Ian MacDonald. That's not a book I think has particularly aged well, put it one way. But I do remember the hype surrounding that book when it did come out, and I'm seeing a bit of that now. Maybe if I started calling myself Ian I'd get that kind of hype too. But it is worth reading for sure, and you can determine for yourself whether what he's putting together, these dots he's connecting, resonate with you or not. One more thing, Just get on the Satby newsletter. Plenty of people have and enjoy it. I recommend it to all my listeners. It is a weekly commentary on things in the news, a lot of sharing of links and video and audio. Satb2010mail.com I find it a much more effective way of communicating with the listeners than doing the social media stuff, which I find taxing and unsatisfying. This is a lot more direct and all of you have already taken the time to get on it, seem to be enjoying it a ton, which I appreciate. I enjoy doing it, so there is that. But here is my conversation with Ian. Hopefully not the last One of the quotes you have in the book that I think is a great sort of summary of what you're going to get out of this as a reader is we're used to the idea of men being good friends or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We're thrown by a relationship that isn't sexual but is romantic, a friendship that may have an erotic or physical component to it, but doesn't involve sex. So that sort of lays the groundwork for the thesis, as it were, for this book. The first thing I want to start with is was there something that you saw lacking in Beatles scholarship that made you want to take this on?

[Ian Leslie]

I suppose so, yeah. I mean, I knew as soon as I started thinking about writing a Beatles book. You know, I've been a fan of the Beatles since I was a kid. Like a lot of your listeners I knew pretty much immediately that I wanted to write about Lennon and McCartney's relationship. And it's because I'm utterly fascinated by it. And I think that the depth and richness and. And strangeness of it has been under explored. And it wasn't really kind of me like a rational kind of conscious thing with me going through all the Beatles literature and saying, well, you know, has it been done here? Has it been done here? I just had a feeling as someone who has read not. Not as many as you, but I've read quite a lot of the books and a lot of the kind of articles that nobody's quite done this justice to the extent that I'm interested in it. And so really I just ended up writing a proposal and then a book for the book I wanted to read. And I didn't think was out there just yet.

[Robert Rodriguez]

At what point did you form a thesis? It sounds like you kind of sussed out that there was ground to be explored in the Lennon McCartney partnership that hadn't done justice, or you wanted to know more or wanted to get a greater understanding of it than you were getting from the existing literature. Presumably, you then started your research and you've come to, as I read off in that quote, you came to a conclusion that is the foundation of the book. At what point did that sort of form itself?

[Ian Leslie]

The book was really kind of triggered by a blog post, a very long blog post that I wrote in 2020 during lockdown times when I had time on my hands. And I thought, hmm, I'm gonna do one of those projects that I've had in my mind for years they haven't got around to. And that's writing this piece about Paul McCartney and why I think he's still underrated, which is a sort of strange thing to write. And I didn't pitch it to a magazine or anything because I thought, well, rightly, I think nobody was gonna publish 10,000 words on why Paul McCartney is good at music. But I. I felt I needed to write it, and I published it on my substack and it went insanely viral. And this was the point at which I started to take the idea of writing a book about the Beatles seriously. And then, as I say, I quick. I pretty much quickly knew that I didn't just want to write about Paul. I wanted to write about John and Paul and that and that relationship. And in fact, I left material out of that blog post because it would have got too long. So I kind of cut the John and Paul stuff. I was like, that's the heart of the Beatles for me. It's like that kind of nucleus at the heart of the atom is. Is what I'm really interested in.

[Robert Rodriguez]

A group within a.

[Ian Leslie]

As you'd say, a group within a group, right, yeah. And as I say, I don't think I'd seen it kind of really investigated to the slightly obsessive depth that I wanted it to be investigated to. When I started to think about it, I thought, well, yeah, if you look at the existing literature, it does tend to be. They tend to classify them either as just mates or they say. People say, oh, they were like brothers. Or they say, oh, they were rivals, they were enemies, they were friends for a couple of years and then they hated each other. They didn't write together. All this kind of stuff. None of this stuff seems to quite ring true with me. All of it has a grain of truth. Yeah. Of course they were friends in some senses. Their relationship was like brothers. I mean, my relationship with my brother is nothing like Jonah's relationship. And other people say, oh, you know, they were homosexual, they were having a go. Again, like, I don't think they were, you know. And there's a grain of truth to all these things. But I kind of quickly. But I concluded after a while that that's part of the reason we haven't seen a really full scale investigation of this relationship. Because people keep trying to squeeze it into one of these boxes we're familiar with. And the truth is, sometimes you get these intense male friendships. You can call it a platonic romance, but these incredibly intense and incredibly creative partnerships where the personal and the creative are merged. You see them now and again through history. You know, I would say like the English Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge had something similar going on. They meet and there's this kind of explosion of creativity and it starts a whole new kind of movement in poetry. There's a few examples kind of scattered throughout history, but I think it's quite rare. And I think it breaks all our usual kind of binaries and categories. And therefore it's taken us a while to get to grips with what's going on here. And I'm just trying to help that process along.

[Robert Rodriguez]

I'm glad you brought that up, those precedents for that, because that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you is from what you described, this intensely deep psychological and creative partnership between them, is there examples of art that flowed from that in people prior to John and Paul? And I think you kind of just answered that question when you describe Your starting point, the undervaluing or underestimating Paul McCartney article. Implicit in that is perhaps an overvaluing of Lenin, which I think one could certainly make that case. That since his death, the efforts put into keeping him on this pedestal and making him something in death that he wasn't in life certainly came in the sort of binary thinking, well, if he's up, then Paul must be down. And this whole John versus Paul stuff that a lot of people invest an awful lot of energy into, that almost seems that it's a tough, tough thing to correct and see for what it really is, because it's been decades in the making, particularly where you had John using the media and say, Rolling Stone to fill the space and create a narrative that went unanswered by Paul for a long, long time.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, you know, one of the conversations that really alerted me to what was going on there was on your show with Erin Talkelson Weber. She talks about that so eloquently. And just this pointed out one of these things is kind of glaringly obvious once you look at it, which is like, John calls Paul a great PR man. Nobody was better at doing his own PR than John Lennon. You know, it's this incredibly brilliant, articulate, vivid interviewee. And he did a hell of a lot of. Particularly after the. And around the breakup of the Beatles. He's out there all the time and he has a kind of message, even though he's rambling all over the place. His underlying message is, I was the creative genius here, and Paul's pretty good, but like, I'm the real artist.

[Paul McCartney]

People like me are aware of their genius, so called at 10, 8, 9. I always thought I was. Why has nobody discovered me in school? Can they see that I'm cleverer than anybody in this school? That the teachers are stupid too? All they had was information which I didn't need to give me. I mean, I didn't become aware of it in, in the Beatle thing. I got fucking lost in that, like being at high school or something. I used to say to my auntie, you throw my fucking poetry out and you'll regret it when I'm famous. And she threw the bastard stuff out. I never forgave her for not treating me like a fucking genius or whatever I was when I was a child. It was obvious to me, why didn't they put me in art school? Why didn't they train me? Why would they keep forcing me to be a fucking cowboy like the rest of them? I was different. I was always different. Why didn't anybody notice me? A couple of teachers would notice and encourage me to be something or other, to draw or to paint or to express myself. But most of the time they were trying to beat me into being a fucking dentist or a teacher. And then the fans try to beat me into being a beetle or an Engelbert Humperdinck. And the critics trying to beat me into being Paul McCartney. So you're very deprived. But that's what makes me what I am, you know, And I have to. It comes out that people like me have to say it themselves, you know, because we get kicked. Nobody says it. Sappers there screaming, you know, look at me, I'm a genius, for fuck's sake. What do I have to do to prove to you son of a bitches what I can do and who I am? And don't dare, don't you dare fucking criticize my worth like that. You who don't know anything about it. Fucking bullshit.

[Ian Leslie]

I was kind of stymied by all these forces. And at the same time, Paul is starting a family or continuing a young family. He's taking obvious pleasure in being married in domestic life and being on a farm or hanging out at home with Linda and the kids. And these are not things that a rock star is supposed to do, right? Especially in the, in the cultural atmosphere of the 1970s, when we really kind of valued counter cultural attitudes and being weird and anti establishment and so on.

[Robert Rodriguez]

It was easy to hang the tag of bourgeois on him.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Straights, right? And Paul's like, well, actually, yeah, I have straight faces. Babies, so what? And, yeah, and John plays to this audience brilliantly. He knows exactly what he's doing and becomes the kind of leader of the countercultural revolution. And, you know, I understand it's easy to say this, all this in. In retrospect, and I'm kind of not blaming particularly, you know, people for seeing it that way, particularly because John Lennon is irresistible when he's kind of in full, full flow. But the fact that it has persisted, that kind of narrative for so long, I mean, I think it's rebalanced the last sort of 10, 20 years to some extent. But still this idea that Lenin was the kind of like weird avant garde, brilliant creative genius and Paul was this very talented but slightly glib and shallow kind of melodist persisted for way, way too long, I think. And I think it's now time to kind of tear that down.

[Robert Rodriguez]

And Paul's in this unenviable position of trying to offer that corrective without Looking as self serving.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, right. And you look at a lot of his interviews from the time they are quite defensive and quite peevish. And then he has to deal with not only his best friend dying, but the simultaneous deification of this friend that he knew was not a saint. Right. In so many different ways. Ways. And now he's got to deal this. It's kind of double jeopardy now. So he's kind of grieving over his friend and he's dealing with this kind of like incredible narrative. This kind of lifting up that 70s countercultural sort of binary narrative onto a whole new level. I think that those things reinforced one each made the other even more difficult to handle. And I think it's really took him like a couple of decades to start, you know, just settling down about that and for the story to start moving on.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Just to go down a little sidebar for a second, if we can. You see the Beatles at the beginning, and one of the endearing qualities of them is that they don't take themselves seriously. They don't take anything seriously. They take their music seriously, but they themselves every effort to put some bit of significance on them, whether it's Aeolian cadences or whatever else they shunt aside. Why would I have a laugh? That's all we're doing here. By the end of the decade, by the end of the Beatles, John is transformed into this person that is super serious about everything, about his art and his life and all that. In a way that always struck me as the John Lennon of 1964 would not have tolerated John Lennon of 1969. He would have just called him out on the bullshit. Now you've written a book called Born why We Can't Live Without Lying. And I just wonder if not read the book. I've only recently become aware of it, but I was wondering if there's something, a thesis from that that you can apply to the effort that, as you said, John was the PR guy. They put so much energy into creating a myth about themselves. The John and Yoko myth that he knew was at odds with the reality. Why was that so important to him at the same time diminishing Paul?

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Wow.

[Ian Leslie]

There's a lot in there. I think there is a sense that he slightly lost his confidence in his own humor towards the end of the decade and seemed to be a bit more determined to be a serious person. Right. I think that's partly what you can see Paul being bewildered by in Get Back or Let It Be, whatever we call it in that footage, you know, when Paul makes these slightly mean jokes about you'll be off in a black bag or whatever. You can see him just sort of straining it, saying, oh, gosh, you're a serious artist and peace activist now. Is that what you are? Really? Okay. And just wondering, where is this incredibly funny, irreverent, crazy guy now? You know, John is still there. And. And indeed, in that footage, you can also see John being very funny at times. But there is this kind of transition out of we're really funny about everything, and then we take the music seriously, which I think was their kind of basic operating model. We don't take ourselves seriously, but we take the music seriously, you know, to kind of. We do take ourselves seriously, actually. And maybe I'm quite an important kind of a global leader for peace, actually. Yeah, maybe I am.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Man of the decade.

[Paul McCartney]

Some people sort of discovered a new reality, and some people are still sort of confident about the future, that we too, are. You know, everybody's talking about all the. The way it's going and the decadence and the. The rest of it, but nobody's really. Not many people are noticing all the good that came out the last 10 years, which is the moratorium and the vast gathering of people in Woodstock, which is the biggest mass of people ever gathered together for anything other than war before. Nobody had that big an army that didn't kill somebody or have some kind of violent scene like the Romans or whatever. And even Beatle concert was more violent than that, you know, and that was just 50,000.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah. Man of the decade and all that stuff. And maybe I'm a bit like Jesus Christ. And you can see Paul understandably going, hmm, really? And I think that's. Paul found something frustrating about Yoko Ono and John. I think it was probably that it was kind of taking themselves a little bit too seriously. It didn't seem like the John that he knew.

[Robert Rodriguez]

You write that 1967, John and Paul were the most in sync. I think John has even said Pepper was something he tended to dismiss in later years. But that was a real creative high, or whatever it was, how he phrased it. He talks about that year. What is it you think that changed after that? It's the year that you lose, Brian. It's the year he's immersing himself in acid. He gets pushed to and then runs with TM as being the answer and the Maharishi, till it becomes yet another disappointment in a life filled with a pattern of disappointments. What is it that you think brought them to that zenith that then fell away?

[Ian Leslie]

Going forward, it's a great question. In a way, it's the most difficult and mysterious question of the whole Beatles story. I mentioned Erin Torkelson Webler earlier on. I just want to mention Diana Erickson of One Sweet Dream here because she kind of really helped me think more deeply about that period, 1967. You know, she's pointed out at length that this was a period pre India when John really was almost too dependent on hall and the other Beatles. So this is the kind of period when he's suggesting that they go and live on a Greek island, right, in a commune, and they just kind of shut the rest of the world away. This is the period when Cynthia is saying, well, it seems like you need them more than they need you. And John is also at his kind of most uncertain. When he's not with the Beatles around this time, he sort of seems directionless. And then they get to India and it's almost like John's dream, this kind of Greek island, this kind of commune dream, has come true, right? They're in this amazing, beautiful place. It's just him and Paul and the others. You know, they're kind of shut away from the rest of the world and they can just make music and meditate and chat that. And it's beautiful. By the end of the. After Paul has gone home, which seems to have been a bit of a turning point for John, you know, he's writing really miserable songs by the end of the stay. And songs in which he talks about killing himself. Right, yeah, blues and so on. You can say, well, maybe he's just joking. They sound quite parodic in some ways, these kind of misery songs. And I think. No, not really. I think he really means it. And often with John, you find that when he's joking, that's when he really means it, right? So jokes and heartfelt kind of sincerity go together in a kind of very close way. With John, I think it was genuinely miserable. And then he gets back from India, you know, obviously that ends badly. We all know about that. And then the period after India is probably his lowest. You know, he has something approaching a nervous breakdown. He takes a lot of drugs, he goes binge drinking. He's pretty horrible to the people around. Around him and has to be kind of pulled together and slowly rebuilt by Derek Taylor and others.

[Robert Rodriguez]

And that's the period that you write about that separate article about him declaring himself Jesus and calling the emergency meeting.

[Ian Leslie]

Oh, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah. I mean, so, yeah, exactly. He's. He. He kind of has this explicit kind of identification. Hi, guys. I just wanted to have this meeting so I can tell you that I'm Jesus Christ, the Messiah, and that, you know, they all sit around and go, okay, that's interesting, John, should we go to lunch? Which I think is like a rather beautiful kind of example of, like, how friends can handle these kinds of things. You just push back. You just listen and go, okay, well, he'll move on at some point, hopefully. So, yeah, a very kind of strange time in John's psyche now. Why was India this kind of turning point? I don't think you can have a clear answer to that because I really do think it happened inside John's head. Right. So when he talks about being wounded by Paul or being hurt by Paul, which apparently he did. Well, we saw him kind of do it to Michael, Lindsay Hogg and get back and he's. Joker said. He said, similar to her. She was kind of baffled by it. It's hard to say. And Paul was obviously baffled by it for the rest of his life. You know, he didn't know why. John basically becomes much more difficult after India to handle, much more antagonistic. So something happens, and it might just be this inner realization that after trying meditation, after trying lsd, after trying to lose himself in music and creativity with Paul, he's still carrying around this pain and this deep existential kind of uncertainty, and it doesn't go away. And if it wasn't going to go away in India, when he's with Paul and he's meditating and they're playing music and it's still there and he gets upset when Paul leaves, then that's an incredibly sort of depressing realization that actually I can't solve myself. I can't actually find a way out and discover the answer to the meaning of my life and the answer to the meaning of life in general at the same time, I kind of stuck with. With myself. And I think that just deeply upset him. And I think hence the crisis. And I think this fed into the kind of poisoning of the relationship between him and Paul thereafter.

[Robert Rodriguez]

It's a kind of flailing. That's sort of a heightened version of what you hear him say to Maureen Cleave two years before about whatever it is I'm meant to do. This isn't it. That's why I try painting and filmmaking and all this. So at the height of the Beatles success, that itch has not been scratched. Yeah, he's still dissatisfied. There's still a wound he's nursing. And then fast forward Two years acid meditation. This idyllic situation you described that's akin to the Greek island fantasy he'd been having. And all this time Yoko Onna's in the background. She's been at arm's length at this point. He's well aware of who she is now. He would describe later on a Rishikesh having this thought, I'd like to bring her along, but I don't know how to do it. And they'd be writing to each other and all this stuff. So she's becoming an obsession, maybe, in the face of the disappointments he's having. Although it doesn't seem to have reached a head yet. And you alluded to that quote that we're familiar with. No one ever hurt me like Paul did. That has remained this mystery that nobody certainly Paul push it back. What does he mean? He was a maneuvering swine. Nobody talks about that. So I'm thinking that maybe the answer does lie in there. In that period between arriving in Rishikesh and leaving it, coming back to London and just acid binging and I'm Jesus Christ. And then, and only then, does the door be cast wide open to Yoko Ina becoming the next obsession of his life. 247 in the studio joined at the hip. You've written about psychology stuff. I'm a layperson like anybody else. I armchair psychologist. But it seems very reactive, his pursuing the relationship with Yoko as sort of a weapon to hurt Paul, who had been filling that space artistically and as you say, on so many levels, as some kind of a partner, romantic without being sexual. Do you see that possibly as his reacting to whatever disappointment he came from Paul leaving or maybe the culmination of things. Brian's gone too. We can't underestimate the destabilizing effect that losing him had on the group as a whole. Is there something you see Paul setting in motion, however unwittingly, that trips Jon off in this direction?

[Ian Leslie]

Yes, and I think this is partly. Well, I'm not sure Paul could have made this much better, but I do think that Paul was probably just generally a little bit oblivious to what was going on in John's mind around this time and to his sensitivities. And I don't think he always realized necessarily quite how uncertain and insecure John felt about their relationship and general. And it tended to be assumed that John was a bit more like him, you know, just somebody who would barrel on through whatever, you know, Just get on with it. Yeah, just get on with it. Right, let's Go to work. Why are we kind of talking about this? This Go. And when they meet up in London, can't remember what they talk about, but they have this kind of meeting just shortly after London. And I think John kind of wants to talk a bit about India and what happened. And Paul is just like, yeah, well, you know, it happened and you fell out with the Maharishi. Okay, fine, let's go. What are we going to do next? I don't know. I just get the sense that Paul's not realizing or not even kind of intuiting yet what's going on. That John is upset. Right. And that it's not just about finding out the Maharishi might be a bit pansy, as we say. It's a bit more than that. Right. There's other stuff going on, and I think Paul's kind of oblivious to that.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Maybe that was like the latest in a series of disappointments in John's life, that Paul wasn't there for him, as in his head, I need you now more than ever. And Paul's, as you say, completely oblivious to it. And so therefore, it becomes one more disappointment in a lifetime, both of them.

[Ian Leslie]

That's beautifully put. And I think that is kind of what I'm trying to say. Yeah, it's kind of like the culmination of lots of things. So it doesn't actually seem huge in itself, but it's. Because it comes at the end of all these other things. It's a kind of straw that broke the camel's back situation. And it really kind of tips him into an abyss of despair. And then. Yes, he then finds Yoko. Decides on Yoko. I think, you know, Yoko had been around and they'd been friendly, and I'm not totally sure that they. He was in love with her up until that point. It's hard to say, but it seems to be like at some point in 1968, then after India, he goes, okay, this is it now. I'm going for it with the Yoko. And I think, yeah, part of it was to kind of put Yoko in between him and Paul as a kind of slightly. To push Paul away, maybe to make him jealous in some sense, maybe as a kind of defensive shield. You see him then doing similar with Alan Klein. He uses Klein as a kind of buffer zone between him and Paul.

[Robert Rodriguez]

A triangulation.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, triangulation, as they sometimes call it in psychotherapy. In relationships, when you kind of get a third person, it's sort of brought in, sometimes against their will into the relationship to be a kind of point of argument. And maybe somebody's kind of using them as a defense against the other person. Obviously, George was never going to play.

[Robert Rodriguez]

That role to affect something you're looking to get from that person. Yes. You're weaponizing them.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You're kind of weaponizing them either as an offensive or defensive weapon, maybe a bit of both. And so I think that's what John really started to do after. And that kind of made him feel less vulnerable and less exposed. The other thing to note here is that it also really juiced him up creatively. Not just getting together with Yoko, but this whole kind of period after India or during India and after it, he's writing a hell of a lot of songs again, which he hadn't really been doing a year previously. It kind of slowed down a bit. So it's this very kind of spirit, spicy, spiky, kind of explosion of energy, which makes him more difficult to work with, but it also revitalizes him creatively. So actually, I can see Paul kind of being both bewildered and hurt. But also, wow, John's really back. This is quite exciting.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Which seems to be the thing that Paul really wanted in the last years of the Beatles partnership. He wanted John present. He wanted John's input in his collaborative energies. And John, seemingly consciously, is making a decision to put all that energy he had saved for Paul to that point into Yoko. You've got a great quote in there. John thought Paul understood how insecure he felt and sought emotional reassurance. Paul thought John needed to feel that he was the most important person in the group. Hence his insistence that John is the boss. But John didn't want power, not anymore. He wanted love. I always found it interesting to my hearing. I'm no more expert than any layperson, but in the flower pot conversation where Paul says to John, but you're the boss. You were always the boss, it sounded over the top, like he didn't necessarily believe it, but this is what he thought John wanted to hear. So he's underscoring it. And again, per your insights, it seems like Paul's misreading what John really wanted in the moment.

[Ian Leslie]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. You get the sense that Paul. He thinks so. This is the period, obviously, early 1969, when that kind of spicy, spiky energy that exploded during and after India, creatively anyway, in the kind of White Album period, has died down. And. And the problem now is that John is not only a bit more distant from Paul emotionally, but he's also more creatively passive. Right. He's not the guy kind of leading the charge in the studio. And he's not really moving at Paul's pace. So then Paul starts to think, well, is the problem here that I've been too dominant in the group because I've been trying to get everybody to do some bloody work. And John feels like I've kind of pushed him to one side. So maybe what I want to do is get John feeling like the leader of the group again. And yeah, he says, I really want you to. The words he used. There is this odd phrase that he uses which is something like, you're the one that kicks the telephone box in. Do you remember that?

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh.

[Ian Leslie]

Which is like a lot of this flower pot conversation is just incomprehensible to me, I have to say. You know, having been through it in detail, I was still, though, at the end of it, I was like, what? What are they talking about? Particularly John, you know.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah.

[Ian Leslie]

But, yeah, as far as we can discern, it seems to be Paul saying, you go for it, be crazy, smash things up, but don't just sit there. I need you to kind of be the prime mover here. And actually, John's not really responding to that because actually, it's not necessarily what he wants. He wants something more like a sort of recognition that Paul is dependent on him creatively and wants him personally as well. You know, this kind of love, not power thing. He wants that kind of closeness again. He's not really up for being the alpha male of the group anymore.

[Robert Rodriguez]

And it must have at the same time felt like you read in 1980 in the Playboy interview. He's talking to David Sheff and he talks about his hurt after so many years of Eleanor Rigby being tossed on the table. He's very dismissive about the people that were around this telephone repairman and this blah, blah, blah, contributing mightily to that song. And then he takes a lot more credit than he actually warrants for being the co writer of that. It seemed like maybe, given John's massive insecurities, getting more and more of a sense that Paul doesn't need him, that Paul is achieving as an artist perfectly fine with next to nothing of John's input, that that would also be something that he needed, some kind of reassurance from Paul. No, John, really, I do need you. That he wasn't getting. Even if Paul felt it, maybe he wasn't communicating it as directly enough for John to receive. That that could have been one of these alienating issues between them.

[Ian Leslie]

I agree. I don't think Paul was that good at reading John, and particularly he tended to overestimate John's confidence in a way that we all have actually for many years. You know, I think his uncertainty and vulnerability has been sort of underestimated. And I think Paul, who, when he met John, John was very much a dominant alpha male of the group and he was literally the leader of the group. And of course, he was older than Paul and it was an age gap that counted for a lot in those days. So Paul was just used to the idea of John being the strong guy and Paul having to kind of catch up and find his place, you know, and not be dominated, kind of fight back and be part of this kind of power couple at the heart of the group. Right. The idea that John was insecure about him, worried about Paul, and thought, maybe Paul's stronger than me, I think probably didn't dawn on him and maybe dawned on him too late in the book. As you know, I kind of talk quite a lot about yesterday. The chapter on yesterday is maybe the pivotal moment for when the balance of power in the group shifts and John's insecurities are triggered. Here is a song that Paul writes and performs by himself. Literally, when they're on stage, the others go off. Paul is in the spotlight now. John is thinking and understandably and rationally in a way like, well, Paul could make a solo career. Right. You know, there's no reason for him to stay with us. If you can do a song that's as incredibly successful as this, and the success of it kind of took them by surprise. Right. Then what's to say that it's not going to be Paul McCartney now and Paul later on in an interview, I think, in the 1990s, said something like, oh, the old bugbear returned after yesterday. And I think he meant this sense that one of us, maybe me, maybe John, was going to be the leader. It's going to be Paul and the Beatles. Not literally necessarily by this stage.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah.

[Ian Leslie]

But it's going to become that kind of structure. And as you know, yesterday became a bit of a bugbear to John. From then on, it was a song he kind of like an itch that he was kind of scratching for years afterwards.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting when you look at the sequence of things. Yes. He comes up with yesterday. It's this anomaly, this weird sort of outlier in the Beatles career. He comes back that autumn with Girl in My Life, Norwegian Wood. It seems almost like a motivating thing to.

[Ian Leslie]

That's A great point to get him.

[Robert Rodriguez]

To raise his game and then.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a really great point. Yeah. And one of the things I wanted to. I mean, you just put that a lot clearer than I did in the book, actually. But. But more generally, one of the things I wanted to do in the book was to say these tensions and uncertainties and conflicts between these two, which really kind of emerge in full from the mid-60s onwards. They were obviously not bad things creatively.

[Robert Rodriguez]

No.

[Ian Leslie]

We tend to read these and go, oh, this was the beginning of the end. You know, they were coming apart. Well, yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe that's true. But also, my God, this is where the band really took off creatively. This incredible evolution, you see, so. And I think that the conflicts and the tensions and the uncertainties were driving the creativity in both of them. But, yeah, including. And especially John, in that case.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Absolutely. You give chapter and verse of that in a way that I certainly never thought about before. John responding to Eleanor Rigby, which, again, was a bugbear with him for years to come, and seemingly responding with Tomorrow Never Knows, his high achievement for the Revolver album. The first song, the track for the album, if people think about it deeply, it's just as powerful as the Penny Lane Strawberry Field sort of response to each other. They're both. You throw something down. I have to respond with this. So, yes, as you say, it's a powerful, phenomenally creative dynamic they had between them, even if it wasn't particularly fun or pleasant at the time. Personally, what art it created. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

[Ian Leslie]

You might say all kinds of stuff.

[Robert Rodriguez]

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[Ian Leslie]

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[Robert Rodriguez]

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[Ian Leslie]

Like your graduation gifters.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the beanbag chair? Aren't we getting a mini fridge? Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before we buy.

[Ian Leslie]

Oh, yes, that's smart. Glad we can agree on something easily. Pool split and Send Money with PayPal. Get started in the PayPal app.

[Robert Rodriguez]

A PayPal account is required to send and receive money. A balance account is required to create a pool, seemingly going back to day one. You make the case in the book that what they couldn't say to each other, what they couldn't express, came out in song. And it's evident from day one. Why don't you talk about that a little bit? Because we've been going all over the place. But that's how the book starts, in this sort of chronological fashion.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And in a way, it's the kind of central thesis of the book. It's called John and Paul A Love Story in Songs. Because I quickly realized that if I was going to tell the story of the relationship as I do, we know, we go from 1957 to 1980, that if you're going to tell that story, you have to tell it through the songs. Because these guys thought and felt in music, in songs. That was where they lived their emotional life, the lion's share of their emotional life, and particularly when it came to the relationship between the two of them. You know, you think about it, they're sitting down from when they're teenagers, opposite each other or standing with guitars and they're playing songs either that they've got from the radio. And then they, of course, they start to write their own songs that are full of emotions. Right. They're in the idiom of pop, sure. But they're also clearly full of love and yearning and anger and jealousy and all sorts of things.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah, pain and loneliness.

[Ian Leslie]

Pain and loneliness, exactly. And so they learn to process their incredibly intense adolescent feelings about the world and about their relationships and. And indeed, about their relationship with each other through this music, through this new American music. And I think they're trained on that. And that becomes true throughout their whole lives after that. Really, by far at their most eloquent on anything emotional in songs. They're not always laying out literally and explicitly. In fact, they're not at all. And that's partly why the songs are so powerful, because they're ambiguous and they resonate on several different levels, but in the lyrics and in the music itself and the sounds of the music they make. That's where their emotions are. So you can't actually understand the relationship without looking at the songs, and vice versa. I don't think you can understand, really, the music of the Beatles without understanding the evolution of the relationship. The two kind of feed into each other.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right. And it is a perfectly acceptable way to express your vulnerabilities if you are taking on the role of a singer of the song, whether it's a Cover of something you just wrote, knowing it's destined for the pop market. You have to use these tropes, but you're really revealing your inner life in a way that is obscured, yet will resonate universally once heard by a listener who can take their own truth from it. So it was a way of disguising your feelings while expressing them. Something you wouldn't say verbally, you could say in a song and get away with.

[Ian Leslie]

That's exactly it. Really well put. And these songs, particularly early pop and rock and roll songs in Beatles career, they're idiomatic, and they're using the kind of convention of the pop song. But they're also vessels for them to express what they're feeling unconsciously, subconsciously, whatever you want to call it. You know, you don't have to be a Freudian to realize that they don't always know what they're putting into the songs. Putting deep emotions into these songs without kind of really knowing where they're coming from. And this was one of the kind of effects of this innovation of writing and performing their own songs. You know, I know there weren't absolutely the first to do it, but they were among the first. The way they did it was the vocal, instrumental group, whatever. But being performers who wrote and performed their own songs, that was just not very common. And what it did is it gave the music huge emotional impact. They weren't just writing songs for other people to sing. So it wasn't all just about the craft of writing a nice, pretty song. It was like, we're gonna have to stand out and play and perform these things. That means we really got to feel it. And they did. And that's a big part of what makes even the early Beatles music incredibly explosive is this sheer emotion that's kind of welling up from deep within.

[Robert Rodriguez]

This personal investment they have in what they're singing that they might not even be conscious of, but certainly it's their subconsciously. And it was a demand when they were not in a position to demand anything. We're going to record our own composition.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that they don't always. So Paul, you know, as you know, is not the kind of guy to, like. He doesn't like to sort of psychoanalyze himself and talk about how he's feeling at some deep level. He's very much a kind of like, yeah, well, let's just get on with it. You know, Deflects, you know, he's a man of his generation. He doesn't talk things out, You Know, he doesn't go to therapy, but he kind of does. You know, there's a great quote, actually, where I think he's maybe said this once or twice where he says, you know, the guitar is like my psychiatrist. You know, I tell it how it's feeling and then it tells me. Yeah, you know, becomes this little feedback loop. And so absolutely like he's pouring his feelings into his music. And people have said that about John, but I think it's happening with both of them. And I think it was happening from a young age as well.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah, that's the thing about John is that there is this quality in his voice, this emotion, this tear that you hear, this vulnerability, this hurt that is absolutely there. And it grabs you by the heart anytime you hear it, no matter what he's singing about. It could be a rocker, you can't do that. Or it could be an if I Fell. And it is absolutely there. Paul seemed to come off as more of a performer, a showman doing his Little Richard or doing his Till There Was you. He seemed primarily motivated to entertain in a way that John, even before he was consciously aware of it, was self expressing. Do you think that in real time they were aware of what they were doing or was this kind of thing where the creative impulse they felt just happened to go in these parallel channels that they somehow merged when their voices joined? I'm not phrasing this very well because I'm trying to make it up as I go along, but I think you know what I'm saying, I wonder if they recognized how powerful they were at expressing their inner lives when they joined forces in a way that they didn't separately.

[Ian Leslie]

Well, I do think that they realized what they were doing was communicating emotions in a song. And in fact, they ex. They articulate that quite explicitly in a couple of interviews where they mention it in kind of 1964, 1965. I think this one particular interview I'm thinking of where John kind of lays that out and he says, you know, I'm not a big fan of other people covering our songs, actually, because I don't think other people get it. I don't think other people get what we're doing. We're picking an emotion for each song. There's a particular feeling that we want people to feel and we use the song to get it into the other person to communicate it. Right. We're transmitting feelings, we're transmitting emotions, you know, with something to that effect.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Which is a pretty profound observation.

[Ian Leslie]

Yes, it is, it is. And I think I Quote Tolstoy at that point, you know, he said, that's what art is. It's a transmission of feelings. Right. John would have. Might have kind of laughed at the idea that he was taking after Tolstoy. But it is the same thing. And it is a real insight about how pop music works. I don't think there are other people around who were saying the same thing, you know. So I think that was quite important to them. And quite kind of personal to them. You see Paul mention a similar thing as well. I think it was something that they talked about, you know, I think they understood it at that level. Yeah.

[Robert Rodriguez]

And maybe that was a distinguishing factor they saw as why their music was better than even records they liked. It's a big difference between Happy birthday, sweet 16 or will you love me tomorrow? Something that's so anonymous. And as fine as those records may be, you don't get the same sense of personal investment from the people who created them. In that. It's like assembly line craftsmanship. Where John and Paul were acutely aware, at least subconsciously, that what they were writing came from a very real place. A very real feeling they had that they needed to express.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah. And just the simple fact that they start recording as many of their own songs as possible. You know, the covers become fewer and fewer. And the whole kind of central goal of their creative enterprise. Becomes about this self expression that's also universal expression. Because they're reaching deep within themselves. And they're finding these incredibly idiosyncratic personal feelings. And yet the more personal and idiosyncratic and strange they get. They find the more and more people connect with it. It's one of these kind of beautiful paradoxes of art. And so why they move pop music onto this whole different level. Because nobody had really wholeheartedly gone for that before. You know, you did have singer songwriters. And of course you had Dylan before that, you know, Hank Williams or whatever. They were kind of writing and singing their own songs. But for a songwriting partnership and a group whose whole raison d'etre is we draw on our own emotions. And then we kind of communicate them to the rest of the world. That was kind of this huge step forward.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right. And specifically designed for the pop market. They wanted to have hit records, not visit the psychiatrist couch, per se. But they were having both.

[Ian Leslie]

Yes, yes, absolutely.

[Robert Rodriguez]

She Loves yous is a deceptively unique composition that you get into in the book. Why don't you talk about that a little bit? You write about it quite eloquently.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah. I mean, the first thing to say is that you often hear people say, oh, well, you know, I love the Beatles, but their early stuff where they're just writing pop songs is not as exciting to me. I like it when they get really innovative and start doing really different, weird things. And I think they underestimate how weird and innovative these early songs were, both lyrically and musically. She Loves you is a big step forward in terms of. Yeah, it's telling a story. Introducing this kind of set of characters. It's not just a first person. I love you. Why don't you love me? It's almost filmic, you know, he's kind of creating a little kind of mise en scene here. And you can imagine the narrative and then the. The music is also innovative. Just the way that there's a different chord on every year of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Taking this very, very simple, basic unit of speech. Yeah. And then showing it from three different angles and then kind of running you through a series of chords without landing on a home chord until you finally kind of settle down on this kind of chromatic, jazzy chord. That seems to come from another tradition of music altogether. And there's a lot going on also, the way it's kind of phrased musically, like a conversation, even though it's do okay, now, that's one person singing I. But it sounds like two people coming together in the street, you know what I mean? Kind of like having this kind of back and forth. So, yeah, I just think it's one of those songs that the deeper you look at it, the more complexity and the more brilliancies. And also George contributing kind of foreshadowing and his kind of guitar licks and. I don't know. There's a lot going on.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yes, a ton. And each one of them raises their game immensely, from the opening drum roll to that sixth sung harmony at the end in the Last Jazz.

[Ian Leslie]

Yes.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Phenomenal piece of work. Unbelievably, deceptively so. You talk a lot about their background and what brought them to partnership at that fate in 1957. Paul had already lost his mother at that time. And I know that there's a quote somewhere from John prior to the loss of Julia. I don't know how you could sit there and be normal when your mom's dead. That he says to Paul, not knowing what's coming around the corner to that point, at least by Mike McCartney's account, Paul's workaholic tendencies that he become known for in the future as a way of dealing with his grief were manifest there as a teenager in the wake of losing his mother and just putting everything he had into guitar writing I Lost My Little Girl. And he meets John, possibly the first person he met at a sort of peer level that also was writing songs at that time. And they both are these great rock and roll fans and skiffle aficionados and whatever. At what point do you think this sort of we're going to express what we can't say directly to each other indirectly through song? Do you think that's something that predated the loss of Julia or something that really happened in the wake where John was struggling to deal with what he was feeling that he could not show overtly to the world?

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, it's a good question. I'm not sure, but I'm not sure that it would have been separate from everything else that was going on. So I think that they were kind of expressing what they felt at some deep level in their songs. And when. When they're difficult feelings that they had for each other or there's something going on in the relationship, it would happen through the songs, I think possibly ratcheted up in kind of just complexity and intensity after the death of John's mother. Death of Julia does a few different things. I think one is it does kind of cement this bond. I mean, that's been talked about quite a lot, including by Paul. And he says, you know, we didn't talk about it much, but it was there. Again, they didn't talk about things, but they processed them through music. I think the other things was it gave them both this deep sense of the contingency of reality, that actually the world that you take for granted can be just ripped away. The rug can be completely pulled from under your feet. And when you think about the kind of consciousness shifting, big moves that they made musically through the decade, you know, right up to. To sergeant Pepper and so on, where they're really messing with your head and saying you think life is like this. Actually it's something completely darker and weirder and stranger. I think you can draw a line from that back to the fact that they both had these maternal bereavements at a young age. Because that just wakes you up to the fact that the world as you see it is not actually the world. It can just go like that, right. And then the third thing I think it did was give them a sense of specialness and difference together, you know, a partner apartness, you know, that we are two guys who are special and different and we don't See the world quite like the other kids see them. I think if you lose a parent, you probably do have that sense of the rest of you kids. You don't really get it. And I think they were already inclined to think that. Because they already thought they were the most. Two most brilliant people around. But I think that kind of fed into that sense that we're different, we're special, only we understand each other.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right. He gets it.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah.

[Ian Leslie]

And also just a sense of a general sense of agency. Like, we gotta move, we gotta do stuff. We gotta become rock and roll stars, you know, because life is short.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right. Like a Bobby Darin.

[Ian Leslie]

You gotta go for it.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's something you write about a lot in the book, is just even prior to the loss of Julia, John had plenty of trauma in his life. And this. This abandonment issue that he would have throughout the whole of his life. That the people he loved would one day not be there. Whether it's his Uncle George, whether it's Stuart Sutcliffe, his mother certainly. And just the physical abandonment of his parents. Shoveling off and being put in this different environment apart from his parents. Unlike the normal kids he went to school with. What's going on here, that would make him feel different in a way that I don't think he could see as positive.

[Ian Leslie]

Oh, absolutely. And this incredible uncertainty and not knowing where he stood with the people that were meant to be his constant guardians. And I don't write the book to kind of say, oh, Julia was a terrible mother. Or, you know, it's not written like that. Or indeed, that ALF was. You know, he did have a job. He was a merchant seaman. He had to be away. However you look at it from the kid's point of view. It must have been just horribly, horribly disorienting and painful to feel that, you know, you couldn't rely on your parents wanting you and wanting to be with you. Mimi gave him this rule that she was flawed and was tough on him and she gave him stability. But, yeah, he spent the rest of his life kind of really scarred by this deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty. And, of course, you know, you can hear it in the music that he made as well. A lot of his best musical creations, from if I Fell to Strawberry Fields to I'm the Walrus. Is like the sound of the ground moving beneath your feet. Right. These strange chords that kind of move all over the place. And you're never really sure where the tonic is. Or where. As we literally call it in music. Where the home chord is, you know, you can't find the home chord. And that makes you kind of go, wow, what's going on here? John was the master of that. And, yeah, I think that connects right back to his childhood.

[Robert Rodriguez]

And that's something I should point out. You write about just masterfully throughout the book is you get into musical matters and how utterly brilliant. I know that's a word that gets tossed around a lot artfully. These songs are constructed where these things that are hard to express, even in words. The whole sonic presentation conveys a lot that goes beyond the words, and it's just done so masterfully. That's something that runs through the whole of his career. We talked a lot about the dynamic between John and Paul and about what may have fractured it or led to disappointment on John's side, where he felt Paul wasn't getting him and that whether through triangulation or genuine love, at least at some point, he replaced Paul with Yoko in his life. Is there anything else you see about what we know about Yoko Ono as a Persona that would have made sense as being the person to occupy this space in John's life?

[Ian Leslie]

Well, she was a creative person. Whether you rate her art very highly or her music very highly or not, kind of beside the point. She was a tremendously energetic, creative artist. Right. And I think it was Rob Sheffield who first pointed out again in that. Kind of like stating the obvious. Once he says it, you go, of course. He said, isn't it funny that they both go off with women, marry women who they then work with musically? How often does that happen in the history of rock and roll? Almost never. But both these guys do it. And with Yoko in particular, he found the same structure of relationship where it's both a personal relationship and a creative one, and the two are kind of intertwined that he had with Paul. So I think that's why it's important. I don't think that the output of John and Yoko was creatively as nearly as important or interesting as John and Paul. But you know what is. But I think kind of structurally it worked in the same way.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Do you think then that it seems kind of obvious that John starts bringing Yoko into the studio, then Paul starts showing up with his women, first Francie Schwartz and then Linda. That by the White Album sessions that Paul is being consciously reactive to the moves John is making to either redress the balance of power or I can do what you're doing. What do you think he was doing? What do you think was the message he was trying to Send I think.

[Ian Leslie]

He was reacting and maybe consciously when he brings kind of Franny into the studio. But also a more profound sense when he commits to Linda. He's doing that as a reaction to John throwing in his lot with Yoko. I mean, he actually says that at some point. There's a quote where he says, I think it may be in the kind of one of his semi off the record interviews with Hunter Davis or something. He says something like, well, John got strong with Yoko, so I had to get strong with Linda. Right. So it kind of framed it as a shift in power and a reaction on his part. And I do think that what's fascinating to me about the Yoko and Linda arrivals is that it's usually told as a story of, well, John and Paul grow up, they split up because they fall in love with these women in their 20s. And they're like, okay, well, now we've got to split up with each other because we've had kind of lost our lives. And actually, I see it more as the other way around. I think at some level they both realized they were too kind of intensely entangled with each other. And then they sort of saw the opportunity to get out because it was becoming just too much. It was too intense. Right. And as I said, Yoko had been around on the scene for a while before. Jon goes, right, okay, it's you now. And similarly with Linda, Paul was seeing other women at the same time as he was seeing Linda. I'm not totally sure that he saw Linda. And it was a coup de foodre. Kind of like, oh, that's it. I love Linda. I think he was thinking, well, John's gone with Yoko. Well, I like Linda. And. And so he goes out and gets her. Right, as the song goes.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah.

[Ian Leslie]

And I think that's what that song is about. And he's. That's why Polly White's so beautifully emotional and intense, because I think he's saying to both himself and John, right, let's go for it. Let's leave each other. We've found these women now. Let's really commit to them. And of course, they do particularly well, both of them. They are the loves of their lives. Even if Jon and Jaeger have a kind of messy relationship, there's no doubt that they do kind of fall in love with them.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Well, it's interesting you pointed that out about Linda. Maybe he wasn't wholly sold on her and she was the right woman at the right time. Because hey Jude, as we know, was written while we stood with Francie Schwartz, who in Fact, he goes out and does the scrawl on the apple windows of the boutique, hey Jude Revolution with her. So he's got the song in his pocket. And Linda, still, he hasn't quite settled on her yet. It just makes me wonder. Likewise with John. You know, there's been talk through the years through Cynthia and through members of the family. Elma Cogan, who John apparently had some kind of thing going on with. You see the footage of them on Ready, Steady, Go. He's a bit handsy with her when he's promoting his book. And I don't know how much we can find is verifiably true of how serious he was about her. But while he's off in Spain making How I Won the War, she gets sick with cancer and dies. His reaction, seemingly, when he comes back and finds out she's just died, is that's when he goes on his acid bender. And within that space of that week, he gets introduced to Yoko Ono. So, like, what would have happened if Elma hadn't died? Would that have been something he pursued because he was looking for this older woman, creative type archetype that Yoko ends up being?

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. I don't put too much weight on the Alma Cogan thing because it's just a kind of tantalizing thought. It's a comment that Cynthia makes now. She may have just been making mischief.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Could have been Petulocho.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, Right. So I'm a little bit, you know, we should be a little bit skeptical of it.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right. We don't know a ton about it.

[Ian Leslie]

But it does seem that he really liked her. And I'm sure it would have just seemed like another blow, you know, even if she was just a friend, just another friend that goes. Just another loved one that. That dies on him, you know, Must have been contributed to his personal crisis, no question. But, yeah, it's not as if Yoko was none of his friends. They all seem to be taken by surprise by it. Right. I see Pete shot. And when John says, oh, I think I really like this one Yoko owner, I think I'm going to call her up and get around here. And Charlton is like, really? What? You never talked about her like that before, you know, And John was not a guy for holding back. So I don't know. I think there's definitely a kind of. He was fascinated by Yoko. I think he was really interested in her. I think he did find her stimulating creatively, artistically and so on. But I don't think he was thinking, oh, she's the love of my life ever since we met in 1966. You know, I think, as you say, it's just that the right woman at the right time. And Paul is a part of that equation.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah, absolutely. So why we can't live without lying. Do you see application of that to the Beatles story somewhere along with the mythology that they consciously and deliberately created about themselves?

[Ian Leslie]

Not really. I don't. I don't. Well, no, I don't really, because, I don't know. Maybe. But I don't really see John as a kind of. Actually, maybe I do.

[Robert Rodriguez]

When you look at the 1980 interviews, that's where I see it front and center.

[Paul McCartney]

Nobody was interested in the tune, you know, doing it originally. Everybody was sick. And it's a sort of, you know, subliminal. The tune was good, you know, And I think, subliminally, people don't want to work with, you know, sometimes. I was so disappointed by it. It never went out as the Beatles. I gave it to the Wildlife Fund of Great Britain and it went out because it was so bad. And then when Spectre was brought in for Let It Be, that's what the.

[Ian Leslie]

Album had gone on.

[Paul McCartney]

He dug it out of the Beatle fire and overdubbed and tried to put me in tune and the group in tune, which is all out of tune on the original track because the guitars are out of tune. I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it.

[Ian Leslie]

Right, right, right. You see him kind of fabricating a narrative there. Is that what you're saying?

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah. That goes even beyond the contents of Double Fantasy, the whole baking bread. I never took the guitar off the wall in five years.

[Ian Leslie]

Right.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Why do you think that was so important to create this whole myth that people to this day continue to run with the David Sheffs and Elliot Mensah's of the world.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah. No, that is interesting. And, yeah, the kind of retrospective myth of him in Yoko. I know it's kind of natural for lovers to kind of romanticize that origins. And they say, oh, yeah, I knew as soon as I met her.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right.

[Ian Leslie]

Even if you're exaggerating a bit. But in their case, it was really kind of elaborated on and kind of overblown, I think. And it all became at peace with this story of him being the true artist and then meeting another true artist and realizing, oh, my God, what was I doing in this pop group with this pop singer? You know? And I think it became. He really hits on that narrative hard when he's feeling at his most insecure. So I think, yeah, 1980. He's incredibly nervous about reemerging into the world as a performing artist and worried that he's going to be a flop. When this album comes out, it's a lot of insecurity and a lot of nervousness. And he's pretty kind of mean about Paul. After having been pretty friendly with him for a few years, you know, he starts to kind of becomes more distant and. And kind of meaner about him.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Dismissive. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, we know he's. He's. Not only has he been sending Fred Seaman out to go buy the latest wings and Paul McCartney records, but he hears coming up on the radio, and that circles back to the way they always inspired him. That's the. The tipping point of, damn it, I got to do something with these songs. I gotta get creative again.

[Ian Leslie]

Such an incredible moment, you know, hearing coming up as he's driving around wherever it is.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Bermuda.

[Ian Leslie]

Right, Bermuda. Sorry. Yeah. Thank you. And. And just going, oh, my God, what is this weird shit way? And if you're snatching for an answer, stick around. I say, oh, my God, it's Paul. And it just galvanizes the whole process that leads to him returning to the recording studio. Really, this incredibly creative kind of six months after that all starts with him hearing a Paul song and going, oh, like that. That's really weird. Which I just think is just so sweet and so funny that even after all those years, it was Paul from a distance who was, you know, setting him on fire.

[Robert Rodriguez]

And you write about in the solo years, the back and forth, the call and response between them on their respective solo albums, that is clearly a pattern. Let me roll it. Being in the center of it and the whole Plastic Ono band sound and how do you sleep and Dear Friend, all that stuff. It's clear, certainly the public's wear the overt stuff like how do you sleep? But they're still in tune with each other. They might not be in physical proximity, but they are communicating through their music as they had back in the Beatle days. They have to know this message is gonna be received by the right set of ears. Yeah.

[Ian Leslie]

And it almost becomes a little bit more conscious, actually. And I think insofar as the Beatles in the Beatles songs, where there are songs where I think they're kind of singing to or for each other, it's sometimes kind of semi conscious or submerged. In the 70s, it becomes a little bit more literal. I mean, obviously we Know about How do you sleep? We've been maybe a little more slow to recognize the songs of affection and love that they sing to each other. So we kind of give a high profile to the ones where they're mean to each other like other people. But, yeah, songs like Different Let Me Roll It, I Know, I know from John, which seems me pretty straightforwardly a love song for Paul and a few others throughout the decade. Yeah, they just have this kind of at a distance dialogue in music. And the songs become even more important to the relationship then because they're not talking as much. They're not certainly not physically in the same room as much. They're talking on the phone and occasionally visiting each other.

[Robert Rodriguez]

We have that quote from Paul where he says that John told him Jealous Guy was about him. Do we have any further information on that? Because it seems like a sort of casual aside Paul tossed out there without really elucidating further.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, and that's a really tantalizing one, isn't it?

[Robert Rodriguez]

Yeah.

[Ian Leslie]

And who knows? So John seems to have told him that around the time that they were having a kind of reconciliation. I think around 1972, they were kind of meeting and going, okay, well, let's just calm things down here. Let's try and stay friends. And I think maybe it was kind of an olive branch from John mentioning that jealous guy. You know, partly that was about you. I was jealous of you. And for different reasons at different times. And Paul, even if John said it as a throwaway and, you know, John obviously said a lot of stuff. Fact that Paul took that out of it and remembered it later indicates that it was meaningful to him. And I certainly think it kind of makes sense. You know, it makes sense to be. When you listen to it, it could well be about Paul as much as it could be about Yoko. It's not obviously about Yoko when I listen to it.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right.

[Ian Leslie]

And there is a kind of just a wistfulness and a sadness to it that indicates, you know, sort of regret over something that has happened.

[Robert Rodriguez]

I remember thinking, who was John jealous over regarding Yoko? It wasn't like she was particularly close to anybody else that he would feel threatened by. But what is interesting is when you hear that studio recording of Revolution 1 when they're tracking it. And Yoko's like, talking into her tape recorder. And there's that great line about if Paul was a woman, I'd feel very threatened by him. Yeah, well, I think she did anyway.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Actually, as a venture.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And from Joker's point of view, I think it's kind of fair, actually. I wish it had been done differently and all sorts of things. You can kind of go, well, I wish it handled it differently. But she's probably right to want to prize Paul apart from John. And probably anyone who was gonna have a full on relationship with John needed to do that. Even Cynthia was saying, well, you lied. You know, Cynthia was kind of worried that John was spending more time with Paul and the Beatles than he was her.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right.

[Ian Leslie]

So maybe Yoko was just the one who had the, you know, strength of mind to actually do it and say, right, you're coming with me, we're getting rid of this guy. Because yeah, maybe couldn't have worked any other way. They had to, Joan. Paul had to separate in order to have healthy relationships with a somewhat functional relationships with women.

[Robert Rodriguez]

It's a very interesting thing because you see, during the May Peng period, I won't call it the lost weekend. I think the found weekend is a lot more appropriate. When John floats. I'm thinking about writing with Paul again. What would you think of that? She's described her head spinning around like the Exorcist. Of course you should. Separately you guys are good, but together you're great and all that stuff. So she's nurturing it. Whereas at the same time you've got Yoko, who apparently, per the story that Paul tells, appeals to him. How do I get John back? He, out of the she loves you narrative tells them exactly what to do. He does it. Seemingly it never occurred to him that if those two get back together, Paul, you're going to be on the outs again. Yeah, it's like, did you not understand you were cutting off your own nose? I find that a curious thing other than the sheer nobility of wanting to be a friend to your friend, even if it comes at your own expense.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, I think it's partly that. I agree. And I think him worrying that John was going off the deep end in terms of drink and drugs, often in California with, with May Pang and Harry Nielsen and co. And wanting John to be stable and sort of prioritizing that and thinking, well, yeah, because actually if we are ever going to get close and perhaps work together again, I need John to be in a kind of personally stable situation. I can't work with somebody who's going on benders and he's going to harm himself seriously at some point if this goes on. So I suspect it was about that. But yeah, you're right. I wonder how much of it was. Also, did he feel conflicted about the fact that John seemed more at ease, more open to him when he was with May Pang. And I don't know, that is puzzling.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Did he come to recognize the folly of his actions?

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, probably.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Now and then.

[Ian Leslie]

Oh yeah.

[Robert Rodriguez]

What do you see that as? Because it seems like everybody's got a different interpretation of that song, especially with the bridge part that was in John's original draft of I Don't Want to Lose youe. Do you come down firmly or you think it's too ambiguous?

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, I don't really come down. I don't have strong views about that song. It makes sense to me that it was. It is tantalizingly close to a song of John going, I miss my creative and personal partner Paul, but it's hard to. I don't want to kind of make it too literal either, you know, and one of the things I.

[Robert Rodriguez]

It could be multiple subjects.

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of one of the things I'm careful of not to do in the book as, you know, kind of when I say Paul's writing a song about John or John's writing a song about Paul, at the points I do that I'm not excluding other readings of them, that the reason these songs are so great is they do resonate on different levels. But I just think often those feelings about each other are in there somewhere. They're in the mix. And now and then pretty clearly what's interesting is that Paul pretty clearly felt that, you know, and that's why he was so persistent over so long in wanting to put this song back together. So whether or not John put it in there, Paul was finding it in there. And that is really interesting.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Right, right. That was Paul's interpretation for sure. So what would you like to see in the fans understanding of the relationship? What would you want to see them carry forward from your work that is a corrective from prevailing opinion?

[Ian Leslie]

Well, I mean, all sorts of things really. I think all the things we've been talking about, really, which is just the sheer depth and richness and strangeness of this intense male friendship, this chemistry, recognizing that it was different, it was a different kind of chemistry to what Paul had with George or John had with George or Ringo or whatever, that they're all very close and the relationships between all of them are fascinating. But these two in particular did have something different and that was intimately connected to the different level of their music making to just about everybody else on the planet. I also, again, as we've talked about, just want to kind of rebalance some of the perceptions about John and Paul, I don't think it does either of them justice to say, oh, John was this kind of crazy, mad creative, sardonic genius and pulls this nice, sweet, sentimental. I mean, it's just we've got to move right past that, you know, because they're both much more interesting and multi layered than that. And overall I just want to kind of people to come away re astonished by what they did and how they did it. Almost think that we're constantly in danger of taking the Beatles and Lennon and McCartney for granted because we know them so well and they changed the world so much that now live in their world. And a big part of the book is kind of just waking people up to what they did and to hear these songs that we think, well, we do know really well, but to hear them again and was constantly trying to make people hear every one of these songs afresh and go, my God, see what they did. Look what they're doing. It's incredible.

[Robert Rodriguez]

You did a great job of that.

[Ian Leslie]

So really the ultimate thing is, thank you very much. That kind of the. The ultimate message, I suppose.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Do you think either one of them individually recognized that they were never operating at a higher level than when they work together?

[Ian Leslie]

Yeah, I think they both knew that, but they were pretty good apart. We're judging them by their own possibly high standards, but I absolutely have no doubt that they knew that they were together. As we were saying earlier, they each thought that the other one was the most brilliant person in the world. And particularly for them, they weren't really turned on by anyone or anything quite as much as they were turned on by each other. And it was incredibly difficult for them to regain the personal closeness that they had. I'm not sure they ever would even if Don had survived. But I think that they missed it and they would have missed it the rest of their lives anyway, as we all do. Yeah, in me.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Come on, come on.

[Ian Leslie]

Back again.

[Robert Rodriguez]

Come on, come on. Something about the Beatles Created and hosted by Robert Rodriguez executive producer Rick Way Title song performed by the Corgis Something about the Beatles is an evergreen podcast.

[Ian Leslie]

Hey, did you dream about me last night?

[Paul McCartney]

I can't remember.

[Ian Leslie]

Very strong dream about you.

[Paul McCartney]

Amazing.

[Ian Leslie]

Different dreams.

[Paul McCartney]

I thought you must have been there. I was touching it.

[Ian Leslie]

Hey, what's up, you guys? This is Reed Mathis. I made a podcast called the Gifts of Improvising. That's come. The Gifts of Improvising that's coming out on Osiris. We talked to all your favorite improvisers, Natalie Cressman, Marco Benevento, Tom Hamilton, Aaron Machner, Holly Bowling, Bill Croydon and Jay Lane.

[Robert Rodriguez]

So what, you're doing a podcast?

[Paul McCartney]

Yeah, doing a podcast.

[Robert Rodriguez]

So don't fear if you hear a.

[Ian Leslie]

Foreign sound to your ear. We need the gifts of improvising.

[Robert Rodriguez]

This is Lawrence Lanahan, journalist, musician and host of Rearranged, an Osiris Media podcast about music arranging. Once a song is written, arrangers make musical decisions that shape how we end up hearing the song. We're not just talking about adding orchestral accompaniment like horns and strings, or doing a cover version of a song. Arrangement can be putting happy music over dark lyrics, using samples, recording all acoustic, even tiny decisions like putting an electronic loop into an acoustic song to draw your attention to an important turnover phrase. It's all arranging. Rearranged Episodes are documentary essays where I use arrangements to answer some big questions like what is a song and what.

[Ian Leslie]

Can a song become?

[Robert Rodriguez]

And how can the sound of a song change the meaning you take from it? Listening this way has changed my relationship with music. Tune in to Rearrange and maybe it'll happen for you, too. Learn [e-mail] Osiris.