John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
54 pages • 1-hour read
Ian LeslieJohn & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
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Themes
The Complexity of Creative Partnerships
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to and themes of death, loss, and mental health.
John & Paul traces the evolution of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship over time to capture the beauty and complexity of creative partnerships. While Lennon and McCartney’s entanglement is an elemental part of the 1960s and 1970s zeitgeist, Ian Leslie seeks to revise myths about their dynamic in his biography. Instead of simply casting them as the removed pop stars responsible for propelling a cultural revolution, he presents them as distinct individuals whose uncanny connection offers insight into human intimacy:
This is also a love story. John and Paul were more than just friends or collaborators in the sense we normally understand those terms. Their friendship was a romance: passionate, tender, and tempestuous, full of longing, riven by jealousy. This volatile, conflicted, madly creative quasi-marriage escapes our neatly drawn categories, and so has been deeply misunderstood (3).
Throughout the text, Leslie seeks to correct these misunderstandings. He does so by presenting all the messy and raw facets of their relationship (from friendship to songwriting, from attachment to frustration) alongside the more tender facets of their history. By incorporating these seemingly dichotomous elements of their relationship, Leslie captures the distinct nature of Lennon and McCartney’s dynamic—one that can’t be distilled into an easily digestible news headline as it has been since their public emergence. In turn, their creative and personal relationship reveals how working creatively with another person can beget unique forms of connection.
Leslie holds that Lennon and McCartney’s relationship (while studded with episodes of anger and hurt) was an unprecedented soul connection. “The professional marriage,” Leslie avers, “strengthened the personal bond, enhancing their sense of themselves as a pair of connected minds” (83). They didn’t simply communicate on a conversational level but had an uncanny way of connecting via music, eye contact, and mere proximity to each other. Leslie references countless songs, performances, and recordings that demonstrate their bond. In addition, he quotes individuals who were close to them to reiterate the notion that what Lennon and McCartney shared—both as people and as musicians—was rare. Indeed, music offered Lennon and McCartney a way to express their love for each other and to share this deep affection with the world.
While Lennon and McCartney’s dynamic has been simplified and presented as a creative rivalry, Leslie deconstructs this notion by presenting Lennon and McCartney in a more sympathetic manner. His detailed descriptions of the songs they wrote to and for each other convey the abiding nature of their connection—one that transcends the bounds of cultural definitions and offers a model for complex, multifaceted forms of intimacy.
The Psychological Dimensions of Fame
Leslie traces Lennon and McCartney’s relationship from their meeting to Lennon’s death in order to explore the effects of fame on their psyches from a young age. When they first became friends and started playing music together, Lennon and McCartney were 16 and 15 years old, respectively. They were just beginning their coming-of-age journeys and thus discovering who they were as individuals.
In just a few years, they formed the Beatles and were launched into the public spotlight. Their rapid acceleration from Liverpool “nobodies” into global pop stars, as Leslie’s account reveals, impacted how Lennon and McCartney understood themselves as people. They began to regard themselves as “‘prisoners of success,’” now restricted by tight performance schedules as well as fan and industry expectations as much as (or likely more than) they had been by work, school, and family (103). Leslie particularly notes how difficult this rise to fame was for Lennon: “In interviews, at receptions, and even at private parties, he was expected to be ‘Beatle John,’” causing him to wonder “who he really was” when he was in private (104). Fame, Leslie thus avers, can distort a public figure’s understanding of reality and complicate his relationships with others. This was true for both Lennon and McCartney, which Leslie speculates is why their bond was tight. The two of them were experiencing their phenomenal foray into fame together and could share in it, while they couldn’t articulate this same psychological and emotional experience with others.
Fame continued to impact Lennon and McCartney in the wake of the Beatles’ split—challenging them to rediscover themselves in an increasingly public sphere. After the Beatles broke up, neither Lennon nor McCartney stopped playing music or working on creative projects. Accustomed to the spotlight, Lennon made the intimate, messy aspects of his relationship with Yoko Ono public (as Leslie captures via descriptions of them photographed in bed and giving hundreds of interviews a year). By keeping himself in the spotlight, Lennon was able to maintain some equilibrium. Before the Beatles’ split, Leslie holds that “it was the band that was keeping [Lennon] together. John wasn’t derailed by the rock and roll lifestyle, but saved by it” (112). In the subsequent years, his public appearances not only allowed him to maintain his position as a global icon but helped him maintain his mental health.
The Beatles’ split similarly compelled McCartney to reexamine who he was and what he wanted, because he’d learned to understand himself according to the group. He began performing again, he launched new projects, and he continues making music to this day. However, unlike Lennon, McCartney kept his family life private. In Leslie’s estimation, this was McCartney’s way of surviving the spotlight. He could separate his public persona and his private individuality by shielding some aspects of his life from the world.
The Influence of Loss and Personal Experience on an Artist’s Identity
Leslie examines overlaps in Lennon and McCartney’s encounters with love, loss, and life challenges to explore how an artist’s personal life might impact his sense of self. Most notably, Leslie begins John & Paul by describing the parallels between the deaths of Lennon and McCartney’s mothers. Julia Lennon and Mary McCartney didn’t die at the same time, but both Lennon and McCartney lost their mothers when they were still young men. Furthermore, neither was given the tools to cope with his grief.
Their losses in turn gave them something to connect over; whereas others might not have understood their experiences, they understood one another’s. Leslie holds that when they were together “they had an aura of unbreachable self-assurance,” which “was partly the arrogance of the damaged” (60). Leslie’s use of the word “damaged” isn’t meant in a derogatory sense but rather captures the notion that both Lennon and McCartney experienced great human suffering at a young age. In turn, their suffering inflected the way they understood themselves and related to others. Their senses of home and family were less definite than those of their peers. They sought adventure and freedom—pursuits that eased their sorrow and immersed them in life’s excitement rather than its horror.
Over time, Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting began to reflect the loss and difficulties they encountered throughout their lives. The older they got—as Leslie illustrates via his detailed cataloguing of their music—the more they wrote about death, home, childhood, and sorrow. Changes in their work’s subject matter and sound echoed Lennon and McCartney’s shifting emotional states and their evolving outlook on themselves as artists and individuals. Examples of these changes include “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and “A Day in the Life.” The last of these works offers “the whole experience of a death-haunted dream, disjointed and disassociated, redeemed only by the possibility of creative connection between people” (200). While John’s parts drew more “on the detached, weary persona” he’d been inhabiting, Paul’s portions of the song “reflected his own energy and drive” (200).
Their musical projects thus expressed the way the two had begun to see themselves. As artists, they were learning to show their vulnerability and questioning minds. Other songs, like “Julia” and “Let It Be,” directly recall Julia’s and Mary’s deaths—events that Lennon and McCartney weren’t ready to write about until later in their careers. In these ways, Leslie captures how Lennon and McCartney deeply embedded their personal lives in their work. By sharing these raw human experiences with the world, they were sharing both parts of themselves and vulnerable lessons on love, sorrow, despair, and joy.
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