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McCartney Sabotaged Lennons Songs?

#81
Floyd Eye said:
Ironically, Let it Be was released AFTER Abbey road. Also ironically, Lennon hated Abbey road. He called it junk. I think in that Rolling Stone interview in fact.
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yeah, I've gotten into a few disputes about which is the actual last album :D I love Abbey Road , I think it is their greatest. Lennon seemed to dislike the albums he contributed the least to, I wonder if thats because the albums didnt feature more of his work, or because he couldnt think of more work to feature on the albums, as he said, Paul always had songs for them to work out
 
#87
benjammin420 said:
yeah, I've gotten into a few disputes about which is the actual last album :D I love Abbey Road , I think it is their greatest. Lennon seemed to dislike the albums he contributed the least to, I wonder if thats because the albums didnt feature more of his work, or because he couldnt think of more work to feature on the albums, as he said, Paul always had songs for them to work out
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Yeah, Abbey Road is awesome.

Lennon was definitely a narcissist.
 
#92
FWIW, I just dug this up from the Playboy interview. The interviewer is asking John about a number of his songs he was involved in, both with The Beatles and solo:

PLAYBOY: "Across the Universe."

LENNON: The Beatles didn't make a good record of "Across the Universe." I think subconsciously we -- I thought Paul subconsciously tried to destroy my great songs. We would play experimental games with my great pieces, like "Strawberry Fields," which I always felt was badly recorded. It worked, but it wasn't what it could have been. I allowed it, though. We would spend hours doing little, detailed cleaning up on Paul's songs, but when it came to mine -- especially a great song like "Strawberry Fields" or "Across the Universe" -- somehow an atmosphere of looseness and experimentation would come up.

PLAYBOY: Sabotage?

LENNON: Subconscious sabotage. I was too hurt. . . . Paul will deny it, because he has a bland face and will say this doesn't exist. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about where I was always seeing what was going on and began to think, Well, maybe I'm paranoid. But it is not paranoid. It is the absolute truth. The same thing happened to "Across the Universe." The song was never done properly. The words stand, luckily.

For anyone interested, the entire interview can be found here:

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#93
I think that anything Lennon said in the early 1970s needs to be taken with a grain of salt. But if he felt that his songs were badly recorded and didn't get the detailed treatment that Paul's songs received, that probably had much more to do with his own lack of interest in and understanding of the recording process than anything Paul did to sabotage the songs. You can hear the difference in production value between the early McCartney solo records and Lennon's solo work. The production of Lennon's solo records is absolutely horrible.
 
#96
nerfbass said:
FWIW, I just dug this up from the Playboy interview. The interviewer is asking John about a number of his songs he was involved in, both with The Beatles and solo:

PLAYBOY: "Across the Universe."

LENNON: The Beatles didn't make a good record of "Across the Universe." I think subconsciously we -- I thought Paul subconsciously tried to destroy my great songs. We would play experimental games with my great pieces, like "Strawberry Fields," which I always felt was badly recorded. It worked, but it wasn't what it could have been. I allowed it, though. We would spend hours doing little, detailed cleaning up on Paul's songs, but when it came to mine -- especially a great song like "Strawberry Fields" or "Across the Universe" -- somehow an atmosphere of looseness and experimentation would come up.

PLAYBOY: Sabotage?

LENNON: Subconscious sabotage. I was too hurt. . . . Paul will deny it, because he has a bland face and will say this doesn't exist. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about where I was always seeing what was going on and began to think, Well, maybe I'm paranoid. But it is not paranoid. It is the absolute truth. The same thing happened to "Across the Universe." The song was never done properly. The words stand, luckily.

For anyone interested, the entire interview can be found here:

Invalid Link Removed
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Lennon was a complicated guy who often contradicted himself, and that excerpt is a great example.

McCartney was ten times the musician Lennon was, and Lennon was painfully aware of it throughout their career, right from the first meeting when Paul taught him how to tune a guitar to standard. McCartney was assertive and could explain, in detail, what he wanted in the studio. Lennon often could not.

As for the criticisms of the studio experimentation that went on? Spare me. Lennon is the same guy who once asked the Abbey Road engineers if they could suspend him upside-down from the ceiling and spin him around while he recorded a vocal track (they wisely refused). When Lennon got sick of his own voice, he prodded the Abbey Road engineers to "do something to make my voice sound different." Thanks to their hard work and ingenuity, the phaser and flanger were the result.

Any criticism Lennon has of McCartney is pure professional jealousy IMHO.
 
#97
McCartney came up with better basslines for his own songs than he did for Lennon's?

Well, duh!
When you create a song in your head and write all the parts and have a genius for playing bass, of course those are going to be your best lines.
How could it be otherwise?
 
#100
electracoyote said:
Lennon was a complicated guy who often contradicted himself, and that excerpt is a great example.
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This much I agree with whole-heartedly. I'm very much a fan of the Beatles, together and on their own. They've all done some great work, and some that's not so great. The interviews that John Lennon gave in the early 70's are really indicative of where his own mindset was at the time rather than any thoughtful examination of the musical output of McCartney on his own songs.

"Across the universe" and "Strawberry Fields" stand pretty damn well on their own, bass parts or not. The songs didn't really need Paul to play crazy bass parts. "Across the universe" didn't really need that. And "Strawberry Fields" works with the bowed upright parts that come in later in the song.

As for Lennon songs where the bass parts are amazing? How about "I want you (she's so heavy)" or "Come together"? Those songs are perfect examples of McCartney settling in to his role as the Beatles bassist and coming up with absolutely amazing parts.

This statement by John Lennon is crap. It's his post-Beatles bluster which he really did not grow out of until the late 70's. At one point he even said that he should have sang "Why don't we do it in the road", even though it was Paul's song. You have to qualify a lot of his statements as coming from a guy who may have been a music superstar, but had some serious bouts of insecurity.

But on a more positive note, some of his solo catalog has been remastered and was just released the other day. I was expecting more from the remastering of Imagine, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the newly stripped down version of Double Fantasy.
 

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