Beatles Fiendish Thingy's and Other Great Stuff!

Two Of Us

This excellent article is part of a series on creative pairs.  You can find it online at Slate.com

"I thought, 'If I take him on, what will happen?' "—John Lennon

Part One

How did John Lennon and Paul McCartney make magic together? On the surface, it seems simple—they covered for each other's deficits and created outlets for each other's strengths. Paul's melodic sunshine smoothed out John's bluesy growls, while John's soulful depth gave ballast to Paul and kept him from floating away.

These points are true so far as they go. John and Paul did balance and complement each other magnificently, and we can pile example on example. When they were writing "I Saw Her Standing There," Paul offered this opening verse:

"She was just seventeen
Never been a beauty queen."

"You're joking about that line," John shot back, "aren't you?" He offered this revision:

"She was just seventeen
You know what I mean"

There it is: Innocence meets sin—an inviting, simple image takes a lusty, poetic leap.

Lennon and McCartney did, to use the precious phrase, complete each other. "Paul's presence did serve to keep John from drifting too far into obscurity and self-indulgence," said Pete Shotton, a Liverpool boy who stayed in the Beatles' circle, "just as John's influence held in check the more facile and sentimental aspects of Paul's songwriting."

But images of completion and balance miss an essential energy between Lennon and McCartney—the potential energy of creative partnerships that they, as much as any pair in history, exemplify and illustrate. We tend to think of them in terms of arithmetic: Two people added together yield magnificence. This is the idea of partnership as chocolate and peanut butter—tasty, obvious, easy.

But Lennon and McCartney were more like an oyster and a grain of sand. Their power together didn't derive simply from individual ingredients but from a dynamic of constant mutual influence. Indeed, even "influence" understates the case, as it suggests two distinct actors operating on each other. Lennon and McCartney did affect each other, change each other, goad, inspire, madden, and wound each other. But they also each contributed to something that went beyond either individual, a charged, mutual space of creation—those pearls your ear probably recognizes and leans toward as much as to your parents' voices.

On a warm, humid July day in 1957, 15-year-old Paul McCartney came around to see a local band called the Quarry Men play in the fields behind St. Peter's Church in the suburbs of Liverpool, England.

John Lennon, who was 20 months older, fronted the six-piece band. He had his glasses off as usual—he was vain like that, though his vision was lousy. His hair was piled up and greased back in the style of post-Elvis "Teddy Boys." He played banjo chords on his guitar, ignoring the two bottom strings. For much of the set—part rock and part "skiffle" (a flavor of 1950s folk)—he passed over chord changes he didn't know and made up lyrics as he went along. When he did the Del-Vikings doo-wop "Come Go With Me," he threw in an image from the blues: "Come and go with me ... down to the penitentiary."

McCartney thought it was ingenious.