"Beatles, Lennon v. McCartney: A Collision of Worldviews"

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

The thing I keep coming back to is this. Paul McCartney threw the first public punch in 1971 on the Ram album with too many people. A few jabs at John and Yoko delivered with a smile. Deniable if you squinted.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

And John's response wasn't just jabs back, it was how do you sleep? Full character assassination. Even saying Paul's only good song was yesterday, George Harrison played the guitar while John said it. That asymmetry tells you everything about John and Paul's dynamic.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

That tension between what you think and what it costs to say, it runs through their story. It's also something I grappled with last week, sitting in a studio notes meeting, smiling and nodding instead of delivering the kind of radical honesty John Lennon would.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

It's a universal tension. My father once left me a voicemail after watching a Beatles documentary. He called their story a waste of a friendship, something he'd never say out loud. Whenever I think about John and Paul, that's the voice I hear it in.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Liverpool in the 1950s, post-war bombed out, rationing barely ended, but it's a Port City American sailors come through with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Records, British teenagers suddenly have access to music their parents can't understand.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Classic recipe parents hate it, kids love it, and the world changes. Into that come John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both working class, both losing their mothers young. That loss is where their real story starts. How young do they lose their mothers?

SPEAKER_00 1:41

John's mother, Julia, essentially abandons him at five, leaving him with his aunt Mimi. He reconnects with Julia as a teenager. Then she's killed by a car at 17. It's a wound that never really heals. He loses her twice. And Paul? Paul's mother Mary dies of breast cancer when he's 14. He goes numb. He later said the first thing he thought was, what are we going to do without her money? The practical question was easier than the real grief.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

So John becomes defensive and sarcastic using wit as a weapon. Paul becomes a people pleaser, channeling everything into making beautiful things.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Exactly. Put them alone, they're good, put them together, something else happens entirely. The 6th of July 1957, a church garden party in Walton. John's band, The Quarryman, is playing. John's 16, they're not good, but they're completely committed.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

16-year-old boys and an earned confidence, the classic combination. Paul, 15, shows up, watches John Fumble lyrics, but sell it with conviction.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

After the show, Paul plays 20 Flight Rock flawlessly. John realizes this kid is better than me. He has to decide, invite Paul in and risk being overshadowed or protect his leadership.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

He chooses smart. John later admitted it was painful together. They're greater than alone, but the mix of resentment and gratitude started on day one. That's such a specific relationship. Needing someone and resenting what it costs to admit it.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

They recruit George Harrison, then Pete Best, and eventually Ringo Star. Playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg, eight-hour sets, living on nothing, taking speed to stay awake. That's where they become real.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

You can't fake eight-hour sets, and from the beginning all songs are credited, Lennon McCartney, even if one writes it solo. Seems fair at first.

SPEAKER_00 3:25

It is until they get famous. Paul writes Yesterday Alone, John writes Help Alone, but both are credited jointly. The partnership starts to obscure their individual contributions, slowly burning from the start. November 1961, they meet Brian Epstein. He manages a record store, sees them at the Cavern Club, and is immediately convinced they'll be the biggest band in the world.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

And Brian is gay in 1961 Britain, where that's still illegal. He's infatuated with John, but still manages and protects them, even in the face of cruelty from John. Brian cleans up their image, matching suits, no swearing on stage, gets them to EMI. Their second single hits, number one, and by 1963, Beatlemania is in full swing. Teenage girls screaming so loud the band can't even hear themselves.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Literally, the tech couldn't keep up. John described it as standing inside a jet engine. February 64, Ed Sullivan show overnight. They're the biggest band on earth. But here's the first real crack. Paul sees the dream, John sees a cage.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Paul thinks we're famous, making great music, this is what we wanted. John thinks this isn't music anymore. It's a circus. We're animals performing for people who can't hear us.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

And John's not wrong. The footage backs him up. The screaming is so loud, the music's drowned out, it stops being a concert and becomes a ritual. John hates ritual. He wants to be heard, not worshipped.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Paul can't see that because he loves the connection. 73 million people watching, girls knowing every word. For him, that's what music is for.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Both approaches are legitimate and completely incompatible. They can't yet articulate the conflict because they're young and unprecedentedly famous. But this is the first real glimpse. Their difference is about whether honesty to yourself is worth the cost to those who depend on you.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

And they'll spend the rest of their lives answering that question in opposite directions.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Exactly. That tension between radical honesty and needing to be loved drives everything that follows. Welcome to part four. The John versus Paul story gets told as a binary. John is the revolutionary, Paul is the craftsman, John is authenticity, Paul is commerce. Pick a side. And I want to say that framing is wrong in a specific way that matters.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

How is it wrong?

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Because the opposition is false. John's radical authenticity say the true thing, regardless of cost, tear down the false, and find the real that position only functions if someone is providing the form that makes the truth audible to other people. John's emotional honesty without Paul's melodic intelligence produces, at its very best, the plastic Ono band, which is a masterpiece, which almost nobody actually listens to. Paul's craft, without John's restlessness, produces wings beautifully made, enormous commercial success, and you can hear something missing in it.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

You can hear the absence of the person who pushed back.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Exactly. And they both knew it. That is why the breakup was so painful. That is why they kept circling each other for the rest of John's life. Neither of them could function at their full height without the other. They both understood that, and they could not find a way to make the personal cost worth it anymore.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

I want to say what I actually think the John and Paul story is about. Not the music industry version of it.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Go.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

I think it is about what happens to a great friendship when it becomes too important to survive. The partnership they built was so central to who they each were that it stopped being something they could hold loosely. It became the foundation. And when the foundation started cracking, there was no negotiating the crack because the crack was in the thing that held everything up. It was all or nothing. And so it became nothing. And what follows the diss tracks, the legal battles, the late night sessions at the Dakota that never turned into a record, the April visit eight months before John died, all of that is two people who built the most important thing in each other's lives and then could not figure out how to be around each other without it. Or without each other at all.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Which is what my father was hearing in that music. Without knowing any of that explicitly, he just heard what a thing to build together. And then to lose it like that. He heard it in the songs. He did. And here is where it connects to now. We live in a cultural moment with enormous appetite for the John position, say the true thing, regardless of cost, burn it down if it needs burning. Authenticity above all. That has real value. What the Beatles story demonstrates is that the John position, sustained alone over time, produces someone who is right and isolated and has no one left willing to tell him when he is wrong. Paul was that person. After the breakup, no one was. Some of the late solo work shows it.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

And the pole position alone produces someone making beautiful things that nobody quite believes in completely. Because you can hear the absence of the friction that made it matter.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

The lesson is not be more like John or be more like Paul. The lesson is that the thing that comes out of the space between two people who push each other honestly, that thing is not available anywhere else. You cannot replicate it alone. You cannot manufacture it strategically. Either it exists or it doesn't. And when it ends, you spend the rest of your life knowing what it was.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

My father is 81 years old. I have never told him, I still have the voicemail, I have never told him how many times I have listened to it. I am going to call him this week and tell him. Not because it is dramatic or because the timing is convenient, just because it is the thing that is true, and I am tired of not saying it. John Lennon would have said it in a song that made everyone uncomfortable. Paul McCartney would have said it in the most beautiful melody you ever heard. I am just going to say it on the phone, but I am going to say it.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Read Philip Norman's biography of John, the most complete account of who he actually was behind the icon. Read Many Years From Now by Paul McCartney with Barry Miles. Knowing it is Paul's version makes it more valuable, not less, because the gaps in what he can bring himself to say are as revealing as anything he actually says. And then listen to Plastigona Band and Ram back to back. Not for the songs, for what you can hear underneath the songs, the shape of the absence.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Tell one person about this show today. Specifically, someone who has a creative partnership they are taking for granted. Tell them while there is still time to do something about it. That is us.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Chow. Welcome to part two, March 1966. John gives an interview. He says, and this is the exact quote, we are more popular than Jesus now. I do not know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity. Um in Britain, people largely shrug. In America, specifically the Bible Belt, the response is comprehensive. Radio stations ban Beatles music. People burn records in public bonfires. The Ku Klux Klan protests their concerts.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

The Klan. At a Beatles concert.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

The Klan. Paul is furious. Why would you say that? You have just handed them a weapon and pointed it at us. And John? John doubles down. His position is I am objectively correct. We are more popular than Jesus in terms of cultural reach. And if that is disturbing, the disturbance belongs to the situation, not to the person who named it.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

I need to push back on that. Specifically, go. John is framing this as radical honesty. And you work in film, I work in streaming. We've both been in rooms where someone said the true thing at the wrong moment and called it courage. Sometimes it is courage. And sometimes, and this is the part I need you to actually sit with, sometimes it is someone who genuinely cannot stop themselves from saying the most incendiary possible version of the point and has decided that their inability to stop themselves is a virtue. John could have made the same observation about celebrity replacing religion, about what Beatlemania revealed about modern culture without the Jesus comparison. He chose the nuclear version. That is not always honesty, Mike. Sometimes that is a very specific kind of self-indulgence dressed up as principal.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

I hear that, but I want to push back on the distinction you are drawing between the person who chooses the nuclear version and the person who genuinely cannot help it. Because from the inside, Mark, those two things are not separable. John was not sitting in that interview calculating the most destructive possible phrasing. He said, what felt true in the moment at full force, the way he always did. The recklessness is not a separate thing, he added on top of the honesty. It is the same impulse. And if you surgically remove it, if you train yourself to always find the more careful version, the deniable version, the version Paul would have given you, do not get John Lennon being honest without the recklessness. You get someone else entirely.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

I am not saying be more careful in general. I am saying that particular observation on that particular day in that particular interview could have been made without handing the Ku Klux Klan a protest sign. That is not about changing who John is. That is about whether you care what happens to the people in the band with you after you walk out of the room.

SPEAKER_00 12:14

And his answer to that question clearly was less than you might hope.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Which is Paul's whole grievance. Not that John was wrong, that John did not care enough about what being right would cost the rest of them. And I think that is a legitimate grievance.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

It is. And I think John knew it was legitimate, which is part of why he could not apologize. Because apologizing would mean admitting that Paul's way of moving through the world had a validity. John spent his entire career refusing to grant it.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

So they are both right and neither can say so.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Exactly. And the thing about John is the same reflex that makes him incapable of the careful version is also where everything great about him comes from. You cannot surgically remove the recklessness and keep the plastic Ono band. The same impulse that produces the Jesus quote produces Imagine. You cannot have one without the other.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Which makes it a tragedy rather than just a flaw.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Which makes it a tragedy. We will come back to this. August 29th, 1966, Candlestick Park, San Francisco. The last concert the Beatles ever play. The biggest band in the world walks off a stage and never comes back to one together. And what follows is extraordinary because without the touring machine, they have to figure out who they actually are.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Revolver comes out the same month. Paul writes Eleanor Rigby, string, quartet, loneliness, death, nothing like anything they have done before. John writes, Tomorrow Never Knows, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Backwards guitars, tape loops. Sounds like a musical thiever dream.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Both extraordinary, neither one possible without the other one pushing. And that pressure produces their masterpiece. June 1967, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

I want to say something about Sergeant Peppers that I know you are going to disagree with.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

You are gonna say Abbey Road is better.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

Abbey Road is better. Better songs, better cohesion. Paul's medley on side two is a masterpiece. And come together in something, and Here Comes the Sun on the same album.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Abbey Road only exists because Sergeant Peppers demonstrated that a pop album could be a complete artistic statement. You do not get Abbey Road without Sergeant Peppers opening the door.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

But Sergeant Peppers is not actually a concept album. The concept disappears after the first two songs. It is a collection of extraordinary songs with a fictional band name on the cover. Abbey Road is better front to back, and you know it.

SPEAKER_00 14:39

That is okay. That is a fair point about the concept, but it misses what Sgt. Peppers actually was in 67. It was not just an album. It was a declaration that the Beatles were no longer a pop band. John and Paul both needed that declaration for different reasons. Paul needed it because he wanted to prove they could make serious art. John needed it because he wanted the world to stop expecting him to be the lovable mop top he had been performing since 63. Sergeant Peppers gave both of them permission to become whoever they were going to be next. Abbey Road is what they became. But Peppers is the door.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

I will give you the door. But here is what I think that actually shows. By 67, John and Paul are already pulling in different directions, and Sergeant Peppers papers over it brilliantly. Paul wants the grand unified statement, the concept, the orchestration, the thing that announces this is art. John wants out of the mop top cage, yes, but what he actually wants is permission to be stranger and more personal, which Peppers does not really give him. Tomorrow never knows is on Revolver, not Peppers. The songs John cares most about in that period, Julia, Strawberry Fields, they are not Peppa's songs. Peppers is Paul's vision of what the Beatles should become. And John goes along with it because it is brilliant and because he does not yet have a better answer. But the divergence is already happening underneath the surface of the greatest album most people think they ever made.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Which is okay. That is not wrong. That is a better argument than Abbey Road has better songs.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

I know. I was working up to it.

SPEAKER_00 16:07

You could have led with that.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

I wanted to see if you would concede on the songs first.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

I did not concede on the songs.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

You absolutely did.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

We are moving on. The resentment is accumulating quietly. And by the way, that is true of John specifically. Years later, he will say, Sergeant Peppers is overrated, and Paul took over the band around this point. He's not wrong, but he also let it happen because the result was magnificent. That is its own kind of trap. August 1967, Brian Epstein dies of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. He is 32 years old. The glue. The person who mediated, handled the business, protected them from chaos, resolved the things that could not resolve themselves. Without Brian, they are four people in a room with no one to settle anything. Paul tries to step into a leadership role. John and George resent it immediately. They start Apple Core, this utopian experiment, going to change the music business, help artists, transform everything.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Complete disaster.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

Comprehensive. Meanwhile, Paul steers them into magical mystery tour, rent a bus, drive around England with a camera, improvise a film, no script, no structure, pure instinct.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

And instinct without structure is not always sufficient.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Critically panned. BBC broadcast it in black and white, even though it is shot in colour. People hate it. Paul takes it personally because it is his idea. And then in the middle of all of this, John meets Yoko Ono.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

And I want to say something about Yoko before Mike frames this. Because she has received a genuinely unfair amount of blame for the Beatles breakup. Go ahead. She is a legitimate avant-garde artist. Part of the Fluxus movement, serious work, not a groupie, not an interloper. She represents for John something he has been reaching toward: total freedom from commercial expectation, complete indifference to reception. John is exhausted by being a Beatle. Yoko offers him a version of himself that is not that.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

But John brings her into the studio.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

And that is where it gets complicated because the Beatles have an unspoken rule: no wives or girlfriends in the studio. Sacred space. Even Paul does not bring Jane Asher. John not only brings Yoko to every session, he eventually has a bed brought in after she is in a car accident so she can lie beside him while they record. A bed in the recording studio. An actual bed. And Paul sees this as John choosing someone over the band over him. Which is the one thing Paul cannot negotiate with being left. He is still the 14-year-old who couldn't process his mother walking out of his life. And now his closest friend is doing a version of the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

That is not a music business story.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

No, that is a much older story.

SPEAKER_00 18:54

May 1968. Supposed to stay for months. They leave early when rumors emerge about the Maharishi's conduct with some of the women there. John is furious, he writes. When they get back to England, they immediately start recording the white album, and it is brutal. How brutal? Five months. John bringing Yoko to every session, Paul controlling every detail, George, who will write something and Here Comes the Sun. Two of the great songs frustrated that the others still treat him like the kid who joined at 14, and Ringo quits. Sweet Ringo quits. For two weeks in August, just walks out, says he is done. The others send him flowers and a note. When he returns, they have covered his drum kit with flowers.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

That is both very sweet and genuinely alarming. If you can drive Ringo Star out of the room, you have a problem that flowers will not fix long term.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Getting a noise complaint from a library. It should not be possible. The white album itself is brilliant, 30 songs, extraordinary material, but you can hear the fragmentation in it. Three solo artists making music in the same building. Paul records his songs with one set of musicians. John records with Yoko beside him. George brings in Eric Clapton to play on while my guitar gently weeps because he knows the others will behave in front of an outsider. They need a chaperone. They need multiple chaperones.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

I want to say something about George here because I think his position in all of this gets flattened into a footnote, and it should not. George Harrison is the person who watches the Lennon McCartney partnership collapse from three feet away for three years. He writes something which Frank Sinatra will later call the greatest love song of the last 50 years. He writes, Here comes a Sunday. These are not minor contributions, and the other three still treat him in the studio like the 14-year-old who showed up at the garden party with John's mate. Paul corrects his guitar parts. John barely registers his songs exist. The only reason why My Guitar Gently Weeps is on the White Album is because George brought Eric Clapton in and the others were too embarrassed to be difficult in front of an outsider. Think about that. He had to smuggle his own song onto his own band's album. And when George finally quits the Let It Be Sessions in January 69 and comes back on conditions, one of those conditions is that they stop treating him like a session musician in his own band. He has watched John and Paul's partnership eat everything in the room for a decade. By the end, he is so exhausted by Paul's control that he plays guitar on the song John Records to destroy Paul publicly. That is not a man who hates Paul. That is a man who has run out of runway.

SPEAKER_00 21:40

The cost of being inside that partnership, if it costs John and Paul themselves that much, what does it cost the person who is inside it but not of it?

SPEAKER_01 21:47

Exactly. George is the evidence of the collateral damage. Everything the partnership consumed that was not John or Paul.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

January 1969. Paul's idea, let's get back to basics. Just us playing live in a room with Like Hamburg, we'll film it. They start at Twickenham Film Studios, cameras everywhere. John is in terrible shape. He and Yoko have been using heroin. They are trying to stop. He sits in the sessions barely participating while Paul tries to keep things moving, which makes Paul look like a taskmaster, which makes John look like he is being managed, which makes everything worse. And then George walks out January 10th, mid-session, says, see you around the clubs. Five days he is gone. The cameras catch all of it. When he comes back, it is on conditions. They stop at Twickenham, move to Apple Studios, and they bring in Billy Preston on keyboards as a buffer. His presence forces them to behave. They are not going to have a complete collapse in front of someone who is not a Beatle.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Same reason George brought Eric Clapton to the White Album sessions.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

They need someone in the room who is not them. And somehow, out of all of this, they pull together for one extraordinary afternoon. January 30th, 1969. They set up on the roof of the Apple Corps building in London and just play middle of winter, freezing cold, get back, don't let me down, while confused office workers stare up from the street. Police arrive for noise complaints, and that is it.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Last time the Beatles ever performed together in public.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

They started in a church garden party in Woolton in the summer. They ended on a rooftop in London in January with the police shutting them down. There is something perfectly right about that. And the footage is extraordinary. You can see them smiling, remembering what it felt like. A brief window of joy before everything stops. And then I'll be rolled. They go back, July 69. No cameras, no documentary, no manufactured premise, just them and George Martin making one more album properly. George Martin takes control. They agree to a truce. We are probably done. Let us go out making something we are proud of. Paul works on the side too medley. George finally gets his moment, something in Here Comes the Sun on the same album. The others, for once, get out of the way. Twelve years of being the third Beatle. And then that right? And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

SPEAKER_01 24:07

I have always thought that line was Paul talking to the audience. Now I think he was talking to John.

SPEAKER_00 24:13

I think you are right. And John quits six weeks after the album is done, September 69, tells them he wants a divorce, agrees not to announce it while they renegotiate the EMI contract. So he is secretly gone while the best thing they ever made is still climbing the charts. Paul is the last one who wants to stay, which makes what comes next even harder. Welcome to part three. April 10th, 1970, Paul releases his first solo album and includes a self-interview in the promotional copies where he announces he has no plans for another Beatles record. The world treats this as the official announcement. The Beatles are over.

SPEAKER_01 24:47

And John is furious.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Because he quit months ago and Paul made it look like Paul ended the band. John feels like Paul stole his exit, which is, I want to say this carefully, an incredibly petty thing to be angry about, and also completely understandable if you are the one who made the harder decision and got none of the credit for it.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

They are both still 12 years old in the weirds that Matter Morst.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

They spend the next several years in open combat. Paul releases too many people pointedly about John and Yoko preaching peace while being judgmental. John responds with how do you sleep, one of the most vicious things one artist has ever publicly recorded about another. He says Paul's only good song was yesterday, and since leaving he is making music for people in hotel lifts. He attacks Linda and George plays guitar on the track.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

George plays guitar on a song, attacking Paul.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

George is so exhausted by Paul's control during the let it be sessions that he picks John's side openly. That tells you how bad things have gotten. But here's what I want to say about how do you sleep, and I know you have a different rate on this.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

I think John knew it was wrong when he wrote it.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Go.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

I think he wrote anyway because Paul was the person who mattered most, and losing him was a thing John could not say directly. So he said it sideways, the way he always said, the things that hurt too much to approach frontly through attack, through wit, um, through the weapon he had been building since he was 17, and his mother died the second time. The cruelty in that song is not the opposite of love. It is what love looks like when you are John Lennon and grief comes out as aggression because that is the only exit you have.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Yeah. And Paul later says that period was the lowest point of his life.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Because Paul needed to be loved, and John was the person whose love had always mattered most, and John had taken it away in the most public and humiliating way available to him. And Paul is still the 14-year-old who went practical when his mother died. He does not have the vocabulary for this kind of grief either. Neither of them does.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Linda saves him, tells him to stop grieving and start working. He forms Wings, tours small venues, rebuilds deliberately and methodically very Paul. Wings eventually has massive hits Band on the Run, Live and Let Die, Silly Love Songs. But the critical narrative hardens against him. John is the serious artist. Paul is making lightweight pop. And what drives Paul genuinely mad is that he thinks significant portions of John's solo output are pretentious.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Some of it is pretentious.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Some of it genuinely is. Some of John's solo work, Plastic Ono Band, imagine jealous guys as good as anything they made together. And some of it is John Lennon in a room with no one willing to tell him it is not working. Because Paul was the person who would tell him that after the breakup, that person is gone.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

And nobody replaces him.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Nobody. They are both permanently worse without each other, and they both know it. The critics spend the seventies setting them against each other, revolution or craft, authenticity or beauty, John or Paul, as if it is a binary. But the real story is that the opposition is false.

SPEAKER_01 27:45

Right? Because John's raw emotional honesty without Paul's melodic intelligence produces at its best the plastic Ono band, which is great, which almost nobody actually listens to. And Paul's craft without John's restlessness produces wings. Also great. Also not the Beatles.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

The thing they were together is not available separately. No combination of other people reproduces it.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

This is the part I keep coming back to. My father's voicemail, what a thing to build together, and then to lose it like that. He was not talking about the music, he was talking about the friendship. And that is the loss that neither of them could do anything about.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

By the mid-70s, the anger fades. They are both in New York. John has stepped back from music to raise his son Sean. Paul is still touring with wings. They run into each other. Stories of them at John's apartment in the Dakota, watching television, playing guitars, just two old friends who know each other more completely than anyone else on Earth.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Almost recording together in 74.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Same studio Paul is recording. John stops by, they play together, bootleg recordings exist, but neither will do it on the other's terms. Paul wants the formal reunion. John wants it casual and unannounced. They cannot find the middle.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Of course they can't, because that is who they are.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

By 1979, there is a genuine thaw. John does an interview with Playboy in September of 1980, speaks about Paul with real warmth. Brothers fight, he says, but the love is still there. And Paul says he visited John at the Dakota in April of 1980. Just showed up unannounced. No agenda. No cameras. Two old men talking about bread baking and raising their kids.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

April 1980.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:24

That is only eight months before.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

December 8th, 1980. John and Yoko returned to the Dakota from a recording session. Mark David Chapman, who had asked John for an autograph earlier that day, shoots John four times. He is rushed to the hospital. He dies within minutes. He is 40 years old.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

I want to just hold on.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

Take a second.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

My father's voicemail. I keep thinking about it because my father's whole point, what a thing to build, and then to lose it. He was talking about something that ended badly but still existed. The music is there. The friendship was real. John and Paul had the April conversation. They were almost back. And then there is no more time. There is no last album. There is no version where they figure out the rest of it. Paul finds out the next morning he is in a studio in England. Someone tells him cameras get in his face immediately. Reporter asks how he feels. And Paul says, It's a drag, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 30:20

People criticize him for that.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

I know. But Paul later explains he was in shock, could not reach the actual feeling. The first thing that came out was the practical register. The same place he went when he was 14 and said, What are we going to do without her money? It is the same response, the same unbearable thing. He was still doing it at 40 years old. He never found a different door.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

And there is no reconciliation now. There is no last record. There is no version of the story where they work it out.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Paul carries it, talks about John in almost every interview, plays Beatles' songs at concerts every time, keeps him present in every way he can.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

Because the music keeps them together in the only way left. When you listen to those songs, you cannot separate them. John's rawness and Paul's beauty are fused into something that neither of them could produce alone, and it will exist as long as those recordings do.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Which is a very long time.