The Beatles were shutting down, but Paul McCartney refused to let the band simmer. When it was coming towards the end of their time together, members such as George Harrison and John Lennon were starting to lose interest in the band. They wanted to move on and work on solo projects, but McCartney was determined to make things work.
While you might admire McCartney’s persistence in this situation, it didn’t help anything at the time. Instead of admiring their bandmates’ work ethic, Harrison and Lennon felt as though McCartney was trying to turn the Beatles into a dictatorship, essentially making the entire band about him and his ideas rather than everybody else. The Beatles were famous for having a similar ideology when it came to making music, but this was no longer the case.
With Paul trying to take the lead, a bitter resentment grew in his fellow bandmates that transferred over to their solo careers. There was no ongoing feud between any of The Beatles’ members, but there was ongoing tension between Paul McCartney and the rest of the band that became tricky to address.
The cruellest thing to come out of this period was John Lennon’s song ‘How Do You Sleep’, which was a devastating number that ridiculed McCartney as a person and as a creative. However, before we dive into just how nasty a song that was, it’s worth noting that McCartney did strike the first blow with his song ‘Too Many People’.
The song wasn’t entirely aimed at Lennon, but there was a line dedicated to the activism he had been doing a lot of. In the song, McCartney sings, “Too many people preaching practices,” which he has since admitted was a jab at Lennon and Yoko Ono.
“He’s been doing a lot of preaching, and it got up my nose a little bit,” he admitted, “In one song, I wrote, ‘Too many people preaching practices’, I think is the line […] I mean, that was a little dig at John and Yoko. There wasn’t anything else on it that was about them. Oh, there was ‘You took your lucky break and broke it in two’.”
Lennon was furious when he heard the line, so much so that shortly after, he was in the studio recording the song ‘How Do You Sleep?’ The track was cruel, there is no other way to put it. While McCartney dedicated one throwaway line to his frustration at Lennon, Lennon delivered an entire song that was centred around his former bandmate. During it, he tells McCartney, “Those freaks was right when they said you were dead,” and that “The only thing you’ve done was yesterday.”
Even by modern rap standards, this diss track is still devastating in its lyrical content. However, perhaps the most cruel thing about the song was that Lennon had George Harrison come in and record some music for it as well. Harrison never spoke too much about how proud or not proud he was of participating in the song; however, one thing was for sure: he was glad that he wasn’t on the receiving end of it.
“I enjoyed ‘How Do You Sleep?’” He said, “I liked being on that side of it with Paul, rather than on the receiving end.”
