It's no surprise that John Lennon harbored some ill will toward Paul McCartney in the aftermath of the Beatles' breakup. In the new book The John Lennon Letters, a previously seen handwritten 1971 note from John and Yoko On0 to Paul and his wife Linda (whom Lennon sarcastically addressed as "you noble people") confirms what everyone already knows about that enmity, as Lennon chides McCartney to "get off your gold disc and fly!"
What's not so well known: the tiff between Lennon and producer George Martin, a beloved figure not usually known for his participation in Beatle beefs.
In one of the angrier missives included in The John Lennon Letters, the then-bitter ex-Beatle lays into Martin for supposedly taking too much credit for the group's sound. He also smacks the producer down for giving McCartney too much credit for some of the songwriting.
"When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?' I noticed you had no answer for that! It's not a putdown, it's the truth," wrote Lennon, who had brought in Phil Spector to redo Martin's work on Let It Be and then continued to work with Spector as a solo artist.
"I think Paul and I are the best judges of our partners," Lennon wrote, less than politely. "Just look at the world charts and, by the way, I hope Seatrain is a good substitute for the Beatles."
Can you say "snap, squared"? Seatrain, as very few people will recall, was the unremarkable California roots-rock band Martin was assigned to produce by Capitol Records immediately after the Beatles' breakup.
What angered Lennon so? In the larger sense, armchair psychologists might suppose that a would-be "working class hero" like Lennon possibly harbored some resentment over having his musical revolution seen as reliant on a stiff-upper-lip establishmentarian like Martin. But in the immediate sense, Lennon was reacting to a Melody Maker interview in which Martin made some seemingly innocent remarks that got the rocker's considerable gander up.
"Now on to 'Revolution No. 9,' which I recorded with Yoko plus the help of Ringo, George and George Martin. It was my concept, fully," Lennon wrote in a letter co-addressed to the Melody Maker interviewer. "For Martin to state that he was 'painting a sound picture' is pure hallucination. Ask any of the other people involved. The final editing Yoko and I did alone (which took four hours)...
"Of course, George Martin was a great help in translating our music technically when we needed it, but for the cameraman to take credit from the director is a bit too much. I'd like to hear what the producer of John Cage's 'Fontana Mix' would say about that... Don't be so paranoid, George, we still love you," ended the main part of the note, signed by " John (and Yoko who was there)."
Looking back at Martin's 1971 Melody Maker, it's not hard to pick out some other passages that might have set Lennon off. "John's become more obvious in a way," Martin told the British music weekly, then a bit less circumspect than he later became. "'Power To The People' is a rehash of "Give Peace A Chance," and it isn't really very good. It doesn't have the intensity that John's capable of. Paul, similarly with his first album ... it was nice enough, but very much a home-made affair, and very much a little family affair. I don't think he ever really rated it as being as important as the stuff he'd done before. I don't think Linda is a substitute for John Lennon, any more than Yoko is a substitute for Paul McCartney."
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