Word: lennons
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McCartney's roughest critic over the years was also his best friend. "He sounds like Engelbert Humperdink," said John Lennon of McCartney's first solo efforts. Later, in Lennon's remarkable album Imagine, he put it directly to Paul in How Do You Sleep?, a fierce song full of anger and injury...
...group had started its own recording and production company, Apple Records, which was also meant to serve as a kind of Ford Foundation for the counterculture. The place attracted all sorts of daytrippers, rip-off artists and weirdos. "People were robbing us and living off us," Lennon comments. "Eighteen or 20 thousand pounds a week was rolling out of Apple and nobody was doing anything about...
...want of trying. McCartney had met Linda Eastman in London in 1967. A year later he was living with her in London, and he looked to her father and brother, Lee and John, fashionable, tough-minded New York show-business lawyers, for advice on Apple's chaotic affairs. Lennon, in the meantime, had met up with Allen Klein, a free-swinging wheeler-dealer who once sent out Christmas cards with this greeting: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because I'm the biggest bastard in the valley...
...emotional cost is not so easily calculated. Lennon and McCartney both retreated, Paul seeking the shelter of quiet, closely restricted family life while John exorcised all his demons in public. Apart, they reveled in the sort of vocational excesses they had once checked in each other. Lennon collaborated with his wife, Yoko Ono, on a series of noisome avant-garde records, then switched to abrasive social protest on subjects as various as the Attica killings and the oppression of women. McCartney wrote about the undemanding pleasures of farm life and domestic bliss, going so far as to record a version...
McCartney's brother, Mike McGear, himself a Pop singer. Those qualities that many critics find cloying could also be melodic acts of self-persuasion. The songs may not work for the same reason that many of Lennon's from this period do not: they are written and sung more out of need than conviction...