Paul McCartney was John Lennon’s friend, songwriting partner, and, he explained, something like a priest. McCartney was one of the people who saw through Lennon’s guarded nature and had many honest, vulnerable conversations with him. McCartney recalled one conversation with Lennon that left him feeling like a priest.
Paul McCartney shared what the relationship between himself and John Lennon was like
McCartney recognized that Lennon’s aggression was a way to protect himself. He responded to challenging situations and emotions with barbed humor.
“There would often be a very witty put-down,” McCartney said on the iHeartPodcast McCartney: A Life in Lyrics (via NME). “It wouldn’t always be a put-down but it was always a very quick answer, and he’d trained himself to do that. That was one of the attractive things about him.”
Still, McCartney was able to break through Lennon’s defenses and have vulnerable conversations with him. On one occasion, Lennon confessed to his bandmate that he worried about how people would perceive him after he died.
“I remember him saying to me, ‘Paul, I worry about how people are going to remember me when I die.’ It shocked me and I said, ‘Hold it right there. People are going to think you were great.’”
He explained that this type of conversation, with Lennon confessing his fears and McCartney offering comfort, made him feel like Lennon’s priest.
“I was like his priest,” he said. “I’d say, ‘My son, you’re great.’ It’d make him feel better.”
Paul McCartney admired John Lennon
Like McCartney, Lennon had dealt with childhood tragedy that shaped his personality as an adult. The pain of losing his mother and having a distant relationship with his father had a resounding impact on Lennon.
“Vulnerability is very true. And at this time, I wouldn’t really know that. Later, when I thought, as an adult, about John’s upbringing, he had a really tragic life really,” McCartney said on the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. “As a kid, his mother was decreed to not be good enough to bring him up. Julia, his mum, who we would visit and he loved – he wrote a beautiful song about her – but she had to give him up … One night, Mum, Julia, was visiting them and had come to see her son, and on the way home, she got run over, she got killed by apparently an off-duty cop who maybe was a bit inebriated … it made me realize why he had that vulnerability.”
McCartney said this was one of the qualities he admired most in Lennon.
“I always admired the way he dealt with it because I’m not sure I would have dealt with it, well, with the stuff he went through.”
The Beatle had an idea of how he wanted people to view him after death
Lennon spoke more than once about the concern he felt about his image. He knew he didn’t want people to see him as a saint or martyr. To him, this designation hinted at premature death.
“Neither of us [Yoko and I] want to make the mistake that Gandhi and Martin Luther King did, which is get killed one way or the other,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “Because people only like dead saints, and I refuse to be a saint or a martyr. So I’m just protesting as a British citizen with his wife against British involvement in Biafra, and voicing the protest in the loudest way I can.”
Tragically, Lennon died young and was, in some ways, deified following his death.
