Most songwriting duos see their craft as more of a competition than anything else. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney worked much better together than apart, it’s interesting to see them ping-ponging off each other whenever they made classic tunes, whether that was meshing two separate tracks together for ‘A Day in the Life’ or creating pieces to outdo each other like on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’. Lennon may not have been the best at complimenting, but even he had to admit that McCartney knocked it out of the park on ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’.
When the Fab Four started the sessions for Revolver, though, there was no real rhyme or reason to what “rock and roll” had to be anymore. They had already taken a huge leap into folk music on Rubber Soul, and cuts like ‘In My Life’ and ‘Yesterday’ were slowly being etched into the history of rock in just a few years.
But if Rubber Soul was their ‘pot album’, Revolver was the equivalent of them dipping themselves in acid, complete with psychedelic freakouts like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ put up against Harrison’s biting hard rock like ‘Taxman’. Whereas both Lennon and Harrison were exploring their mind, McCartney wanted to sing where his ballads would take him, like on ‘Good Day Sunshine’.
While it sounds like Macca was the lightweight trying to make sugary music for the masses, this was by no means simple. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was unlike anything that any band had come up with, and ‘For No One’ may as well have given it a run for its money in terms of pure melancholy. But McCartney was still the fun one in the group, and his flirtation with Motown on ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ was the kind of soul track any artist wishes they could write.
Despite being an ode to pot, the song’s infectious groove puts an even greater sheen of cool on Revolver, especially when the brass section comes storming in. While McCartney did credit Lennon for giving him the courage to reach high up in his range, the ‘Intellectual Beatle’ already knew his friend had something great on his hands.
Recalling back to his Beatles years in 1980, Lennon thought that the soulful cut ranked among McCartney’s finest works, saying, “I think that was one of his best songs, too, because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write them. You see? When I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort– here’s an example.”
However, attributing it solely to McCartney might be selling the song short. While McCartney did like to play a lot of his own instruments if he knew what suited the track, that lead guitar passage coming out of the second chorus is one of the single greatest moments in Beatles history, as if they captured every emotion in the song using just one lick.
So when looking through ‘Got to Get You Into My Life’, don’t look at it as just McCartney singing about getting stoned. This was his songwriting on parade, and considering what Sgt Peppers and Abbey Road had to offer, this was just a small glimpse at what the rest of the decade was shaping up to be.
