Off The Beatle Track

When I worked in corporate America, among our favorite time-wasters¹ was to try to solve problems by asking 5 “what” or “why” questions.²

I thought I’d use that method as a way to explore what I consider to be the big Beatles question: What made The Beatles great?

Question 1: Why should we consider The Beatles to be the best pop/rock group ever?

Because they produced the best songs; their catalog separates them from every other pop/rock act.

Question 2: What made The Beatles’ music so special?

They were four talented musicians who brought out the best³ in each other. They⁴ had exquisite taste when it came to writing, singing, playing, arranging, and producing their records. But the thing that they did best, the thing they did better than anyone else, was write.

Question 3: What made their songwriting unique?

They had two of the best songwriters in pop music history, John and Paul. They wrote together sometimes, mostly in the band’s early years, and separately more often, but they always wrote great songs. Later, George developed into a gifted songwriter in his own right.⁵

Question 4: Why were John and Paul able to write so many great songs?

They were undeniably talented, sure, but so were Leiber and Stoller, and Goffin and King, and Stevie Wonder, and Bob Dylan, and Holland–Dozier–Holland, and Paul Simon, and countless others. But none of them wrote as many great songs and Lennon and McCartney.

John and Paul were friends and songwriting partners, but they were also competitors. They had similar backgrounds, but they had very different personalities. In many ways they complemented each other, and in other ways their talents and interests overlapped.

I think I’ve brought this up before, but my Gen Z son believes that the next great wave of Beatles’ writing and research will focus on the psychological dynamics among the four members of the band, Brian, George Martin, and others involved in their careers.

If that happens, I hope that Beatle writers start by examining the relationship between John and Paul. Ian Leslie’s 2025 book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, was a good start, but much work remains. The excellent Another Kind of Mind podcast has explored the Lennon-McCartney relationship in its “Pizza and Fairytales” and “A Mistake in Many Ways” series and elsewhere.

But Leslie himself wrote that “We think we know John and Paul; we really don’t.” I agree, but I wonder, How is that still possible? They were two of the most famous people on the planet, and they’ve given hundreds if not thousands of interviews between them.

We know that neither one was a completely reliable narrator of his own life, but they did occasionally reveal credible information about themselves and the other one (as Paul did in his 1980 interview with Peter Brown and Stephen Gaines).

Maybe more information will come to light after Paul’s death, which I hope, to steal a line from the man himself, will be “many years from now.” The relationship between John and Paul was the engine that drove The Beatles, and until we fully understand the nature of that relationship, we won’t be able to assess accurately what made The Beatles great.

What are your thoughts about John and Paul? Email me at beatletrack@gmail.com.

1. We used this method from about 2002 to 2008-9, when the Great Recession put an end to the nonsense. ↩︎
2. I sat in many a meeting that went like this:
   Facilitator: Ok, someone give me a problem that your team is facing. [Followed by 30 seconds of silence.]
   Someone in the group: Uh, we, uh, don’t have enough staff to handle the amount of work that management keeps dumping on us.
   Someone else in the group: Yeah, and every year we’re expected to handle more work with fewer staff.
   A third person: Plus we’re expected to volunteer to do other shit too.
   Facilitator: Well, let’s watch our language. But why do you think you have more work than people to do the work?
   A fourth person: ‘Cause all we can reliably count on is that management will always have their heads up their asses.
   Facilitator: LANGUAGE!
   So we never saw this method actually work. ↩︎
3. And sometimes the worst. ↩︎
4. With George Martin’s help. ↩︎
5. I know, I know, “in his own write” was just sitting there, and I missed it. ↩︎