rocker654 wrote:Lennon and McCartney brought the best out in each other.

On their own, they produced some great stuff and some crap.

Lennon was an intellectual and McCartney was an entertainer.

Wings sold more records than the Beatles did.

McCartney=Not Crap most of the time.

Wings didn’t sell more records than the Beatles.

And if Lennon was anything, he was a pseudo-intellectual. They all were. I say this as a Lennon admirer. He was a doer, not a thinker. In the studio, he could care less about how things worked. He liked to perform in the moment. He was a big fan of that scream therapy stuff that he got from Yoko. Lennon loved jumping in to new philosophies, but he was never a master of them – more of a student.

Back in the Beatles days McCartney introduced tape loops to John. Macca went to galleries and stuff. He knew the names of painters. Pretty much all of the construct of the “theme-y” albums like Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road are because of Paul (and George Martin). I think he was thought of as the intellectual more than any of the others.

I would say John was just as much an entertainer. He loved Chuck Berry. He rocked out more.

Minotaur029 wrote:NOT CRAP. Was a Beatle...seems that it was ultimately Paul's being a little bitch that killed the Beatles, but oh well.

It's pretty well documented that he kept them together so they could finish up Let It Be. That's what that song's about - "chill the hell out everyone."

Remember, when Harrison walked out, Lennon said "who cares, call Clapton."
The combination of Macca keeping the train on the rails and the introduction of Billy Preston is what got the album finished.

-A

Edit: looks like ARRGHHHHH beat me to it. Nice work.

SecondEdition wrote:so I guess not crap but only slightly because good Christ does his solo shit suck.

Maybe I'm Amazed sucks?

Wow.

-A

Come on...Temporary Secretary?

If he's on the radio or TV, I change channel.

The guy was one of the A-grade Beatles. He could be a paedophile and dog-sodomizer, and still wouldn't be crap.

alex maiolo wrote:

SecondEdition wrote:so I guess not crap but only slightly because good Christ does his solo shit suck.

Maybe I'm Amazed sucks?

Wow.

-A

I did say "with slight exceptions" Crap...and Maybe I'm Amazed is an exception that proves the rule.

alex maiolo wrote:

Minotaur029 wrote:NOT CRAP. Was a Beatle...seems that it was ultimately Paul's being a little bitch that killed the Beatles, but oh well.

It's pretty well documented that he kept them together so they could finish up Let It Be. That's what that song's about - "chill the hell out everyone."

Remember, when Harrison walked out, Lennon said "who cares, call Clapton."
The combination of Macca keeping the train on the rails and the introduction of Billy Preston is what got the album finished.

-A

Edit: looks like ARRGHHHHH beat me to it. Nice work.

Additionally, I clarified my statement in my last post.

Side note: Let It Be was shelved until Lennon let Spector take a crack at it. Lennon likey very muchy. Obviously...Paul did not dig the wall of sound treatment.

McCartney haters are the most joyless, tedious people in the world.

Josef K wrote:Come on...Temporary Secretary?

This song, she is not so good.
I can sort of defend it though. It was recorded in 1979 and uses a step sequencer, some vocoder, drum machine, and oddly, a compressed to hell acoustic guitar played so ham fistedly it's sort of out of tune. Pretty crazy for the time. This was Kraftwerk's domain and not many others.

McCartney II was essentially him trying to figure out how all of this new gear worked, hence the song Check My Machine, which he wrote as a way of...checking out how the machines worked.

That's very much in the tradition of Macca. He always wanted to know how the stuff at EMI worked whereas John could have given a shit. Tomorrow Never Knows is "John's" song, but the ideas would have never made it to tape if Paul hadn't "translated" the ideas to George Martin. Not only was Paul important as a song writer, he held this extremely key job.

I consider the whole McCartney II album to be an experiment. Even the textures on the hit, Coming Up, were a little strange. I'd argue that this record's better than Neil Young's Trans, and it came out many years earlier.
Whether albums like this should be foisted upon the public is the stuff of further debate, but I like that some people never lose their curiosity.

In addition, while Temporary Secretary is a dated, weird song, I'll contradict you with:

Helen Wheels
Jet
Band on the Run
No Words
(and pretty much the rest of the BOTR album)
Mull of Kintyre
Maybe I'm Amazed
Live and Let Die
My Love
Another Day
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey

just to name a few.

Lennon's best songs are as good or better than these. The problem is, he doesn't have as *many*, and his stinkers, per capita, equal or exceed Macca's.

In the end, they needed each other to be at their very best, and that's hard to dispute.

-A