John Lennon and Paul McCartney built their songwriting partnership on a mutual understanding that whoever wrote the song would have the final say-so in how that track turns out, but that doesn’t mean they always agreed with one another. One such example came from their penultimate album, Abbey Road. Years after its release, Lennon would lament over the fact that McCartney insisted on singing the lead vocal.
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Speaking to David Geff during one of his final interviews before his death in 1980, Lennon discussed “Oh! Darling” and what he liked (and didn’t like) about the blues rocker. He described the song as “a great one of Paul’s that he didn’t sing too well. I always thought that I could’ve done it better. It was more my style than his. He wrote it, so what the hell, he’s going to sing it. If he’d had any sense, he should have let me sing it.”
To some degree, I’d be inclined to agree with Lennon. Of the two musicians, he was certainly the grittier of the two. “Oh! Darling” sounds more akin to Lennon’s composition, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, than, say, McCartney’s “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, elsewhere on the album. Hearing how Lennon interpreted those blues lines would have undoubtedly been an interesting example of how the men differed in their vocal approach. But alas, the songwriter got the final say. And in this case, that was McCartney.
Paul McCartney Tried Several Times to Track the Vocals John Lennon Wanted to Do
In hindsight, it seems almost sacrilege to suggest that The Beatles should have done anything other than exactly what they did. John Lennon might have believed he could sing “Oh! Darling” better than Paul McCartney. But it’s not like McCartney was a stranger to the scream vocal. He had already proved his abilities with that particular technique on “White Album” tracks like “Helter Skelter”. Still, we can only imagine how vexing it must have been for Lennon to watch McCartney track and re-track his vocals again and again and again, all the while, Lennon was itching for a chance to put his spin on it.
Alan Parsons, studio engineer, recalled McCartney coming into the studio multiple times to attempt his lead vocals on “Oh! Darling”. “He’d come in, sing it, and say, ‘No, that’s not it. I’ll try again tomorrow.’ He only tried it once per day. I suppose he wanted to capture a certain rawness, which could only be done once before the voice changed.”
And indeed, McCartney was after something specific. Speaking to Barry Miles for Many Years From Now, McCartney described tracking the vocal with a handheld mic, with a mic on a stand, when he was tired, when he wasn’t, and so on. “I tried it every which way,” McCartney said. “It’s a bit of a belter. If it comes off a little bit lukewarm, then you’ve missed the whole point.” Lennon certainly seemed to have thought so, too.
Photo by: Universal Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
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