In early June 1969, the Beatles scored what would be their last No. 1 song (which also happened to be one of their most controversial) before their split later that year. Interestingly, only two of the Fab Four are on the track, signaling the fractures that would dismantle the band as a whole months later.
Paul McCartney recalled John Lennon being in an “impatient” mood when the latter Beatle brought the song to his bandmate. “I was happy to help,” McCartney would later say. Based on the song’s chart performance, everyone else was happy to hear it.
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Two Feuding Beatles Scored The Band’s Last No. 1 Hit
By the time (some of) the Beatles got into the studio at Abbey Road to start recording “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” they were already on the verge of splitting up for good. As the title would suggest, John Lennon was well into his relationship with Yoko Ono, having recently married her two months prior to the recording session in March 1969. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were also branching out individually. In fact, the bandmates’ separation was the impetus for only Lennon and McCartney recording the track in the first place.
“By the time we came to record Abbey Road and Let It Be, things were really disintegrating,” McCartney recalled in a 2004 interview with Uncut. “Especially between me and John. It was a very nervy time. The atmosphere was uncomfortably heavy when we got together. I just remember when John came round to my house, and he wanted me to help him finish up “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” He mainly had it all down. I didn’t do much on it. But he wanted me to help with the recording.”
“He wanted to run in that day and record it because he knew that, between the two of us, I could play bass and drums, and he could play guitar,” McCartney continued (via The Paul McCartney Project). “It was just a question of immediacy. I could feel, though, that things were breaking up even though we were still managing to create stuff together.”
And indeed, the band wouldn’t survive through the following year, at least not mentally and emotionally, anyway. Their breakup meant “The Ballad of John and Yoko” was the Beatles’ last No. 1 song in the U.K. before the 2023 release of “Now and Then.”
A Late-Stage Testament To The Musicians’ Collaborative Process
In their best moments, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were able to play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses to create some of the most enduring musical offerings of rock and pop from the 1960s. Although each of the Fab Four’s writing styles became more unique as the decade wore on, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” was a late-in-their-career testament to the musicians’ collaborative process. Despite only having two of the Beatles in the studio, Lennon and McCartney were able to create strong cohesion in what would be their last No. 1 hit until 2023.
“John wanted to do things quickly,” Paul McCartney later recalled in 1995, per The Paul McCartney Project. “That was the very exciting thing about working with him. He didn’t like to hang about. I hate to hang about, but I will do it. I will steel myself and say, ‘Oh, well, it’s the nature of the beast. We’ve got to hang about.’ John wouldn’t do it. And he just came around to my house and said, ‘Hey, come on, let’s go around Abbey Road.’ We didn’t really feel that we had to ask whether it was okay to do this. We just went ahead and did it.”
The other bandmates didn’t seem to mind. In Anthology, George Harrison remarked, “I didn’t mind not being on the record because it was none of my business. If it had been “The Ballad of John, George, and Yoko,” then I would have been on it.”
Moreover, Lennon and McCartney still billed their last No. 1 hit as being by the Beatles. Even if Harrison and Ringo Starr weren’t physically present in the studio that day, what’s good for the goose is for the gander, so to speak.
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