Such is the immense cultural swell behind the tsunami known as The Beatles that it is hard to imagine as anything other than the titans of pop music they have been mythologised as. And, as near-deities in the world of music, their position is not only infallible by and large but even personally. It seems impossible that each member of the band would not be determined to climb the creative Mount Olympus every time they set foot on stage or in the studio.
Of course, things couldn’t be further from the truth. While the band have been duly awarded their titles as some of the most influential musicians of all time, they were also simply four lads from Liverpool who used their spare time to learn some rock and roll songs and hopefully make a few bob down the nearest music hall. This means that each of the members of the group had their own personality and, as it would turn out, their own breaking points.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Star were, apart from being musical heavyweights, just four ordinary blokes from Merseyside and that meant tempers would flare occasionally. There have been a few occassions noted within the annals of Fab Four history when the bandmates would almost come to blows or find themselves on the wrong end of a verbal battering from another. However, it was rarely the music that pushed them over the edge.
Usually, the interpersonal relationships that held the band together became sticky and inescapable to the point of aggression. However, on a few occasions, the music pushed Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr over the edge.
The songs The Beatles walked out on:
‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’: The Beatles song John Lennon walked out on
The White Album is certainly the album Lennon loved most of all from the band’s canon. It resembled, to him at least, the band’s return to rock and roll and, therefore, was built largely out of deeply thumping tracks about more dark and dangerous topics than had infiltrated the recording on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the group’s last LP and a largely conceptual piece devised by McCartney. However, that doesn’t mean every song on the record was to his liking.
John Lennon deemed one such track so offensive that he stormed out of the studio. ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ is a divisive song thanks to its music hall leanings, something Lennon determined as “granny shit” and it signifies the fabric of the group tearing apart. During the recording of the number, Lennon would take issue with the track.
The exhaustive process of trying to nail the recording would send Lennon to the limit. “John went ballistic,” Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick explained in his book. “Ranting and raving, he headed out the door, with Yoko trailing closely behind. We thought we’d seen the last of him.” Despite McCartney retaliating “right in John’s face,” the duo eventually settles down and gets the track for the record finished. However, some might argue the duo never truly recovered their spark of working with one another.
The Beatles songs Paul McCartney walked out on
There are a few things that could keep Paul McCartney away from the studio. An audiophile to the last, McCartney’s presence either in the booth or by the mixing desk was an immovable object, especially during the latter part of The Beatles’ careers. It might be a surprise to learn, therefore, that there were two occasions when he decided enough was enough and found his way to an escape.
‘Come Together’ is not only one of The Beatles’ best but arguably one of Lennon’s most bodacious moments. Channelling his hero Chuck Berry, perhaps a little too closely, he would take centre stage on the track, something which Emerick recalls in his book as annoying McCartney. “[Paul] would normally be manning the keyboards even if they were recording a Lennon song. Finally, in some frustration, he blurted out, ‘What do you want me to play on this track, John?’. John’s response was, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do the overdubs on this’. For a moment, I thought there was going to be an explosion,” he wrote. “Instead, he contained himself, shrugged his shoulders, and simply walked out of the studio–one of the few times he left a session early.”
While that may have been a simple clash of creative differences, for the song ‘She Said, She Said’ it would seem that McCartney had simply had enough of being a Beatle for one day. A song written about an LSD-induced night with Peter Fonda seemingly didn’t connect with McCartney, and he left in a huff: “John brought it in pretty much finished, I think. I’m not sure but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on. I think we’d had a barney or something and I said, ‘Oh, f**k you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George played bass.”
‘Two of Us’: The Beatles song George Harrison walked out on
For a lot of fans, The Beatles’ song ‘Two Of Us’ has often been held up as a mark of McCartney’s unity with Lennon. However, the truth is, he wrote it for his wife Linda, and rather than uniting the band, it almost broke them up.
Ste up in the Twickenham studios, readying their album Get Back, relations between the Beatles had grown intolerable. McCartney had assumed the role of musical savant, while Lennon found himself engrossed more heavily in drugs and Yoko Ono than ever before. It left Harrison, a now perennially frustrated songwriter and, apparently, unwilling to take it much more.
On January 10th, 1969, after playing on ‘Two of Us’ Harrison would quit The Beatles. After offering his guitar skills to the McCartney song, the songwriter would shut him down, insisting he had over-complicated his love song, leading Harrison to splutter: “OK, well I don’t mind. I’ll play, you know, whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.” The standoff would lead Harrison to leave the studio with the sign-off, “See you around the clubs”.
‘Polythene Pam’: The Beatles song Ringo Starr walked out on
Now, the other three members of the group may be susceptible to the odd blow-up, but few can label Ringo Starr as anything but an affable chap. However, even he would lose his cool from time to time. Most of the time, this was when Starr’s unique ability was being questioned by his bandmates.
Starr is often the butt of jokes when considering legendary drummers, but even a modicum of research will tell you that his style is one of the most authentic and special in 1960s percussion. His ability to feel his way into a track and provide eccentric and extraoridnary, yet seemingly simple, fills is nothing short of magic, it means when he was question he would lose his cool a little.
‘Polythene Pam’ would see Lennon embrace the concept of Sgt Pepper but not without issue. As engineer Geoff Emerick recalled to Music Radar, “John wasn’t happy with the drumming on Polythene Pam. He had some problems with Ringo’s performance, and Ringo got pissed off and split for a couple of days. But he came back and redid the track, and John was pleased”.
