But You Know It's Not Allowed: A Case for Imagine as a Lennon/McCartney Song
When Paul McCartney decided to include secret messages to John Lennon on Ram ("you took your lucky break and broke it in two" being the type of message he admits to, "I find my love awake and waiting to be / what can be done for you, she's waiting for me" the type he doesn't), he must have known how John would react. This was after Lennon Remembers
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I don't think John ever said publicly that Jealous Guy is about Yoko specifically, but he did say it was about his relationships with women. My favorite interpretation is that it's about everyone John ever loved and hurt, but I'm not sure if that's actually what he intended or not. Either way, the song is more about him than the person he hurt.
Is there a Lennon song other than "Jealous Guy" which started out as a melody to a completely different lyric, that we know of?
May Pang claimed that some of the melodies on Double Fantasy were first written when he was with her (I believe Beautiful Boy was one she named). But in all these examples, it seems that there were lyrics with the original melody, but John then changed the lyrics later.
Another thing about Paul recognizing the Jealous Guy melody: Paul wrote Mother Nature's Son as a response to the same lecture from the Maharishi that inspired Child of Nature. It wasn't just a song that Paul knew, but a song that was connected to one that Paul wrote.
. I mean, John presumably was aware that "The Long and Winding Road" was one of those few McCartney songs openly autobiographical and the expression of his 1969 misery (and a case of Paul's tendency to use song writing instead of therapy or, you know, openly admitting to said misery).
I think it was one of those situations where John knew about didn't know. Plausible deniability, right? Maybe Paul was expressing his deepest feelings, or maybe it was just a song. If John really did try to sabotage the song, that was probably why: he was angry at Paul for expressing himself in an ambiguous manner.
Re: Crippled Inside. John was definitely open about being an asshole while Paul was more open about wanting to be likeable (I think John wanted to be liked as much as Paul did, if not more, but he went about it a different way). Paul seems to have a harder time admitting to his flaws and admitting mistakes.
One thing that gets overlooked during the break-up period is how frustrated John was with Paul refusing to admit he could be wrong. There's an exchange they had while dealing with Apple, I can't remember where, some book or other. Paul supposedly said, about his current plan, "You know I'm right." To which John retorted, "You're always fucking right, aren't you?" John also took the "we believe that we can't be wrong" line in Back Seat of My Car as an attack on him and Yoko. According to Peter Doggett, around that time he wrote a speech bubble over a picture Paul at age 21 with the words, "I'm always perfect". In the Melody Maker feud, John wrote, As I've said before, Have you ever thought that you might POSSIBLY be wrong about something?
Of course, John tried to get Paul to admit to imperfection by screaming verbal abuse at him, which is an unsurprisingly ineffective method.
And Some People Never Knew, the song that does appear to be a response to How Do You Sleep?, Paul admitted, "I'm only a person like you, love / and who in the world can be right all the right times?"
But with Paul more inclined to hide that he has flaws, and John inclined to paranoid, I wonder if John ever blew Paul's flaws and Paul's darkness out of proportion in his mind. In fact, I'm certain he did (subconscious sabotage, and all).
I will respond to your other comments later.
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Quite true, on both counts. And if We can work it out is anything to go by, 60s Paul must have been incredibly frustrating to argue with. "Try to see it my way" indeed. I can John escalating the verbal onslaught out of sheer "what does it take for him to admit he's wrong?" annoyance.
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I've heard the comparisons to both John and Linda.
I've noticed one big difference in how Paul handled Heather Mills break-up versus John Lennon break-up: What he said in the music. Memory Almost Full has an adoring and unambiguous love song in See Your Sunshine, which Paul publicly stated was about Heather. On the same album is Gratitude, a song that must be about Heather. The song acknowledges Heather's mistreatment of him ("I should stop loving you / Think what you put me through"), but is an intense expression of what she did give him during their relationship. I think John would have appreciated a song like that. I'm sure John sometimes thought that Paul would have been better off had John Lennon not come into his life. After all, when imagining their alternate, Beatleless lives John pictured himself a bum and Paul a doctor.
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