Paul McCartney Edited This Pointed Lyric Out of a Diss Track Directed Toward John Lennon

Have you ever written out a diss that was a little too spicy to share with the world? Anger and hurt can sharpen words to the point of surprising even the people saying them, and that seemed to be true when Paul McCartney edited out a rather pointed lyric in a song he wrote about John Lennon.

The song appeared on McCartney’s second solo album, Ram. And as one might expect from a musician fresh off a highly contentious and highly public breakup with a band he had been in since he was a teenager, plenty of the material on Ram had to do with the Beatles’ split.

…and, according to one retelling of McCartney’s songwriting process, about his ex-best friend’s second wife.

What Made Paul McCartney Decide To Return The Favor

Paul McCartney opened his second solo album post-Beatles breakup with “Too Many People,” an apparent diss track toward his ex-friend and bandmate, John Lennon. In Paul Muldoon’s The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, McCartney said he felt like Lennon had already dissed him multiple times in tracks of his own. “I don’t know what he hoped to gain, other than punching me in the face. The whole thing really annoyed me,” he recalled.

So, McCartney decided to, as he put it, “turn my missiles on him, too.” Too many people going underground, he begins in “Too Many People.” Too many reaching for a piece of cake, too many people pulled and pushed around, too many waiting for that lucky break.

“The idea of too many people preaching practices was definitely aimed at John telling everyone what they ought to do,” McCartney explained. “Telling me, for instance, that I ought to go into business with Allen Klein. I just got fed up with being told what to do, so I wrote this song. You took your lucky break and broke it in two was me saying basically, ‘You’ve made this break. So, good luck with it.’ It was pretty mild. I didn’t really come out with any savagery.”

In Vincent P. Benitez’s book, The Words and Music of Paul McCartney, he alleges that the original lyric about “lucky breaks” read, Yokotook your lucky break and broke it in two, but Macca changed it. This version of the song, of course, would be considerably less mild than the final version that made it onto Ram.

The Musician Felt Like He Had To Push Back Against John Lennon

Tensions among the Fab Four were certainly at an all-time high in the months leading up to their official split. But Paul McCartney argued to Paul Muldoon that he had tried to make his peace with his friend and bandmate John Lennon (and his second wife, Yoko Ono), before the split. “I’d been able to accept Yoko in the studio, sitting on a blanket in front of my amp. I’d worked hard to come to terms with that. But then, when we broke up and everyone was now flailing around, John turned nasty. I don’t really understand why.”

One of those “nasty” moments, unsurprisingly, came in the form of a song that McCartney felt was a not-so-thinly veiled diss at him. “How Do You Sleep?” from Lennon’s second solo album, Imagine, had language that McCartney couldn’t help but feel was about him. “The line, the only thing you done was yesterday, was apparently Allen Klein’s suggestion, and John said, ‘Hey, great. Put that in.’ I can see the laughs they had doing it, and I had to work very hard not to take it too seriously.”

“At the back of my mind, I was thinking, ‘Wait a minute. All I ever did was “Yesterday”? I suppose that’s a funny pun. But all I ever did was “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Lady Madonna.”” McCartney mused that maybe his ex-friend was lobbing disses at him “because we grew up in Liverpool, where it was always good to get in the first punch of a fight.”

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