96. Getting Better

It's time to take 'Lennon/McCartney' seriously, and literally

There are so many ways to get at the John and Paul relationship. You can focus on Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. You can talk about them writing ‘eyeball to eyeball.’ Or talk about them sniping at each other in How Do You Sleep and Too Many People. There’s the interplay in We Can Work It Out. Or the one in A Day in the Life.¹ But I think, in a strange way, this song might be the perfect entry point.

It certainly played a big role in my own burgeoning understanding of the separate personalities when I first listened to it as a preteen. There’s something perfect about the small, completely self-contained illustration of their difference in:

Paul: I’ve got to admit it’s getting better!
John: (Can’t get no worse)
Paul: A little better all the time

Even as a kid, I understood that these represented radically different philosophies on life. Paul, the optimist, looking to the future with wide eyes. John, the realist, putting it all into context.

And as a tiny little morality play, it really does illustrate something profound about each of them. But there’s also so much more going on.

Because the reality is that each of these needs the other one to work. They aren’t opposite or contradictory approaches; they are two aspects of the same face which exist in relation to the other. Paul’s sunny enthusiasm is cut by John’s wit, while John’s cynicism is elevated by Paul’s open heart. Each is the tonic to the other.

And that plays out across the whole song, as well. Because this is ostensibly a ‘Paul song,’ as far as these things go. But it really is actually what it says on the tin: a “Lennon/McCartney song.”

There was a time when people took the ‘Lennon/McCartney’ label literally, and believed that these songs really were all co-writes. There was even some truth to it in the very early days. But quickly, people caught on to the reality that most songs were actually primarily (or even exclusively) composed by one, and that ‘Lennon/McCartney’ was a label, not a description of reality.

But I think we’ve taken that knowledge too far, fixating on ‘Paul songs’ and ‘John songs’ and in doing so treating the partnership as if it were a simply an illusion. And therefore aligning ourselves with John, the iconoclast, who wants to puncture the myths and live in reality. When, in fact, some of the myths really are true. And some of the stories that we tell deserve to be told, even if they’re a bit fanciful.

Which is to say: it’s true that Getting Better is a ‘Paul song,’ in the sense that he came up with the idea and the tune, sings the lead vocal, organizing the recording and production, and all that. But it’s also true that it’s a ‘John and Paul song’ because they really did write it together. Which we know because Hunter Davies (who was in the process of writing their official biography) was actually there to watch it happen.

And it’s not just the little ‘can’t get no worse’ refrain. It’s the whole song.

• Rather famously, Getting Better includes the line: “I used to be cruel to my woman / I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.” That’s clearly John’s voice, being channeled through Paul.²

• And some of the other lines about being an ‘angry young man’ feel more like an interpolation of John and Paul than a straightforward description of either of their childhoods. Paul wasn’t really angry so much as he was extremely willful and resistant to authority (especially teachers who were “filling him up with their rules”).

• I also think the use of dialect “Me used to be angry young man / Me hiding me head in the sand” feels like something that neither would have written alone, but which reflects the very specific form of songwriting that you get from in-the-room improvisation.

Bringing it all together, you get a song about growing up, where the ‘growing’ is powerfully shaped by those around you. If life is getting better, it’s because I have good friends around me who help me to become my best self. And who I in turn also help along their own path.

By 1967, John and Paul were already started to splinter. John had clearly started to lose himself and was increasingly lost at sea. Paul might not have named it in precisely those terms, but also clearly seemed to understand that “John and Paul” was probably never going to be the same as it had been when they toured as the Nerk Twins, or when they wrote ‘eyeball to eyeball,’ or when they cried “because there wasn't any reason left to keep it all inside.” But that didn’t mean there wasn’t room left for them to still share something special.

1. Indeed, Ian Leslie’s wonderful John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs goes through these, and many others (including Getting Better).

2. And supplemented by George’s contribution: a tamboura overdub for this verse, which adds a layer of ominous electricity to the proceedings.