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Hi i want to ask you about Paul jealousy towards John. Do u think his jealousy are same as John? Thats what i see from Get Back, Paul always get away from this. People always focus on John jealousy and mental psychology while Paul often being ignored or under explore. I just want hear something from you because your blog quite fascinating about Paul, makes him more human i think.

Yes, Paul is also a jealous guy, especially towards John. The legendary partnership of Lennon-McCartney is not only created by cooperation, but the mutual competitiveness that neither of them wanted to be behind each other in any way. It's just that Paul is the only one alive who can always say his songwriting partner was jealous of him whereas John, unfortunately, was busy being dead.

The rivalry is always there, I think, it didn't explode until the final time of the Beatles- when John brought Yoko into the studio. That's really pushed Paul's jealousy to a new level, he actually spends rest of his life competing with JohnandYoko, either about itself or its enormous impact.

The intimacy between John and Yoko bothered Paul most at the beginning when he just got dumped by his fiancee not long ago. It can be seen that he is jealous of John for diving into a romantic relationship so much as well as Yoko taking his creative partner away. He always considers himself as the only one who was desperate to keep the band together but he actually made the situation worse by bring several girlfriends into the studio to get his own back. He couldn't help doing it even if he knew how absurd this competition was. As George said, "That really helped put the nail in the coffin."

We all know what happened next: The Beatles was disintegrating while John and Yoko was at the height of their popularity as the high-profile anti-war couple who acted like messengers of peace with the famous slogan "Make love, no war." A succession of eye-catching peace activities during the Vietnam War made JohnandYoko a cultural iron and made John well known as an intellectual, a political figure, a true artist. After his death he was put on a pedestal not even his Beatles colleagues could reach. Till today, even the wife beater image can not weaken his influence, actually, it's part of it for being so famous that even the bad things are so widely known.

I don't like any of their peace events and works (including the song Imagine), nor the saint John people worship who has been reduced to a couple of labels. It's kind of sad to see such a funny man with extraordinary charm be remembered as a hyper serious person talking about world peace. But it can't change the fact that they are the main reasons that made John much more famous than other Beatles. Paul isn't content with it, he has always been trying hard to prove that he deserves the same praise. Those main public images of John are the ones Paul highlights in his interviews and books:

Intellectual

It's an old chestnut that Paul has always been arguing he isn't viewed as an intellectual like John. Obviously it's another competition with John as well his resentment towards stereotype he thinks caused it all. The lad who said "we ain't written no poetry" with his innocent huge eyes widely opened eventually become a bitter gammer babbling "John never had anything like my interest in literature." What a sad thing to see.

Artist

The one Paul seems to care about most - as a rough estimate, praising how artistic Paul is takes up half the length of Many Years From Now. Whether it's avant-garde loops, film, orchestra or painting, he's good at it.

PAUL: We used to have drawing competitions in the group where we'd sit down and say, 'Let's draw Mal,' and mine was often the likeness. I used to catch it. John's were often like crazy, because he couldn't actually draw like that. He did character drawing, he drew his little men, people with bulbous noses with hair coming out of them, bizarre character stuff, but he wasn't actually that good at representing something figuratively.

— Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now

(If I never saw his drawings I may buy that Paul is a realist painter more distinguished than John.)

In fact, it connects with the intellectual one, only in a more specific aspect. When it came to making loops, he didn't forget to say he and John was "wildly in reverse" on intellectual level:

PAUL: I was into a lot of those things, which was very strange because I was at the same time known as the cute Beatle, the ballad Beatle or whatever. I hate to think what I was known as. John was the cynical one, the wise Beatle, the intellectual. In fact at that time it was wildly in reverse.

— Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now

Political Figure

I don't like this one but it's crucial to John's public image. As he thought John would become "Martin Luther Lennon", Paul must be aware of that too.

He could be a manoeuvring swine, which no one ever realized. Now, since his death, he's become Martin Luther Lennon. But that really wasn't him either. He wasn't some sort of holy saint. He was still really a debunker.

— Paul McCartney, off the record conversation with Hunter Davies, 1981

Paul's rude remarks can be understandable consider what mental state he was in just five months after John been shot dead. But he doesn't seem to mind calling John "a manoeuvring swine", which can be found quoted in Many Years From Now - his official biography written in the 90s.

The others, much as they also loved him, regarded him as a 'manoeuvring swine', as Paul once put it.

— Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now

(George and Ringo: How did we get dragged into this?)

He already had a problem with Bagism back in Get Back session. And 30 years later, after praising his leadership in marijuana legalization protest for a whole section in Many Years From Now, the long journey of "Expanding the Field of Consciousness" end up with a comparison with Bagism and Imagine:

This was the first example of Paul's involvement in political lobbying, a skill which he would later apply with great success to saving his local hospital in Rye, Sussex, and in starting and funding the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. The Beatles signed and paid for the advertisement at his instigation. There was no high-profile posturing. He did not sit in a black bag or sing a song about it, just supported a traditional method of lobbying. In this instance quiet and effective work led to a change in the law - from which he himself benefited when police found pot plants growing on his Scottish farm in 1972.

— Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now

In a certain way it is really an intense relationship that both of them can make the other one extremely jealous if any inequality exists. In Paul's case, as a person so insecure and so afraid of losing face, his jealousy also fueled by the public. The competition continues after John's death because he isn't on Lennon's bandwagon of being one of the greatest men in the world. It sounds snobbish but it's hard not to believe this is true.