Who’s the guy threatening to ‘finish’ Ringo and Maureen, who was warning me on the phone two weeks ago? Who said he’d ‘get us’ whatever the cost? As I’ve said before-have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” He then slagged off McCartney’s father-in-law. He sent an open letter to McCartney via the music mag Melody Maker in which he wrote that McCartney had said to him, “‘Ringo and George are going to break you John’. Lennon also continued to be a loose cannon in the press. The front featured McCartney holding a ram by horns, so for Imagine Lennon inserted a postcard in which he holds a pig by the ears, grinning. Ram’s back cover included the subtle snapshot of one beetle screwing another. By being lyrically just vague enough and played within an arresting sound scape, “Too Many People” transcends the backdrop that inspired it. But it is so overtly about McCartney that its subject can’t be separated from the performance, making it difficult to enjoy beyond the context of Lennon’s character assassination. Lennon would counter on his next album with “How Do You Sleep,” which would also be magnificently played and produced. McCartney whips himself into a war dance, dancing around Hugh McCracken’s guitar pyrotechnics with falsetto shrieks and whoops, banging the floor tom drum. When Lennon heard it, did he have an inkling that he would only have one more number one record in his lifetime? It perfectly captures the eerie foreboding when partners are divorcing, with one wondering privately if he is making a mistake even while trying to scare the other that he will regret it. that they will never be able to measure up in the future without McCartney. No doubt it is meant to instill the unease in Lennon and Co. The sense of physical space in the recording conjures the dread of walking into a deserted mausoleum in a horror film, underscoring the “lucky break” taunt. The performance opens with a malevolent groan that could either be an effects-treated guitar, a harmonium, or far-off horns. Originally it was “Yoko took your lucky break and broke it in two,” but he changed “Yoko” to “you.” McCartney vows that he’s not going to hold back his feelings anymore, though he did temper the opening line. (Although, truth be told, Harrison was the biggest seller at the moment, so the set up benefited McCartney in 1971.) And all of them were trying to grab McCartney’s cake: under the groups’ contract, all the profits of each ex-Beatles’ albums go to the company and then the total is divided among them. Not only was Lennon preachy politically, Harrison was religiously preachy to the max as well. Weberman, even took a break from harassing Dylan to stage a protest in front of Linda’s father’s Park Avenue residence on Christmas Eve 1970.11 McCartney also slams Lennon for sinking into heroin with Ono, losing weight, and just eating cake, as junkies have a notorious sweet tooth. The lyrics read as the anti-Beatles version of Starr’s “Early 1970.” McCartney is getting pushed around by Lennon going underground and letting himself be a mouthpiece for the Communist party radicals. No song by McCartney captures the loneliness and anger of the Beatles’ feud as intensely as “Too Many People,” in which all his vitriol spewed out like an infected zit.
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