‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’: The Beatles song that showed Paul McCartney’s “brotherly” side | CPT PPP Coverage

“It was very romantic,” Lennon later recalled. “It’s all in the song, ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’, if you want to know how it happened, it’s in there. Gibraltar was like a little sunny dream. I couldn’t find a white suit – I had sort if off-white corduroy trousers and a white jacket. Yoko had all white on.”

When he had finished the song, Lennon wanted to record it straight away. There was just one problem: half of the band wasn’t available. After the stressful sessions that made him briefly quit the band, George Harrison was busy cooling off on vacation. Ringo Starr was off filming The Magic Christian, the film that caused the Get Back sessions to be on a strict deadline. Lennon was unfazed and decided to take the song to his only bandmate that was in London: Paul McCartney.

“John was in an impatient mood so I was happy to help,” McCartney remembered. “It’s quite a good song; it has always surprised me how with just the two of us on it, it ended up sounding like The Beatles.”

By 1969, the creative partnership between Lennon and McCartney had changed significantly. Whereas the two had once written material in close collaboration, their musical partnership was now largely created separately. Still, McCartney was ready to hop on the drums for the basic track of ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, overdubbing bass and piano while Lennon handled guitars. The session was remarkably quick, with the pair recording and mixing the track in one night.

“‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ was a very fast session,” engineer Geoff Emerick recalled. “It was a really good record too, helped by Paul’s great drumming and the speed in which they did it all.” For producer George Martin, the song was a highlight, if not a bittersweet sign of things to come.

“I enjoyed working with John and Yoko on ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’,” Martin later said. “It was just the two of them with Paul. When you think about it, in a funny kind of way it was the beginning of their own label, and their own way of recording. It was hardly a Beatle track. It was a kind of thin end of the wedge, as far as they were concerned. John had already mentally left the group anyway, and I think that was just the beginning of it all.”

For their part, neither Harrison nor Starr seemed too put out that they weren’t included in the song’s recording. “‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’ only had Paul – of the other Beatles – on it but that was OK,” Starr explained in Anthology. “‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?’ was just Paul and me, and it went out as a Beatle track too. We had no problems with that. There’s good drums on ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’, too.”

“I didn’t mind not being on the record, because it was none of my business,” Harrison concurred. “If it had been ‘The Ballad of John, George and Yoko’, then I would have been on it.” For Ono, the song proved to be one of the final moments of true collaboration between Lennon and McCartney. “Paul knew that people were being nasty to John, and he just wanted to make it well for him,” Ono would explain later. “Paul has a very brotherly side to him.”