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The John Lennon song Paul McCartney was most proud of: “That’s a really nice part”

2025-02-17 11:00:00
8

The Beatles were never looking to be the most proficient musicians when they started out. They were the definition of a garage rock band when George Martin first saw the potential for them to be great and looking through their albums; it’s easy to see them learning how to become more complex musicians in real-time. While Martin was the one showing them the ropes half the time, each one of them was progressing by leaps and bounds in their own ways, and once John Lennon started hitting benchmarks in his discography, it didn’t everyone long to take notice. Granted, Lennon was always self-deprecating when it came to his own guitar playing. He was still one of the finest guitar players in Liverpool when he started. Still, outside of the rhythmic strumming he did on many of their classic hits, he was never one to showboat with crazy lead playing or pull out the kind of tricky licks that Eric Clapton was doing in the late 1960s. There was still room for him to grow in his own way, though. ‘All My Loving’ might not have the most complicated chord structure, but it’s insanely hard to keep up with Lennon’s strumming without practising. And as much as ‘The End’ encapsulated everything that made the group’s guitar chops so revered, Lennon might actually be the victor in that guitar duel for how much he punishes his instrument. As the band retreated to India to practice transcendental meditation, it was no longer about making anything too caustic. Their search for inner peace helped them write songs with a more mellow groove behind them, and that meant Lennon taking a few cues from Donovan when he started looking at fingerpicking. While not a lot of Beatles songs incorporated fingerstyle guitar, the pattern that Lennon got down during The White Album era is fantastic, eventually working the technique into songs like ‘Dear Prudence’. When listening to ‘Julia’, though, there are no other guitars for him to hide behind, only featuring his voice and guitar, and he sings his touching tribute to his late mother. McCartney had already been trying to test himself with fingerpicking on ‘Blackbird’ and stretch himself on the piano with ‘Martha My Dear’, but he admitted being blown away at how Lennon mastered the fingerstyle pattern, saying, “John was the only one who actually stuck at it and learned it. If you listen to ‘Julia’, he’s playing properly with fingerpicking on that. I was always quite proud of the lad. I think he just had a friend who showed him, and that’s a really nice part on ‘Julia’.” Even if Macca’s fingerpicking was a little more primitive when working on tracks like ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ and ‘Junk’ from his first solo album, Lennon was committed to that technique for years. After the band had called it a day, he was still partial to what Donovan had shown him, eventually using it to unpack his own identity on tracks like ‘Look At Me’ off of Plastic Ono Band. Lennon never claimed to be the most diligent student when going to art college, but this is the perfect example of him honing in on his craft if he was committed enough to it. That didn’t mean that he had a better knack for fingerpicking, but if he wanted to hear a certain sound coming out of his guitar, he was going to move the Earth if it meant getting a track right.

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