You Gave Me Something I Understand

In the great Lennon v. McCartney debate I choose...both? (With a straw vote for Harrison.) I was introduced to the Beatles by my friend David Rigberg in 1979, and he definitely favored Paul, and at first so did I. With his blunt politics and scream therapy, John scared us music nerds a bit. It also happened to be a lot easier to be a McCartney fan at the time, what with Wings going full steam and Lennon at home baking bread. Back to the Egg was out, and I quite liked it (in retrospect I like it even more, not least because a song like "Spin It On" shows that Paul had clearly heard a bit of punk and said, "I'll have a go").

A year later, of course, some reversal of sympathy was all but inevitable: Paul put out the wildly uneven McCartney II and John returned with the triumphant Double Fantasy, which had been out not even a month when he was shot dead at age 40. And while, on balance, my ex-Beatles-album tastes still run to Paul (and George), I remain a staunch Lennon-and-McCartney fan when it comes to their Beatles output. It's not an original view, but it seems self-evident to me that they were never better than when they were in a group together, both writing together and particularly writing apart, daring each other to go further, traveling as far as possible from each other but still clearly using the other as a foil, a measuring stick. "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane" might be the ultimate expression of that polarity, in which they found their truest selves in diametric opposition.

This dialogue continued, albeit fitfully, into their solo careers, most notably with John's needlessly vicious "How Do You Sleep at Night" and more poignantly, posthumously, with Paul's anguished "Riding to Vanity Fair." In both those cases, though, the dialogue was in the lyrics. I would argue, as many have done before, that McCartney's most overt, if unconscious, Lennon tribute was the classic "Let Me Roll It," the memorable closer of Side A of the 1973 Wings album Band on the Run. It is among the simplest melodies and harmonies, not to mention lyrics, he ever wrote—these span, respectively, 5 notes (with a 6th thrown in once as an ornament), 4 chords, and 55 words. The impressively snarling guitar figure that is the song's main hook, over a hypnotically repetitive, almost drone-like progression of E major and F-sharp minor, is relatively straightforward:

The doo-wop 6/8 feel, the double-tracked vocals drenched in reverb—it could almost fit on Lennon's 1975 covers album Rock 'n' Roll. I don't mean to suggest either that John's musical palette was more rudimentary than Paul's (though you could certainly make that argument), or that what makes "Let Me Roll It" great is how uncharacteristic it is of the poised, perfectionist melodist McCartney is (in)famous for being. But there's no denying the sense of liberation, of release, the song seems steeped in, as if by returning to the basics of the early rock 'n' roll he and John first loved and learned and sought to emulate, Paul has settled back into a deeply familiar, even familial groove, at play with childlike abandon as well as an adult confidence, like a grown man revisiting his childhood hometown, strutting down its high street again, reliving his glory days.

This also happens to be a love song about the inability to express love, with an adorably awkward yet somehow entirely satisfying metaphor at its center: "I can't tell you how I feel/My heart is like a wheel/Let me roll it to you." How does that physiology work exactly? The song's surging power answers the question. "Let Me Roll It" is somehow exactly the sound of a heart rolling, radiating love outward. And even if it was unconscious I can't help but think that some of that outbound affection was aimed in John's direction.

The song is a maze of Beatles intertextuality, it turns out: McCartney borrowed the title from Harrison's "I'd Have You Anytime," in which the rolling image is tied to the heart but oddly enough not to a wheel shape; and though I'm hard-pressed to hear it, Nick DeRiso claims that Lennon put the "Let Me Roll It" riff into his instrumental "Beef Jerky." Clearly these lads were no more done with each other, even after 1970, than we are with them.

This cover by Fiona Apple is definitely worth your time.