The years between 1971 and 1973 represent the most documented silence in rock history. Two men who had written Yesterday, A Day in the Life, Blackbird, Let It Be, and approximately two hundred other songs together — men who had spent the most formative decade of their lives in a creative proximity so intense it borders on merger — and they were not speaking. Not privately. Not occasionally. Not through intermediaries. They had stopped.
The public record of what Lennon said about McCartney during this period is extensive and painful. The Rolling Stone interview of December 1970 — conducted by Jann Wenner in the raw weeks after the Beatles’ legal dissolution — contains assessments of McCartney’s music, character, and creative worth that are remarkable in their directness. How Do You Sleep?, released on Imagine in 1971, is a song addressed to McCartney that calls him a pretty face whose music means nothing, that says the sound he makes is muzak to his ears, that reduces twenty years of partnership to a dismissal.
McCartney received all of this publicly. He did not respond in kind publicly. He has said in interviews across decades that he made a decision, early in the separation, that engaging Lennon’s attacks directly would produce more noise than resolution — that Lennon in that period was in a state that made rational engagement impossible, and that the most dignified response was to make music and let the music speak.
What he has said less publicly, and what has emerged through the Get Back documentary and through recent interviews in the context of his biography with Paul Du Noyer, is what the silence cost him personally. McCartney has described the period following the Beatles’ breakup as the most psychologically difficult of his life — more difficult than Linda’s death, more difficult than any subsequent loss — because it combined professional grief with the specific grief of losing the person who understood him most completely.
He has explained the three-year absence of direct communication in terms that are more mundane and more human than the mythology suggests. There were lawyers. There were business disputes of enormous financial complexity. There was the Klein situation — Allen Klein, the manager Lennon, Harrison, and Starr had installed over McCartney’s objections, whose presence made any direct conversation between McCartney and the other Beatles pass through a filter of legal and financial interest. McCartney did not trust Klein. He had said so before Klein was hired and had been outvoted. The resulting litigation made informal contact feel like a minefield.
But underneath the legal explanation is something simpler. McCartney has said, in recent years with the directness that age permits, that he did not know what to say. That the How Do You Sleep? moment — hearing a song on the radio in which his oldest friend told the world that he was nothing — produced a grief that did not have a clean vocabulary. That the appropriate response to How Do You Sleep? was not another song. It was silence, and then eventually, painstakingly, the resumption of something that never fully recovered what it had been but that became, in its final form, genuine.
They spoke by phone toward the end of Lennon’s life. McCartney has said the last years of intermittent contact were warmer than anything in the decade following the breakup. He has said he is glad they found their way back to something, even if it was not everything.
The phone call the night before Lennon was killed went unanswered. McCartney has never stopped thinking about what he would have said.