Part of the magic of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting partnership was their ability to blend the former’s avant-garde experimentation with the latter’s commercial sensibilities, and few singles demonstrate this ability — for better or worse — as the 1967 A-side “Hello, Goodbye” and its B-side, “I Am the Walrus”.
Unsurprisingly to anyone with even a vague knowledge of The Beatles, McCartney penned “Hello, Goodbye”, and Lennon wrote “I Am the Walrus”. Both songs are indicative of who each musician was as a songwriter. McCartney explored Gemini-esque themes of duality amidst a pop background, Lennon composed an LSD-fueled ode to Lewis Carroll poetry with nonsense syllables and shocking imagery.
Also unsurprising is the fact that Lennon wanted “I Am the Walrus” to be the A-side to the single. Ultimately, McCartney and George Martin won the debate, and Lennon’s psychedelic ode to the “egg man” was relegated to the B-side. McCartney and Martin were correct in their assumption that “Hello, Goodbye” would perform better on the charts worldwide, though “I Am the Walrus” beat out its A-side in Belgium.
One of the most recurring issues in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s collaborative relationship was McCartney’s insistence on prioritizing sellability over oddity. On the one hand, The Beatles were a pop band. But on the other hand, they were riding high in the peak of psychedelic creativity in the late 1960s. Why not stretch their legs a little bit? As Lennon recalled to David Sheff in one of his final interviews, “Hello, Goodbye” smelled of McCartney from “a mile away.
“Doesn’t it?” Lennon added. “An attempt to write a single. It wasn’t a great piece. The best bit was the end, which we all ad-libbed in the studio, where I played the piano.”
Still, McCartney has stood by The Beatles’ A-side both from a creative and moral perspective. Despite its pop sensibilities, McCartney said “Hello, Goodbye” explored “a deep theme of the universe” in its expansion on duality. “Man-woman, black-white, high-low, right-wrong, up-down, hello-goodbye,” McCartney explained, per Kenneth Womack’s The Beatles Encyclopedia. “It’s just a song of duality with me advocating the more positive. You say goodbye. I say hello. You say stop. I say go. I was advocating the more positive side of the duality, and I still do to this day.”
In another elaborate explanation of the song that was born from a word game of trading opposites with Brian Epstein’s assistant, Alistair Taylor, McCartney said of the track in 1967, “It’s a song about everything and nothing. If you have black, you have to have white. That’s the amazing thing about life” (via A Hard Day’s Write).
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