Rolling Stone has shared an exclusive clip from Paul McCartney’s new podcast, McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. The excerpt comes from the episode dedicated to his solo track “Here Today,” which airs Wednesday, November 8. In the episode, McCartney recalls his first meeting with John Lennon long before they formed The Beatles.
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The song, which was included on his 1982 album Tug of War—his first release since Lennon’s death—imagines a dialogue between the two of them. While discussing it with the podcast’s host, Paul Muldoon—who collaborated with McCartney on the book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present—McCartney recalled how Lennon immediately seemed like his counterpart when they first met.
“The first time I ever saw John Lennon, he got on the bus…he was like this slightly older guy with this sort of rocker hairdo—lots of grease—black jacket, sideburns, sideboards as we call them,” McCartney said. “And I just remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s a cool guy. No idea who he is.’”
“And what would happen is when I would talk to people, they’d sort of say, ‘What are your hobbies? What do you like to do?’” he continued. “And then inevitably, I’d say, ‘Well, I’ve written a couple of songs.’ And they’d go, ‘Oh.’ And we’d pass that pie, and we’d carry on a conversation. But I met John, [and] we were just chatting, and ‘Well, I’ve written a couple of songs.’ And he said, ‘Well, so have I.’ So that was like a full stop. So then it was like, ‘Let me hear what you’ve done and I’ll show you what I’ve done.’ So that started us getting together.
“I think I was possibly the first person he’d met who’d said that to him. So that was the start of our relationship. We decided to get together, normally at my house, and my dad always left his pipe in the drawer, so we would take tea, fill the pipe with it, and smoke it.”
Check out McCartney: A Life in Lyrics.
