Feb 23, 2025
Beatles in Colour → Paul McCartney in BLUE For @fleetn-crab85
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Beatles in Colour → Paul McCartney in BLUE For @fleetn-crab85
Well, when I thought, when, I thought When I thought you was my friend
-- 3 legs 1971
Always, always, my friend You'll be my only one
-- We Two 2026
hi! if i can ask, do you think the phrase "you can knock me down with a feather but you know its not allowed" in 3 Legs has a special meaning? to me it has always sounded a bit more personal than the rest of the song ... idk! thanks in advance!
Hi anon, you can certainly ask, and I’m glad you did! Don’t thank me too far in advance bc I’m not sure I have much to contribute here, but I’ll RAMble a bit ah ha HA
Okay, the first thing Paul invokes with that line is an idiom— you could’ve knocked me down with a feather. By definition an idiom carries a widely agreed-upon meaning, but the addition of “you know it’s not allowed” turns a broad sentiment into something that feels much more personal, like you mentioned. It’s almost childish, kind of petulant, an insistence that the addressee broke (or is threatening to break?) some implicit or explicit “rule.” To me, this seems like an acknowledgment of how much power the other person has, but it’s also a boundary. It’s Paul exerting some defiance against his own susceptibility to said power.
So Paul takes a general phrase and uses it to indicate a subjective woundedness or fragility, and pairs it with a stubborn and almost prideful protest. As a whole, it comes to something like: “What happened was so unexpected, so against the rules that structure our relationship, that you might wreck me with practically nothing right now. BUT you of all people should know you can’t actually do that— I’m not going to permit it to happen.”
That lyrical strategy — taking a generalized phrase or image and tilting it until it becomes kind of disorientingly personal — is very Paul. RAM is super interesting to me bc it leans hard into a vaugely nursery-rhymey, kind of absurdist atmosphere, but Paul uses these surreal little vignettes to express a lot of big, raw feelings.
There’s another illustration of this in the opening image of 3 Legs. We begin amidst a pastoral scene, walking a horse upon a hill— something external and observable. But it’s followed by a really intimate question: “When I lay me down / Will my lover love me still?” That storybook imagery sets us up for something simple and distant, and instead we’re thrown into a private fear of abandonment. The music emphasizes that mismatch, too. You’ve got this swaggering, kind of crooked tune, which only makes the anxiety underneath feel sharper once you pick up on it. It’s jarring in its contradiction.
The ultimate example is, of course, Too Many People. On paper it’s about “people” in general, but we know the song is aimed at one very particular You. The whole thing is like, “these ‘people’ are doing things I don’t like, YOU fucked up, and me? Well, I’m about to be balls-deep in Linda.” That’s the RAM special: say something vague, mean something specific, and then majorly (and unconvincingly) overcorrect— “as you can see, demonstrated by my horniness, I am totally fine.” Sure you are, buddy!
It’s no wonder John was so insistent that the album was riddled with coded messages directed at him. RAM absolutely feels as though it exists inside the j/p shared imaginative terrain, and listening to it closely can bring on a case of emotional whiplash. You’re bouncing between everyday rural scenes, “I love my wife and I love fucking her,” nonsense imagery, and these flashes of hurt that are vivid and specific. I’d be losing my shit trying to decipher the lyrics, too. (Actually…….is that happening to me right now?)
Anyway, all of this is to say that I think 3 Legs and RAM as a whole are totally stacked with implications, just layers upon layers of them. This was a pretty surface level reading, and I’m sure we could go a bit deeper, but I am of the opinion that the album had one very specific audience in mind. So without a full j/p language dictionary there’s probably no way to get a comprehensive understanding of all the intended meaning.
Well, when I fly, when I fly, when I fly When I fly above the clouds (When I fly above the maddening crowd) Oh, when I fly, when I fly, when I fly When I fly above the clouds (When I fly above the maddening crowd)
(3 Legs, 1971)
“Some of my most vivid dreams were about me being in a plane, flying over a certain part of Liverpool. It was when I was at school. The plane used to fly over time and time again, all the while going higher and higher. “There wasn’t anything special about the plane, and I don’t really remember anything about any other passengers. It was just the being up there. “For a long time I didn’t understand why I had this dream. It didn’t seem to make any sense. Then it dawned on me. It was probably a subconscious urge to get above people, or out of a rut, or something. I used to mess around at school, but I must have had ambition without realising it.
(John Lennon, interview with Alan Smith for New Musical Express: Beatle dreams – John, July 22nd, 1966)
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Apple Businessmen
Don’t Let Me Down
AKA Trust Issues
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I am fascinated by Lennon/McCartney. I am fascinated by John, I am fascinated by Paul, and I am fascinated by them together. And my fascination leads me to try and better understand the complex emotional dynamics that played between them. And I must admit, the more I unravel, the greater my fascination becomes. More than that, increased awareness only increases my love for these human beings.
Getting to know them – and, inadvertently, getting to better know myself – has truly been the most wonderful experience.
This series will both function as a personal attempt to understand them, their actions and motivations – which I find is facilitated by me having to expose it to a third party – and as an ode to their beautiful humanity; a public declaration of how much I appreciate and respect them, and an attempt at expanding, even more, your love for them too.
So please know that this is a labour of love. And that I’m working on a very simple principle:
Understanding leads to Love and Love leads to Understanding.
But let’s get to the specifics about this particular series of posts and the issue that it will explore.
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The Hypothesis
It was never a lack of love, but a lack of trust.
Specifically, a lack of trust in the other’s love.
With this, I mean to say that, if there was anything that compromised the Lennon/McCartney relationship, it was never a diminishing of the love they had for each other, but rather an exacerbation of the fear.
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But how are we going about exploring this issue? Through a lot of observation. Primarily, of their behaviours and their statements about them, which offers us different kinds of information.
When I try to make sense of something as complex and multifaceted as, say, interpersonal dynamics, some strategies become very helpful:
For one, I try to identify underlying patterns and deconstruct them to their barest, simplest forms.
Secondly, I remember that these mechanisms are present for an evolutionary, biological reason.
Let me tell you, bringing biology into it really helps to clear out the seemingly nebulous nature of human emotion.
But you might be (rightly) dubious about trying to understand the whole by simply breaking it down into parts. After all, we all know that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. But for me, I find that in order to really get the full picture, I have to ally both the simplistic and holistic. And in the end, like in a symphony, the true beauty arises from seeing the kaleidoscope of possible interactions between these different components.
But let’s start with the second strategy and built up from that to the first.
Animals have evolved a great motivator: the Reward System.
It’s a neat little mechanism that leads us to increase contact with beneficial stimuli and avoid potentially harmful stimuli, in the interest of our own well-being or the continuation of the species.
So Pleasure is just a signal that says, “this stimulus is good, let’s try it again!”
And Pain is the alarm that alerts us that something is wrong, “this thing is probably bad for us, let’s try to seek relief from it (and consequently, get pleasure) and learn to avoid it next time.”
So we have “positive” emotions and feelings, those that are attractive or “good”, and “negative” emotions or feelings, those that we are generally averse to and try to escape.
Because the subject we’ll be exploring is the Trust Issues, there will be a greater focus on these “negative” emotions as motivators.
It doesn’t mean that they weren’t equally motivated by pleasure; as we’ve seen, even seeking relief from pain is chasing pleasure in itself. But because I’m specifically trying to figure out what went wrong, I’m afraid we’re going to have to dwell in these more adverse waters.
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The choice in title is no coincidence. In fact, this specific expression – don’t let me down – is a plea they repeated throughout a lot of their songs:
‘You Can’t Do That’ (1964): So please listen to me, if you wanna stay mine, I can’t help my feelings, I’ll go out of my mind, I’m gonna let you down and leave you flat
‘Hey Jude’ (1968): Hey Jude, don’t let me down
‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (1969): And if somebody loved me like she do me, Oh, she do me, yes, she does. Don’t let me down!
‘Oh! Darling’ (1969): Oh! Darling, please believe me, I’ll never let you down!
‘3 Legs’ (1970): When I thought you was my friend but you let me down, put my heart around the bend
‘Tomorrow’ (1970): Oh baby, don’t let me down tomorrow, holding hands we both abandon sorrow.
‘The Other Me’ (1982): I want to be the kind of me that doesn’t let you down as a rule
So glaring was the pattern, even Paul remarked on it:
PAUL: There’s a story. There’s another one – ‘Don’t Let Me Down’. “Oh darling, I’ll never let you down.” Like we’re doing—
JOHN: Yeah. It’s like you and me are lovers.
PAUL: [reserved] Yeah.
— Get Back Sessions (24 January 1969).
But what does it mean? What were they begging for or promising?
By definition, to let someone down is to disappoint, to fail to be there for someone as they had hoped, to fall short of expectations.
And it’s this fear of being let down that is at the core of a lot of their problems.
They didn’t trust the other to be there for them because they were terrified of the pain they would feel if/when he wasn’t.
Because what is fear if not the memory of pain?
We seem to have evolved fear as a defence mechanism against suffering, a pre-emptive signal against that which would harm us.
But pain itself is nothing more than the signalling of a stimulus, an alarm alerting us to a certain situation so that we can best choose how to deal with it. The way people handle the existence of that alarm, however, is interesting.
John just lets the alarm ring. He lets himself be overwhelmed by it and all the frustration that it brings, alternatively getting down and depressed or resentful and furious. All this, I suspect, because he is convinced that he himself can’t turn it off, but someone or something out there probably can. John has a recurring problem with acknowledging his own agency. After all, it’s arduous to have to make conscious decisions and take responsibility for their consequences. It’s easier to try a find an entity that we can give the reigns to; someone who’ll take care of us, but that we can also blame when things go wrong. So John’s strategy to dealing with the alarm of pain is to look for something/someone that can shut it down for him.
Paul simply ignores that the alarm is ringing (while it remains ringing all the same). He feels it’s his responsibility alone to move past the ringing and carry on. But, truthfully, he doesn’t like the feeling of those “negative” emotions. He’d much rather stay on “pleasure mode” all the time! So rather than acknowledge his unpleasant feelings and having to go through the nasty business of facing them, he’d much rather deny their existence in the first place (and, hopefully, exorcise them through more unconscious and productive means, such as creating music). Also, much in the same way he doesn’t want to hear it himself, Paul doesn’t want others to know that there is an alarm ringing inside him. And he will take protective measures not to have anything set it off again.
As we’ve seen, these protective measures often translate into fear, and specific to this series, lack of trust.
It is my opinion that their basic fear is the same, but that they reacted to it completely differently. And the way they responded to it was so opposite, that it caused a complete breakdown in communication.
I’ll be attempting to examine this issue further in a series of posts, focusing on either specific stages in their lives or on certain facets of their relationship. To that end, I’ll be updating the section under the cut with links to the various analysis.
