Paul McCartney: John's whole life was a cry for help

Paul McCartney sits down with Billboard to reveal intimate details about The Beatles number one hits.

Paul McCartney on The Beatles song 'Help!':
Lennon later said, "I was fat and depressed, and I was crying out for help," though he also masked his misery with the song's chirpy tempo. Adds McCartney, "He didn't say, 'I'm now fat and I'm feeling miserable.' He said, 'When I was younger, so much younger than today.' In other words, he blustered his way through. We all felt the same way. But looking back on it, John was always looking for help. He had [a paranoia] that people died when he was around: His father left home when John was 3, the uncle he lived with died later, then his mother died. I think John's whole life was a cry for help."

On 'I Want to Hold Your Hand':
"The big story about 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' " recalls McCartney, "I'd said to Brian [Epstein, the band's manager], 'We don't want to go to America until we have a No. 1 record.' A lot of British artists went there and came back with the audience having been slightly underwhelmed by them. I said, 'We don't want to be like that. If we go, we want to go on top.' "

Hey Jude was mistaken to be anti-semitic:
Later, McCartney changed "Jules" to "Jude." "I'd heard the name in a musical --Carousel, I think: 'Jude is dead' or something like that. I hadn't realized 'Jude' means 'Jew' [in German]. That caused some confusion, and a man got quite angry with me over that." So angry that after McCartney and a few friends painted "HEY JUDE" on the highly visible window of the Apple Boutique on London's Baker Street in 1968, the passerby mistook the phrase for anti-Semitic graffiti and smashed the glass with a soda siphon.