i literally have a draft ready for this exact question, it was too dumb of a hill to die on to be worth posting so i just left it... until now, here we go!
John probably liked Obladi-Oblada
- They had fun writing it in India
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da was born on the steps of one of the low slung cottages where the entourage lived. One day, remembers Saltzman, he was passing by the cottage when he saw Lennon and McCartney sitting on the front steps and strumming the tune on their acoustic guitars. He ran back, picked up the camera and took pictures of the two with a pensive-looking Starr sitting on the side, from outside a wicket gate. Saltzman remembers the two were singing the first two lines of the song "over and over again, going fast and slow, having fun". "That's the riff we have," McCartney told Saltzman, "but no words yet".
George and John had been selected as Prudence’s “team buddies,” a designation comparable to court jesters, appointed to rescue her from a near-catatonic state. “One night when I was meditating, George and John came into my room with their guitars, singing ‘Ob la di ob la da,’ ” she told her sister, Mia, although it seems unlikely they’d play one of Paul’s songs. “Another time John, Paul, and George came in singing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ the whole song!”
2. They had fun recording it (at first)
“I remember being in the studio with George and Ringo, struggling with an acoustic version of the song. John was late for the session but when he arrived he bounced in, apologizing, in a very good mood. He sat down at the piano and instantly played the blue-beat-style intro. We were very pleased with his fresh attitude. It turned us on and turned the whole song around. He and I worked hard on the vocals and I remember the two of us in the studio having a whale of a time.”
George happened to be absent on the first night the Beatles started running down “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” so Chris was the de facto producer. Initially, we all enjoyed doing the track because of its lighthearted up-tempo feel. Even Lennon got into it—at first, anyway—because it gave him a chance to clown around with his silly voices. But then it started going on and on, dragging out over three nights. Paul wasn’t happy with the rhythm of the track or with the way his vocal lay. He was after a Jamaican reggae feel and he wasn’t satisfied that the band had nailed it. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that even Paul didn’t quite know how to lock it in rhythmically, and so he was getting pretty frustrated with himself.
Here, There and Everywhere - Geoff Emerick, Howard Massey
Paul was something of a perfectionist by this point, but he also had to have been upset about the way John had been acting. I couldn’t help but think that perhaps that had something to do with why he was so fussy about the recording of the song—maybe he did that just to annoy John, just to teach him a lesson. Throughout the preceding weeks I had noticed that John’s behavior was becoming increasingly erratic—his mood swings were more severe, and they were occurring more frequently. That was definitely the case with the recording of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” One moment he’d be into it, acting the fool and doing his fake Jamaican patois, the next minute he’d be sulking and grumbling about how the song was more of Paul’s “granny music shit.” You never knew exactly where you stood with Lennon at any given time, but things were definitely getting worse.
Here, There and Everywhere - Geoff Emerick, Howard Massey
Howard: John didn’t like this song Obladi-oblada, am I correct?
Paul: Who says?! No, John did like that song.
Howard: He liked it?
Paul: I think so yeah.
Paul: Well, what happened was, me, George and Ringo were kind of slaving over this and John wasn’t there, he was late again. So were not getting anywhere with it, we’re thinking oh god it’s not happening. And John comes in the studio and says what are you doing, what’s happening, what are we working on? We say Obladi, he goes “Oh, that one!”. He goes over to the piano and goes [mimes opening piano] and we fall in behind him and go “yes!”.
Howard: And isn’t that great when someone comes in with a fresh set of ears and just goes okay I got it
Paul: It’s a great little memory, yeah
3. John kept listening to and singing it after it was recorded
One night John tuned in to Tom Snyder's late-night talk show, which had as its guests Paul and Linda McCartney. John, amused and intrigued, noted that Linda was in a particularly ornery mood. But he admitted that Paul, whom he termed superficial, appeared to be flourishing. After the show John heard from McCartney, who phoned the Dakota to talk about music.
As soon as he retired to his bedroom that night, John pulled out several old Beatles records and even played some McCartney tunes, including "Obla-di Obla-da" and "Eleanor Rigby." Despite his often volatile feelings toward McCartney, theirs was the kind of deep connection for which John continuously yearned. It was a void no one else would ever fill. Yet Lennon never put his stubborn pride aside to repair the once-treasured friendship.
3.31 OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA
Paul’s Jamaican influenced bass line leads off this slightly off-color (and substantially different) version of a song which originally appeared on “The Beatles.” John does most of the singing here, perhaps as a response to Paul’s having taken the lead vocal on his song “I’m So Tired” a few moments earlier. Someone (perhaps George Martin) pounds out the rhythm on a tambourine throughout. Everyone is obviously having a great time, and John and Paul laugh their way through the performance. It’s interesting that John and Paul sing the same parody lyric simultaneously at one point; presumably they'd done this sort of thing before. It’s also interesting to note that John’s enthusiasm for this number is in marked contrast to his post-Beatle opinion of it, which was consistently negative. As the performance ends, Paul utters some bitter words about entertainer Jimmy Scott who publically claimed that Paul ‘stole’ “ob-la-di, ob-la-da” from him (the phrase, not the song). The final line of the performance is a direct reference to Marmalade’s recording which added a reference to jam to the song as a pun on their name.
24.10 GET BACK / OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA
This starts out as a half-baked version of “Get Back.” Paul, however, interjects the bass riff from “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” which prompts the others to play that song. John sings the first verse (imitating Paul’s voice), as Paul sings backup. This messy hybrid very quickly quits, and The Beatles move on to more serious rehearsal.
3.42 OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA
John sings a single line of parody lyric.
Get Back, the Unauthorized Chronicles of the Let It Be Disaster (Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighhardt)
4. Negativity and being critical of each other's songs at this time was greatly exacerbated by their relationship problems
I saw the grimaces flicker across the faces of George Harrison and Ringo, and I’m quite sure that none of us missed the sheer look of disgust on John’s—this was a McCartney composition that Lennon openly and vocally detested. These days, the two former close friends and songwriting partners expressed little but disdain for each other’s contributions; in fact, it seemed that whenever one would even bother to offer a suggestion to the other, it would be rejected out of hand, even if it was a good one. Paul and John weren’t having legitimate musical differences; instead, they seemed to be saying, “I don’t like what you’re suggesting because I don’t like you.” They weren’t necessarily angry at each other, but you could see that both were highly frustrated, and Yoko’s constant presence certainly wasn’t helping matters any. As a result, within what had once been a close-knit group, there was no longer any sense of team or unity; any camaraderie that had once been there had now simply vanished.
Here, There and Everywhere - Geoff Emerick, Howard Massey
JOHN: It’s not that we didn’t like each other. I’ve compared it to a marriage a million times, and I hope it’s… understandable for people that aren’t married, or any relationship. It was a long relationship. It started many many years before the American public – or the British public, for that matter – knew us. Paul and I were together since he was fifteen and I was sixteen. Now, it’s a long long time that the four of us have been together. And what happened was through boredom, and through just the too much of everything, and Epstein was dead, and people were bothering us with business… The whole pressure of it finally got to us.
So like people do when they’re together, they start picking on each other. It was like, “It’s because of you, you got the tambourine wrong, that my whole life is a misery!” You know, it became petty. But the manifestations were on each other, because we were the only ones we had.
