He Looks So Good. My God. That Is All

This is beautiful lol. Paul has good taste

butt-gate 

Lol! To be fair a group hug after throwing a brick through the window would make for a great story. I’m just protective of my Johnny. My husband says I collect broken people. Even at the pound I have to rescue the runt if the litter who looks the saddest. Hence why he love John and fight the good fight for him as even though he did so many annoying friends someone has to give him unconditional love you know? Yes I’m sad

Wholesome moment! ❤️ love to see it

(From McCartney by Christopher Sandford)

Why was it John’s fault? He paid her the equivalent of a million dollars in the divorce and gave her half the proceeds from the house at Weybridge and of course child support for Julian. Was he supposed to pay fof her and her various husbands throughout the rest of her life? Cyn struggled with cash because of poor business decisions throughout her life including numerous failed restaurants and other ventures. That isn’t John’s fault. It also isn’t John’s fault he married the daughter of a banker who made solid business decisions that greatly increased his fortunes in the 1970s. At the point he divorced Cyn he actually didn’t have as much money as you would think due to contracts Brian Epstein signed that gave most of the money away for merchandising, etc. Cyn got 50 percent of his fortune at the time as she was entitled to. She was not a victim

I just realized something.

Yoko never wrote an expose about John. Cyn, May Pang and Pete Shotton did, but Yoko didn't.

exposes kind of rub me the wrong way. This is someone who trusted you with everything, and then you turn around and write a tell-all about them. As a fan I love them, but I'd feel so betrayed if a friend wrote one about me.

Pattie Boyd, George Martin and Pete Best wrote books, but they were more about themselves and their connection to the boys than a fictionalized version of the past.

Ivan Vaughn, Jimmie Nicol, Jane Asher, Peter Asher and Maureen Starkey never did. They didn't even write autobiographies from what I can find.

I think that all speaks volumes.

Especially Yoko. No matter what you think of her, that shows a strong sense of character and respect that we just don't talk about enough when it comes to her.

I am not sure John was a baby but he was a softie. He is missed

the softest guy i’ve ever met

I somehow have the feeling if John was alive and didn’t turn up at the Hall of Fame for whatever personal reason, people would have no problem calling him petty and immature. The media had no problem throwing him under the bus for years. Once again the daily reminder Paul at a human being and it’s ok to criticise him. And yeah taking more than his cut makes him the asshole. These weren’t his solo songs, this was music he made as part of a group. It doesn’t matter how much cash he thought he earned, he can’t pull a surprised pikachu face when he gets sued.

This is probably a weird question so apologies, but do you think Paul should have gone to the Beatles Hall of Fame award show? I know he didn't and I've seen it described as the petulant act of a child and understandable given the legal situation and hurt feelings. I would love to know what you thought of it?

Not a weird question at all!

I don’t think Paul should ever do anything he doesn’t want, to be honest. He’s earned being as petty as he wants. Not that I think that’s what he was doing, but even if he was, so what? I wouldn’t want to hang out with three people that were all suing me either. I’m sure he felt it was The Breakup 2.0 and I can’t imagine how shitty that must have felt. Also, this should have been such a special moment for him and then they sued him right before and ruined it. I doubt that was on purpose (the timing) but… I can see how it might have felt pointed.

I don’t know if George’s speech should be taken at face value. Personally it seems a little… disingenuous of him to suggest he’s surprised. But, perhaps he genuinely assumed Paul would always just roll over and put a brave face on/wasn’t capable of being hurt by that sort of thing/there was no reason for him to take it personally because really they were suing EMI/Capitol and not him.

Do I think Paul should have gone to make himself/The Beatles look better? Maybe? They had sort of been suing each other and everyone else for nearly two decades by that point, so perhaps they should have all just carried on like it was business as usual and that would have stopped some of the backlash. But it is also possible that people would have slagged him off for daring to be there when he was shitting all over their legacy for ‘stealing their money’.

I guess the other question is if Paul was trying to get one over on them with the royalties and therefore should have been there (or not been there) to apologise. I mean, if Capitol was just giving him more out of its own profits and it wasn’t taking anything from the others, he certainly had less to feel bad about. Of course I’m sure they all thought (and John almost certainly would have felt) there was a gentleman’s agreement not to take more. But, who can say. Paul was making a lot of money for Capitol and obviously it’s his right to negotiate whatever he wanted. I do get why people would feel that a) he didn’t need more money and b) The Beatles should be a completely separate thing and it’s almost petty to ask for a bigger cut of that because he (arguably) can’t deserve more of it now than he did before. I say arguably because there’s something to the idea that Paul being as successful as he was, was keeping the Beatles more in the public eye and therefore selling more. But how you figure out THAT I have no idea because John dying did as much as anything for that, and obviously Ringo and George released music too (along with other things).

But in summation, Paul often couldn’t win in the eyes of the press so it was almost certainly just better for him to do what made him personally happiest.

Always happy to hear other’s thoughts though.

lennon and mccartney, a collection of pictures

Interesting he made this assessment when it was only Paul he got alone time with. If he only spent time with Paul one to one, why assume he’s more clever than John? As clever, fair enough. But more clever? Based on zero time with John? This is why I hate all this Paul revisionism going on. He reality is that few people had access to John in relation to Paul due to his introvert tendencies and difficulty trusting people and therefore few people really knew John well. So they put John down in relation to Paul because Paul flattered them more by giving them the time. Total stupidity

Their separate personalities are as clearly defined as characters in a fairy tale: John the clever one, Paul the sweet one, George the quiet one and Ringo the holy fool. As these public images are rooted in a private reality, there seems little point in meeting the Beatles; social confrontation can only confirm the known and simple truth. Yet I was curious to talk to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, because it is as songwriters rather than as performers that the Beatles interest me most. When I met them both together, however, they gave an impenetrable performance - a double act, with John facetiously punning on clichés and Paul obligingly feeding him. The jokes were good, but no better than Beatle jokes on the cinema or television screens. Later, I had the chance of spending two hours alone with Paul at Brian Epstein's office. He was ready to talk about his music, and did so with the minimum of suspicion or self-consciousness. The sweet, in their desire to please, can be even more articulate than the clever.

'Close-Up: Paul McCartney as Songwriter', Francis Wyndham (London Life, 4th December 1965)

they must be separated.....they're just too annoying together..... 😫

I agree! The reality is that all these authors have bias but if it’s in favour of Paul McCartney it’s ok because he’s seen as being victimised by the rock journalists of an earlier era. Erin Torkelson Weber has a quote I’ve often seen here that just because something came later it’s not necessarily untrue. But the important thing to keep in mind is it’s not necessarily true either. Paul McCartney has a huge advantage over John Lennon in that when he tells his story, the emotions of the situation have settled which makes him seem like a more rational source, unlike John who was still working through his emotions in the 70s as the events were still in recent memory. Paul has also had time to think about how to make his story palatable to today’s audiences where times have changed, which John never had given he died 40 years ago. He also has his legacy to preserve and of course will twist things to his advantage as who is going to challenge him? Yoko is ill and Sean doesn’t know the full story as he was only 5 when his dad died. I just think people need to think critically about this and realise that just because this is the latest version of events doesn’t necessarily make it true. The truth is always something in between

“Some of those who eulogised Lennon seemingly could not do so without denigrating McCartney, Harrison and Starr or devaluing their contributions to the Beatles. “He [Lennon] stood for a mixture of tough minded realism… wit and intellect. Paul on the other hand was a pretty boy.” The most famous example of this came from the Village Voice’s Christgau, one of America’s most powerful rock critics. In a piece shortly following Lennon’s death, Christgau referred to the three remaining Beatles as “hacks” and blamed their refusal to accept Ono into the band for the breakup. He also repeated a number of misconceptions about Lennon that, while widely accepted, were untrue. This included praising Lennon, the only middle-class born Beatle, as a “working-class” hero and declaring that Lennon had always been the only artistic, avant-garde Beatle because “the others just didn’t have the stuff.” His obituary of Lennon stated that the wrong Beatle had been killed. “Why is it always Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon? Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?”

Erin Torkelson Weber, The Beatles and the Historians

Dear friend! We already know his thoughts on Coming up from a few interviews and the same for Too Many People. I don’t entirely buy that Call Me Back Again is a McLennon song. But Dear Friend is 100 percent about John and given it came during a period of infighting, I want to know what John truly felt hearing that for the first time. Can I get Paul reacting to I Know, I Know as a bonus? And both of them reacting to I Don’t Know (Johnny, Johnny)?

Beatle (John) Hypotheticals #11

If you could be a fly on the wall when John listens to a song for the first time, which one of the following songs would you choose and why?

Too Many People

Dear Friend

Call Me Back Again

Coming Up

If you could choose another song, that isn’t listed above, which one would you choose and why?