Hilarious To See Paul Fans So Triggered By One Guy Within The Whole Beatles Fandom Who Might Actually

The comments on this picture are hilarious. Paul has nowhere to lean because they’ve been asked to pose that way. I’m all for deep dive analysis but sometimes the simplest explanation is the real explanation. And they all supported each other. It wasn’t just one way.

The Beatles

Finally an acknowledgment that the Eastman dynamic was pretty toxic to the Beatles too, not just Klein. So many people think Paul was offering sone kind of reasonable alternative to Klein when in reality his management offer was his in laws who had no desire to represent the other Beatles and their interests. Klein may have been a bad choice but in my opinion the Eastmans would have been a disaster for the other Beatles in terms of representation

wait re your tags what do you mean by wives of two members having more influence. on the group? or on those two members?

Linda and Yoko were basically the other two Beatles for the remainder of 1969. Everyone talks about Klein and the fact he offered Yoko a successful career being the main reason John stuck with him at all, but Linda was the one who brought her dad into it, and the clash of titans between Eastman vs. Klein was just as big a reason the group broke up as the psychosexual crossfire of Lennon/McCartney, possibly an even bigger one. I’m not saying Linda was scheming in any way, but obviously her father was one of the best lawyers in American entertainment business, and her boyfriend was the biggest rockstar on the planet who was in a shitstorm of legal/money problems. Of course the two would meet, and Linda soon went from black sheep of the family to Golden Daughter.

But as the year went on, the JohnandYokoandKlein monster grew stronger against John Eastman’s aggressive and selfish business tactics. Sure, Klein and the others tried to pressure Paul into going with him, but Eastman wasn’t even remotely interested in taking on the rest of the band (was listening to a 71 Paul interview, and he said his father-in-law wouldn’t have managed the others if they paid him, and Paul still went with him. Hm). Yoko obviously tried to meddle in as much as she could, and John helped her do so; Linda found herself tangled in a web of shit that she originally wasn’t planning to get into, but she’s no pushover and so she went to meetings and was her husband’s only source of strength for the rest of these cockfights (to her own detriment as well).

My point was: where do George and Ringo fit into his? John didn’t turn to anyone in the studio for help except his wife, and Paul confided in no one else except his own spouse and her family of lawyers (who were managing Paul Solo from the start). George’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer that same year too, it was a hard time for him and he had no real voice (and I think patience) to deal with the whole Eastman vs. Klein debacle. George and Ringo went with John and Klein because they were the ones actually giving them what they wanted, not the Eastman-McCartneys.

I can’t believe the nerve of some people. Littlelambdrgnfly’s writing is fire.

That other anon can piss off. The beatles shagged their way through Hamburg, its not like they were sexually immature in anyway?? plus the issue with age gaps is power imbalance which absolutely does not exist in a fanfic about men who are 50 years older than you irl. Please don't get disheartened to write the sequel just because one stupid anon wanted to make you feel bad over nothing (also cause, while I'm really looking forward to the sequel to the sum of them and any other fics you may write, the rise and fall of john lennon is my favourite and the things you've planned for the sequel are so hot!!)

Thank you, that’s pretty much how I felt about writing them at those ages! I mean, I feel like it’d be one thing if I was writing about, say, the kids from Stranger Things, but it’s different when it’s the Beatles because they weren’t inexperienced or sexually immature (except for George lol), they were fully grown men by that point. And it’s not like there are actual young people getting exploited... And also, yeah, I’ve seen way too many friends and even my younger sister get involved with people way older than them to know how weird it is when someone in their late teens or early 20s gets involved with someone in their late 30s or 40s.

I’d be less disheartened if this was the only message I got like this. I know I’m older than a lot of people on this website, but damn, it’s a 60 year old fandom and it’s not like you automatically stop liking what you like once you hit a certain age. I don’t like being thought of as a creep, but tbh, I thought if I was going to get hate, it’d be for the fetish and not my age. If I do a sequel, I may just post it here or maybe make a Patreon, I’m not sure but that’s a long ways off if it happens. Thank you for your nice words though <3

♪ And you know what it's worth ♪

John Lennon, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards from The Dirty Mac performing Yer Blues (1968)

@dumbcloud And now the DILF:John Edition.

Yes, I’m aware most of these are from the same couple of days but he looked good on those days

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.

September 2, 1980 ..

Reposting because John looks so good in this picture. I don’t even care about the anecdote. This is a beautiful man.

“John and I went hitchhiking. George and I did it a couple of times too. It was a way to get a holiday. Maybe our parents booked holidays, but we wouldn’t have known how to. So we would head out, just the two of us, with our guitars. John was older, but I was in on the decision about where we might go. He’d got a hundred pounds from his uncle, who was a dentist in Edinburgh, for his twenty-first birthday, and we decided we’d hitchhike to Spain by way of Paris. We’d start over on the other side of a particular bridge because that’s where all of the long-distance lorries started. We’d wear little bowler hats to get their attention! When we got the lift, we sat together; we’d experience the lorry driver together. We knew what it was like to go on the cross-channel ferry; we knew what it was like to try and hang out in Paris. We would walk for miles around the city, sit in bars near Rue des Anglais, visit Montmartre and the Folies Bergère. We felt like we were fully paid-up existentialists and could write a novel from what we learnt in a week there, so we never did make it to Spain. We’d been together so much that if you had a question, we would both pretty much come up with the same answer.”

Paul McCartney, “Ticket to Ride” from The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present (2021)

It’s nice to see a music critic put into words how I have felt as some of these excerpts from the book have come out. As a John fan, I’ve had to scroll past people calling John an evil wifebeater on my dash, people diagnosing him with a variety of mental illnesses despite no diagnosis in his lifetime and then diagnosing people around him with mental health issues just for associating with him. They then use these mental health issues he may have had to discredit his thoughts and feelings or even worse infantilise him, particularly in relation to Paul. I haven’t called these things out as everyone has a right to their opinions. But when a few people have called out Paul for some of the hurtful things he has said regarding John, they have been shouted down, blocked or told they have no right to their opinions and aren’t being team players in the fandom. I think that due to Paul having a tough treatment after John’s death, there’s a need to put Paul on a pedestal as he is seen as needing defending and consequently either minimise John’s accomplishments or grossly highlight all of John’s flaws (while conveniently ignoring those of the other Beatles.) Paul, like john, is human and it’s should be ok to point out elements of his behaviour you find problematic and by the way many of John fans completely are aware of both John’s flaws and Paul’s wonderful points too. If we call out the Jean jackets who put John on a pedestal and treat him like a God surely we shouldn’t be encouraging that behaviour for the fans of the other Beatles. Ted talk over

McCartney, With and Without Lennon

In “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” Paul McCartney and the poet Paul Muldoon present the words to 154 of the former Beatle’s songs.

  Posting this, because it’s a pretty balanced review. The reviews have been generally pretty favourable, but they do (and rightly so) call out Paul for his (intentional?) inconsistency and revisionism. I’m not too familiar with the author, but a quick wikipedia search says he has been on the musicology/ music critique writing scene since the 70s. Some will probably say “oh he’s just one of those male rock journalists who favoured John and therefore his criticism of Paul is invalid”. But I think he makes some really excellent points about the flawed elements of this book. 

  “The best of the songs collected here (“For No One,” “She’s Leaving Home,” “When Winter Comes,” “On My Way to Work” and quite a few more) reflect eyes fixed on the small niceties and curiosities of everyday life and a mind that bounces freely, taking childlike pleasure in that freedom. “The Lyrics” makes clear that McCartney has written on a high level long past his Beatles years, and even the weakest lyrics in the books have a character all their own: a feeling of giddy playfulness and unguarded experimentation. They’re a joy to read because they exude the joy their maker took in their making.” “Over and over, McCartney shows how deeply he is steeped in literary history and how much his output as a songwriter has in common with the works of the likes of Dickens and Shakespeare. “John never had anything like my interest in literature,” he announces at the top of his commentary on “The End,” before pivoting to a mini-lecture on the couplet as a form. “When you think about it, it’s been the workhorse of poetry in English right the way through. Chaucer, Pope, Wilfred Owen.” Apropos of “Come and Get It,” the trifle he wrote and produced for Badfinger, McCartney notes, “When you’re writing for an audience — as Shakespeare did, or Dickens, whose serialized chapters were read to the public — there’s that need to pull people in.” Aaaah … we realize: Paul really is a word man, the more literary and cerebral Beatle.”  “As one would expect from the pop star who posed with his baby tucked in his coat on his farm for his first post-Beatles album, McCartney talks with ardor and respect for his parents, his extended family in Liverpool, and the traditional values of hearth and home in general. He attributes the buoyant positivity of his music to the happiness in his family life and, by extension, ascribes the bite and cynicism that distinguishes much of Lennon’s work to the domestic upheaval in John’s early years. To McCartney, a dark view of humanity is a failing and must be a mark of suffering, rather than an attribute of thought.”  “While pronouncing his love for Lennon as a longtime friend and creative partner, Paul is pretty rough on him at points in “The Lyrics.” His main crime is one of omission, passing on opportunities to point out Lennon’s signature contributions to songs they wrote collaboratively, such as “A Day in the Life.” In the context of conflicts between the two of them, McCartney describes Lennon as “stupid” or an “idiot.” Yes, we all know that McCartney can’t help defining himself in relation to Lennon. Still, as he shows convincingly throughout “The Lyrics,” you don’t have to make the other guy out to be an idiot to prove that you’re a genius.   

Yes thank you for the love of God! I also love how he casually wrote his Lyrics book and didn’t even mention John’s contributions to A Day in the Life (which are glaringly obvious) yet people still seem to think he’s the paragon of truth when it comes to who does what on any Beatles song. I know he does the same for George’s contributions as well.

Sometimes I think Paul needs to be reminded that it wasn't

Paul McCartney and the Beatles.

He doesn't own the legacy.

And I'm sure Pattie would love to call him on certain things but chooses not to.