McCartney Tells Yoko Ono to Chill Over Credits
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Let it be, said Paul McCartney to Yoko Ono. McCartney, in a lengthy statement released on Wednesday, rejected suggestions that the widow of his late partner John Lennon might have a court case because he reversed the credits on Beatles songs on his latest album from the traditional “Lennon-McCartney” to “by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.”
McCartney’s new album “Back In The U.S. Live 2002,” lists 19 classic Beatles songs that way and McCartney said, “The truth is that this is much ado about nothing and there is no need for anybody to get their knickers in a twist.”
While some press reports have indicated that Ono was considering litigation over the matter, her spokesman Elliot Mintz told Reuters: “This is not an issue involving a legal matter…. She is secure in the knowledge that the agreement that has been in place for the past 40 years stands,” he said.
Mintz said that in the past McCartney has asked Ono to reverse the order of songwriting credit and that she has repeatedly rejected his requests on the grounds that a “deal is a deal.” Mintz said McCartney did not contact Ono for his most recent CD.
But, “regardless of what occurred on his last CD, Yoko is confident that the original Lennon/McCartney agreement is going to stand in future matters of this nature and this matter does not involve litigation,” he said.
‘RATHER SILLY DISPUTE’
In his statement, McCartney said he was not worried about Ono’s displeasure but thought it was time to make the facts clear over this “long-running and rather silly dispute.”
McCartney has long complained that Lennon, for instance, had no input in the hit “Yesterday,” which McCartney wrote.
McCartney said Lennon accurately divided credit for each of their songs in a Playboy magazine article and that he and Lennon were in complete agreement as to who had done what. McCartney himself spelled out the exact writing credits for Barry Miles’s book “Many Years From Now.”
McCartney said Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Lennon independently decided in Epstein’s London office that the billing would be “songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney”
“I said ‘What about McCartney/Lennon?’ They said ‘We’ll do this for now and we can change it around to be fair at any point in the future,”‘ McCartney said.
“(Being) reassured by this, I let the matter go and our songs became known as Lennon/McCartney songs, a fact I was perfectly happy about,” he said, but recalled years later when he made a request to Ono to reverse the order for “Yesterday” for the “Beatles Anthology.”
“At first she said yes, but then she rang back a couple of hours later and reversed her decision,” McCartney said.
“I personally don’t see any harm in John’s songs such as ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Help’ being labeled ‘by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’ and my songs such as ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ being labeled ‘by Paul McCartney and John Lennon’,” he said.
McCartney said it was time for people like Ono to be a little generous and “not have a problem with his suggestion of how to simply map out for those who do not know who wrote which of the songs.”
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