The ballad of Paul and Yoko

Think they buried the hatchet? Think again. The recent skirmish over songwriting credits was just the latest shot in a long-running war over John Lennon's legacy -- and the question of who was the coolest Beatle.

By Gilbert Garcia

Jan 27, 2003 | For much of the '70s, John Lennon liked to take afternoon tea in the Palm Court of New York's Plaza Hotel. But there was one part of the experience that rankled him a bit. Inevitably, the violin players at the Palm Court would recognize Lennon and attempt to serenade him with one of his most famous compositions. Unfortunately, the tune they always picked, "Yesterday," had been written and performed solely by Lennon's ex-collaborator, Paul McCartney.

Lennon had grown accustomed to this type of botched tribute. He realized that when the masses thought about the so-called Lennon-McCartney songbook, the first songs that sprang to mind -- "Yesterday," "Hey Jude," "Let It Be," "Michelle," "The Long and Winding Road" -- were usually McCartney creations. During his 1972 guest-hosting stint on the "Mike Douglas Show," Lennon explained to Douglas that McCartney's songs were often mistakenly attributed to him. Douglas, who'd just sung "Michelle" on the show, apologized for his own faux pas. A sheepish Lennon responded: "At least I wrote the middle eight on that one."

If Lennon was occasionally annoyed about getting credit for songs he didn't write, such mistakes have irritated McCartney for the opposite reason. Since Lennon's death in 1980, McCartney has fought an uphill battle to assert his place in history, often finding himself dismissed as a shallow hack, a Salieri to Lennon's Mozart, as Lennon's widow Yoko Ono cruelly put it. So even as McCartney's tunes continue to carry the load for the Beatles' back catalog (14 of the 27 chart-topping songs featured on the group's wildly successful "1" compilation were predominantly Paul's, and another four were at least half-written by him), little of the prestige reflects back on him.

At least that's the way McCartney seems to view things. That helps to explain why, for his recently released double-live CD, "Back in the U.S.," he flipped the songwriting billing on 19 Lennon-McCartney songs to read "McCartney-Lennon." McCartney's cheeky gambit has been met with a torrent of public venom from Yoko Ono's camp, including vague threats of legal action from Ono's attorney Peter Shukat, and a bewildering charge from her spokesman -- and longtime friend -- Elliott Mintz that McCartney has "kidnapped 'Eleanor Rigby,'" simply by placing his name ahead of Lennon's in the credits.

If McCartney's latest maneuver indicates a compulsive need to prove his importance to the Beatles, Ono's reaction is harder to fathom, and -- considering her own dubious history of handling songwriting credits -- loaded with hypocrisy.

For one thing, Ono and Shukat's avowed concern -- that Lennon is no longer here to speak for himself on who wrote which song -- looks like an attempt to play the martyr card for all it's worth. Ono has conveniently forgotten that McCartney made a similar credit switch in 1976, when he included five Beatles songs on his live record, "Wings Over America." Lennon was very much alive at the time, and neither he nor Yoko voiced a word of disapproval about it. If Lennon didn't object to the reversed billing at that time, why does Shukat find the same action "absolutely inappropriate" now?

Despite Shukat's early suggestion that he was "looking into" a possible lawsuit against McCartney, Ono would appear to have a flimsy case. While Beatles releases are required to carry the Lennon-McCartney designation, McCartney's Capitol contract allows him to reverse the credit for his solo releases. When contacted for this story, Shukat tersely responded: "I have nothing to say about it, sir."

But Gregory Victoroff, a Los Angeles entertainment attorney who represented Ono in the early '80s, contends that the legal issues are complex, and hinge on the precise language of the Beatles' publishing contract. "When you think about it, [McCartney's action] is a little disturbing to the extent that it creates an impression in consumers' minds that it's a different composition," Victoroff says. "It may be deceptive and actionable if it creates a false impression in the minds of consumers that the goods are different than they were before."

The famous Lennon-McCartney appellation grew out of an agreement that John and Paul made as Liverpool teenagers in the late '50s. At that point, they decided to establish a partnership in which both would share credit for every song they wrote, together or alone. But even within the Beatles' catalog, there has never been an absolute uniformity to the order of those credits. On the band's 1963 British debut album, "Please Please Me," all eight original songs -- including the McCartney concert staple "I Saw Her Standing There" -- were credited to "McCartney-Lennon."

Next Page: A mid-'70s schoolgirl: "Who are those three guys with Paul McCartney?"

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