McCartney has no problem with Lennon having primary authorship on the Lennon songs. He just wishes that the Lennon estate would have the grace to allow him primary authorship on the songs that he wrote.
which i understand. and again, i wish someone of his stature and success (financial and sometimes artistic) would have the good grace to leave it alone. he gets to be a beatle for life. that's more important than setting a record most everyone knows anyway straight.
As for the "What a drag" statement, imagine this scenario: You have just learned that your primary collaborator and best friend has been murdered. You receive a phone call from a journalist to inform you and get an instant reaction that is then splashed into worldwide headlines. What are the odds that the first words out of your mouth will be something profound?
wouldn't ask for something profound, but would have appreciated something that sounded a little less hollow.
Glass houses, again.
really? what does that mean? that celebrities are above reproach? what glass house do i live in and, for that matter, what stone did i throw? it's interesting to me how paul mccartney seems to be a raw nerve to a few people here. i haven't really criticized him, i don't think. i've just said that i wish someone in his position would be a bit more an ambassador for a time (and phenomenon) in rock, a little less petty. 'yesterday' is well enough documented as his song. i think it's shortsighted of him to not realize that he'll look like a graverobber if he starts messing with a phrase as key to rock history as 'lennon/mccartney'. _________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Kurt Gottschalk wrote:
which i understand. and again, i wish someone of his stature and success (financial and sometimes artistic) would have the good grace to leave it alone. he gets to be a beatle for life. that's more important than setting a record most everyone knows anyway straight.
devil's advocate... but will everyone know this one hundred years from now? <shrug> --dk Yes. Beautiful, wonderful nature. Hear it sing to us: *snap* Yes. natURE.
on 12/19/02 9:37 AM, SUGAR in their vitamins? at yol@esophagus.com wrote:
On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Kurt Gottschalk wrote:
which i understand. and again, i wish someone of his stature and success (financial and sometimes artistic) would have the good grace to leave it alone. he gets to be a beatle for life. that's more important than setting a record most everyone knows anyway straight.
devil's advocate... but will everyone know this one hundred years from now?
In the case of the Beatles, quite probably. They were probably the first pop phenomenon to be subject to such intense documentation and wide appreciation. It's pretty easy to figure they'll stay in heavy rotation both musically and biograhpically for another century. Probably that question would be dicier if it was asked about the members of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet, whose members will very likely be largely buried by history. skip h
Probably that question would be dicier if it was asked about the members of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet, whose members will very likely be largely buried by history.
The first or second? The first will be remembered for Coltrane, Adderly, and Evans, IMHO. The second worked was a definite Gestalt group, but the names of Shorter and Hancock may endure. There is also the issue of the quartet dissolving into larger groups at the end of its life. Only time will tell on this matter, but jazz fans have a "strange" habit of knowing every sideman on a cut--magnified to ridiculous proportions by certain DJs. Zach
If Wayne & Herbie endure -- and they likely will -- it will probably be more as composers than as players. Just as Duke Ellington has come to be regarded for proactical purposes. There was a time when one would have said -- with surity -- the same things of the Duke Ellington bands that you said of Miles' great quintets. And Bubber Miley and Barney Bigard were considered revolutionary soloists playing revolutionary music on records that outsold anything the 60s Miles quintet ever released. But I don't know that many people who can tell when they're hearing Bigard vs, say, Jimmy Hamilton, which is like the difference between Wardell gray and Wayne Shorter. Jazz, unfortunately, has a tendancy to treat history as so many obsolete licks. Few people these days are all that aware of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, or Fatha Hines, but what they did was as brave at the time as anything Don Cherry ever did. Of course, even Cherry's stuff has become less known to the successive generations of trumpet players. Granted, there are isolated rediscoveries, but they're often based on something other than merit, as if anybody can really quantify merit in art. sh on 12/19/02 9:57 AM, Zachary Steiner at zsteiner@butler.edu wrote:
Probably that question would be dicier if it was asked about the members of the 1960s Miles Davis Quintet, whose members will very likely be largely buried by history.
The first or second? The first will be remembered for Coltrane, Adderly, and Evans, IMHO. The second worked was a definite Gestalt group, but the names of Shorter and Hancock may endure. There is also the issue of the quartet dissolving into larger groups at the end of its life. Only time will tell on this matter, but jazz fans have a "strange" habit of knowing every sideman on a cut--magnified to ridiculous proportions by certain DJs.
Zach
_______________________________________________ zorn-list mailing list zorn-list@mailman.xmission.com To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list
Here's the thing: as expressed here and by many people here and elsewhere, there's an expectation that rich people have to be better than the rest of us, and a feeling that we can endlessly slag them if they aren't. Is there some supposed income level (like a tax bracket) that, since McCartney has supposedly passed it, makes him ineligible to make a change to how history may remember him? Why is it go terribly important to others that he go to his grave with this issue unresolved? Could it possibly be more important that remote people get a sense of comfort from the mantra "Lennon/McCartney"? And similarly, we seem to be expecting a rich and famous person to say something profound or perhaps "less hollow" in a moment of grief. (I remember that, many years ago, when my best friend died, the first thing I said on the phone when I was told was "Holy shit!" Would I not have been allowed that expression had I been more famous?) Sure, as you say, you would have appreciated him saying something different -- but looking at this with reasonable compassion, one might allow him whatever expression he needed in that stunned moment. Here, again, is the expectation that just because someone is rich and famous, he is open to ridicule for being human. And that's the glass house: we all say things out of emotion and have personal issues that we might like to have changed. And each of us, compared to someone else, is rich and famous in some way.(Yes, we are: none of us, AFAIK, is living in a box on the street, and we all are writing words that are archived for international access, hopefully in perpetuity.) I doubt that any of us could live up to the level of constant scrutiny to which the famous are subjected. It's become all too common for people who have done a lifetime of good to be brought down by one statement or one incautious act. None of us is perfect; none of us can go our entire lives without some statement or action that could be amplified toward our destruction. To think that one can is either to be living an utterly unexamined life or to woefully underestimate the power of the overamplified razor-wire gossip fence that so much of our popular discourse has become. On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:55:33 +0000 "Kurt Gottschalk" <ecstasymule@hotmail.com> wrote:
McCartney has no problem with Lennon having primary authorship on the Lennon songs. He just wishes that the Lennon estate would have the grace to allow him primary authorship on the songs that he wrote.
which i understand. and again, i wish someone of his stature and success (financial and sometimes artistic) would have the good grace to leave it alone. he gets to be a beatle for life. that's more important than setting a record most everyone knows anyway straight.
As for the "What a drag" statement, imagine this scenario: You have just learned that your primary collaborator and best friend has been murdered. You receive a phone call from a journalist to inform you and get an instant reaction that is then splashed into worldwide headlines. What are the odds that the first words out of your mouth will be something profound?
wouldn't ask for something profound, but would have appreciated something that sounded a little less hollow.
Glass houses, again.
really? what does that mean? that celebrities are above reproach? what glass house do i live in and, for that matter, what stone did i throw? it's interesting to me how paul mccartney seems to be a raw nerve to a few people here. i haven't really criticized him, i don't think. i've just said that i wish someone in his position would be a bit more an ambassador for a time (and phenomenon) in rock, a little less petty. 'yesterday' is well enough documented as his song. i think it's shortsighted of him to not realize that he'll look like a graverobber if he starts messing with a phrase as key to rock history as 'lennon/mccartney'.
-- | jzitt@josephzitt.com http://www.josephzitt.com/ | | GPG: A4224EFA http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt/ | | == New book: Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems == | | Comma / Gray Code / VoiceWAVE Silence: the John Cage Discussion List |
Joseph wrote to zorn: JZ> Why is it go terribly important to others that he go to his grave JZ> with this issue unresolved? Could it possibly be more important that JZ> remote people get a sense of comfort from the mantra JZ> "Lennon/McCartney"? I think it's important to people because it functioned as some kind of statement at the time: that nobody creates in a vacuum, that collaborators are always collaborating, even when they're doing something "under their own steam". That's a larger statement than just "who should get the royalties", it's a statement about community; and it's a statement that resonates with what a large number of people who were around in the sixties considered the sixties to be "about". (And yeah, it's a statement like a marriage, and remember that it was Paul who described the breakup as a divorce.) So I think it looks, from out here, like a final disavowal of principle. Especially since he's waited until twenty years after the person he made the agreement with died to renege on it, just to make sure he's dead enough not to argue. -- Jim Flannery newgrange@talmanassociates.com When you can't give anything, you can also receive nothing. Through giving, you also receive. You can never stop giving. When you have nothing more to give, you're dead. -- Mustafa Tettey Addy np: Fugazi, _The Argument_ nr: Harry Mathews, _The Journalist_
On Thu, 19 Dec 2002 14:39:57 -0800 Jim Flannery <newgrange@talmanassociates.com> wrote:
Joseph wrote to zorn:
JZ> Why is it go terribly important to others that he go to his grave JZ> with this issue unresolved? Could it possibly be more important JZ> that remote people get a sense of comfort from the mantra JZ> "Lennon/McCartney"?
I think it's important to people because it functioned as some kind of statement at the time: that nobody creates in a vacuum, that collaborators are always collaborating, even when they're doing something "under their own steam". That's a larger statement than just "who should get the royalties", it's a statement about community; and it's a statement that resonates with what a large number of people who were around in the sixties considered the sixties to be "about". (And yeah, it's a statement like a marriage, and remember that it was Paul who described the breakup as a divorce.)
But remember that McCartney is *not* insisting that Lennon's name be dropped entirely.
So I think it looks, from out here, like a final disavowal of principle. Especially since he's waited until twenty years after the person he made the agreement with died to renege on it, just to make sure he's dead enough not to argue.
Note that this is, of course, not the first time that he has raised the issue. I suspect it's just the first time that the complaining about it has gotten loud enough for the press to start carping on it. -- | jzitt@josephzitt.com http://www.josephzitt.com/ | | GPG: A4224EFA http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt/ | | == New book: Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems == | | Comma / Gray Code / VoiceWAVE Silence: the John Cage Discussion List |
participants (6)
-
Jim Flannery -
Joseph Zitt -
Kurt Gottschalk -
skip Heller -
SUGAR in their vitamins? -
Zachary Steiner