-
sponsorship
This week's New York Times Magazine has an epic preview of The Beatles: Rock Band, the video game in which you'll be able to pound plastic instruments to the beat of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." In the article, we learn that all four of the Beatles' "shareholders"—Paul, Ringo, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono—gave their blessings to the project in 2008. But another big name was missing: Michael Jackson. Didn't M.J. also have to sign off on the project, given his estimated $500 million stake in the Beatles catalog?
No. Jackson wasn't involved in the decision to license the 45 Beatles songs in Rock Band. That negotiation was handled by Sony/ATV Publishing, the company created to manage the Beatles' catalog after Jackson sold half of his stake to Sony in 1995. While it's conceivable that Jackson could have personally nixed the licensing, he was largely a silent partner in Sony/ATV, leaving the day-to-day operations up to company executives. The fact that Jackson had already heavily mortgaged his stake in the company to pay off debts would have made any effort to kill such a lucrative deal improbable.
Jackson didn't really "own" the Beatles' catalog, as has been widely reported. What M.J. did control at the time of his death was 50 percent of the composition rights to about 250 songs written by Lennon and McCartney. While these songs add up to nearly the entire Beatles catalog, Jackson's rights don't apply to the actual recording of, say, "Revolution" as it appeared on The White Album; they covered only the composition—that particular combination of notes and lyrics that make up the song "Revolution." (The rights to the recordings are owned by EMI Records.) These rights meant M.J. got royalties if anyone wanted to perform or re-record the song, play it on the radio, or use it in a movie, advertisement or video game. (Paul McCartney recently complained about having to pay up every time he played "Hey Jude" on tour.) Harmonix, the company behind The Beatles: Rock Band, needed those composition rights in order for the songs to appear in a video game, but it also needed rights to the actual recordings—not to mention the Beatles' name and image.
-
sponsorship
If any musician has had the opportunity to hone his onstage banter to a razored gleam, it's Paul McCartney—he of the iconic, '60s-era press conference rapport (goofy and absurd with the Beatles where Dylan was aloof and eviscerating); he of the decades of interviews; he of the 40 years of looking out at crowds and filling the silence between songs with words.
And so it was a surprise, during the first hour of his set last night at Boston's Fenway Park, to find the interstitials so ... Unfocused? Rambling? Noncommittal? He told a long story about Jimi Hendrix that went nowhere. He told a story about screaming teen fans. "By the way," he noted, pointing at video screens towering behind him, "those big images back there are from the new Beatles Rock Band thing," punctuating this with a twiddle of the thumbs, as though that's a gesture anyone makes when they're playing Rock Band.
There was a sense of distraction or doddering, and it carried over to the first handful of songs, augmented by a blow-dried, Sunset Strip-looking backup band, which tried to overcompensate with volume and wanky guitar fireworks for what it couldn't deliver in genuine thrill. (The Boston police on hand could have done a great public service by ordering them to step away from "Day In The Life," lest they smother it.) Fenway is home to the Green Monster, but for a while it seemed as though this night was brought to us by that other green monster, the one that contractually obligates you, for instance, to hit the road in support of a new high-ticket video game bearing your likeness.
Then McCartney broke out a ukelele for "Something" and everything started to change. As Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters famously proved in The Jerk, the emotive properties of that midget guitar shouldn't be underestimated. In McCartney's hands, the performance was dinky, tender, surprising, playful: the first great point of the night, the one where McCartney seemed to come off autopilot (even if he does the same bit at the same moment on every night of this tour).
In between more blustery, not ineffective runs through beefed-up beefy hits like "Back in the USSR," "Get Back," and "Helter Skelter," there were other moments of weird intimacy: a solo acoustic rendition of the exquisitely sweet "Blackbird," prefaced by a few revelatory (to me, at least) words about the song's roots in the civil rights era: "I wrote the song imagining a young black girl and the troubles she went through." It was well-meaning, a bit cringe-worthy, and might have torn the wings off a lesser song.
It was true what they say on the Internet. He does look like an aging lesbian. But when things took off, he played with the winningness and verve of a lesbian at least half his age.