The 1971 concert Paul McCartney was offended by: “I’m not going to do that”
It was bound to take a lot for something to genuinely piss off Paul McCartney.
The man has looked chipper all his life, and even when he wasn’t working on the easiest albums in the world, he always seemed ready to take on any obstacle that came his way whenever he worked on his next project. But even if the rest of The Beatles weren’t willing to work with him anymore, he felt personally attacked more than a few times when they tried to make some inroads back into his good graces all over again.
You have to remember that these guys had been together through thick and thin for the better part of a decade, so even if they were going to break up, it wasn’t going to be quiet. If they had chosen not to speak to each other for the rest of their lives, that would have hurt them even more, but Macca probably wasn’t ready for the onslaught of songs that were getting aimed at him all the while.
‘How Do You Sleep’ is definitely the most damning critique of what he was doing, but aside from him throwing a few shots towards John Lennon, the fact that Ringo Starr was even clowning him on ‘Back Off Boogaloo’ had to hurt a bit. Starr was the peacekeeper, and if he didn’t have a friendly back-and-forth with him, you know that there were some bridges that must have been permanently burned.
But even if McCartney’s problems had more to do with business than anything, his relationship with George Harrison cut a little bit deeper. He didn’t want to become one of the third wheels of the band when McCartney asked him to join the group, and since his musical older brother had been treating him like an afterthought during a lot of their later sessions, there’s a good chance that Harrison wouldn’t have wanted to play with Macca ever again.
Of course, there are a few ways around those sticky situations, though, and McCartney did at least get a small invite when Harrison was putting together the Concert for Bangladesh. The guitarist’s heart was clearly in the right place, and there were more than a few times when he was willing to forget about all the tension for a night, but McCartney wasn’t ready to forgive everything that his bandmates had done.
If anything, he was downright offended that Harrison even had the gall to ask him about such a thing, saying, “There were a lot of things that went down then, most of which I’ve forgotten now. I really felt annoyed – ‘I’m not going to do that if he won’t bloody let me out of my contract.’ Something like that.”
“For years, there had been problems as to why the other three felt they couldn’t just rip up our partnership agreement.”
Paul McCartney
All of that seems petty now that Harrison is long gone, but the fact that all of the business decisions went down like that, McCartney had a right to be upset. He was being painted as the villain before the rest of the band knew Allen Klein was a massive scoundrel, but given that he found it in his heart to play with the band again during Anthology, there were at least a few wounds that had mended themselves.
Because even if Macca said no to Harrison’s massive charity festival, he could still find time for Live Aid once John Lennon passed away. He knew that music was what mattered above everything else in the industry, and no amount of squabbling was worth the amount of time that they had with each other.
