And remember, he doesn't own the license to all Beatles songs, only the portion of the Beatles songs that were mostly his. So, you won't hear a lot of what you might want to hear.
Infinitesimally Infinitely minor footnote to all of this: when I was a paralegal, many (roughly 360!) moons ago, I was the guy made the list of song titles that was then filed to perfect the security interest on the loan Michael Jackson's shell corporation used to buy the the publishing rights.
(Yes, even then he
could have but no, he did not in fact use out-of-pocket-cash to buy them. And I have
no recollection of the company name, which was probably of the garden-shell-corporation-variety but I do remember that his name itself didn't appear anywhere in the loan documentation) ) About that project, the only thing worth mentioning is that during the couple of days it took to type them up (there were a
lot of songs including a lot of really obscure & strange crap, not just the Beatles' own stuff), all I kept thinking was how great a pity it was there was no way to transfer even a measly one or two of them to
my name.[sigh] Not that it would have meant early retirement or anything, but it certainly would have been a nice little yearly bonus.:biggrin:
ETA1:
Actually, the most memorable thing about it and this being AT and all, worth mentioning here, was really the fact that the word processor I typed the list on was running on a freaking DEC VaxCluster that, for some bizarre reason, the firm used as it's central computing system. I doubt it lasted all that long after I left to go to law school in 1988, since even then decentralization-via-PC was clearly on the horizon, but it
was fun to get to play with it a bit at the time. And the idiots running the thing (and they all really were, except the head of the department) had put virtually no security in place - the factory default passwords were mostly left in place and they were
extremely lax about user permissions - so I did actually get to "play" with it more than would ever have been possible even say, 2-3 years later...)
But back to our program... Music "licensing" - in the sense of being able to perform a piece in public - is automatic.
* And fwiw, he and Lennon (and then Yoko) have always owned the songwriter's rights
jointly by the way, by agreement between the two, that never changed. As for the publishing rights, which are neither here nor there in this context, McCartney doesn't own any of them (but then strictly speaking, he hasn't, almost from the start, when they were transferred to a corporate entity owned, iirc, in various percentages by the members of the band. At the moment, as far as I know, Michael Jackson's estate still owns them.
But none of any of that means he (or anyone else) couldn't perform it in concert. As to why he's not performing more of the Beatles stuff in concert, I dare say he just thinks more highly of his solo material than you do.
(
ETA2: From what little I've bothered to read over the years, all of the song-writing band members had " ego issues" to one extent or another about the fact that despite their later, individual work, what they all remained, and to this day obviously still remain, most widely known for was their Beatles' work, much of which, with no small justification, they considered a period of "professional adolescence", as it were...)
As for the OP's question, I don't know what to tell you. If you're a fan, I guess I say go for it unless it means eating ramen noodles for a month.
Personally, my first thought was that someone would have to pay
me at least some nominal amount to go to one of his concerts, though upon further reflection, I decided I'd probably pay as much as $10 to go, just for the sake of being able to say I had gone...
) But then, having been born in 1964, I'm not quite old enough to have been even a Beatlemania onlooker, but am obviously much too old to have been raised, later on, by "Beatlemaniacs" either. And while I do own and like several of their (mostly later) albums quite a bit, I frankly think their music on the whole simply hasn't aged all that well, in the scheme of things. It is and always will be "good music", but rather than being "timeless", it just kinda screams "mid 60s" at me and, well, that was a
long time ago...^_^ When I hear most of it these days, I feel the way I did when I was a kid and what were then called "Golden Oldies" came on the radio...
(
ETA3: And I must say, my occasionally-mildly-malicious sense of humor would just love to see McCartney's face if he read that last sentence. I don't know whether he'd laugh himself or be annoyed, but I
am kind of curious to know which it would be.[chuckle])
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* Google ASCAP and BMI for more information than you wanted to know or probably even knew existed.
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