Listen to This Song

Beatles’ Northern Songs/Michael Jackson misadventures are a lesson for all who want to protect their creative works

BY REID CREAGER

Sixty years ago this month, Paul McCartney and John Lennon met with a music publisher, an attorney and Beatles manager Brian Epstein at Epstein’s Liverpool home. Little did McCartney and Lennon realize they were getting a ticket to ride replete with misery.

When the Beatles songwriting team signed an agreement on the morning of Feb. 22, 1963, accepting part ownership in a new company called Northern Songs, it marked the formal beginning of an intellectual property odyssey and wicked education for a group of naive young men. Their journey can help educate anyone interested in protecting creative rights today.

Bruce Berman, chairman of the Center for Intellectual Property Understanding and CEO of Brody Berman Associates, reminds us that “The music publishing difficulties of the Beatles and other recording artists are well documented. Bad early publishing deals have been standard practice in the music industry since before rock ‘n’ roll.”

Of course, the Beatles likely would have become rich no matter who handled their business affairs, or how. But the fact that the most successful music group of all time was victimized, its members often making uninformed assumptions and choices, makes for a compelling cautionary tale.

Only a Northern Song

The Northern Songs deal seemed logical, even attractive, at the time: The fledgling group fancied better promotion of their records after their first 45, “Love Me Do,” stalled in part due to lack of publicity by EMI‘s Ardmore & Beechwood publishing company.

Music publisher Dick James—a former singer once produced by now-Beatles producer George Martin—seemed a good choice to not only get better play for the group’s second 45, “Please Please Me,” but to get major artists to record Beatles songs and boost their royalties (both accomplished). 

According to the Brow Beat blog on slate.com, Martin gave Epstein three candidates to become the group’s music publisher (adding a good word about James). Then fate intervened when one of the candidates was 20 minutes late for a meeting with Epstein.

He left and showed up early at the office of James—bald, bespectacled and little known in his current line of employ. Epstein played an acetate of “Please Please Me” for James.

Brow Beat reports: “Right in front of Epstein, James called his former producer Philip Jones, who had fortuitously taken over one of Britain’s most important pop TV shows, ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars.’ He played ‘Please Please Me’ into the phone, got the Beatles their first national TV appearance, and … sealed the deal.”

This must have seemed irresistible to Epstein, who 13 months earlier had signed a five-year contract to be the Beatles’ manager despite having no experience in that capacity. Representing a talented but inexperienced group, he needed James as much as James needed him.

“As a music producer friend tells me, it’s all about leverage,” Berman said. “Early in their careers, the Beatles had none.

“Artists like them were lucky to get a meeting with a publisher or record label, let alone control their copyrights. Those starting out in product or brand licensing are faced with similar obstacles.”

“Please Please Me” was a smash hit. A sea of chart-topping singles and albums ensued, making the Beatles millionaires almost overnight. Their “invasion” of America on Feb. 7, 1964, launched a worldwide music phenomenon that lives to this day. Singers ranging from Herb Alpert to Petula Clark to Ella Fitzgerald rushed to record Beatles songs within the first year under James, who soon was also publishing Gerry and the Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, the Troggs and many more.  

So why is the Northern Songs saga generally seen as disastrous?

It would take decades for the full effect to stomp one Beatle in particular.

Ticket to ride

“John and I were taken for a ride. No doubt about it,” McCartney said in a 2005 interview with Mojo magazine.

“We were in a little mews in Liverpool one morning and there was this lawyer (Charles Silver), who we later found out was sort of ours. He didn’t look like ours, and he certainly didn’t do a deal like he was ours.”

But with full trust in Epstein’s business acumen, neither McCartney nor Lennon read the contract. 

There are varying accounts of the original deal’s details, but the headline is that Lennon and McCartney each had a roughly 20 percent ownership in Northern Songs. Dick James Music (James and Silver) owned 51 percent; Epstein’s company, NEMS Enterprises, 9-10 percent.

Epstein and James were named directors of the company. McCartney and Lennon were not. George Harrison and Ringo Starr had no controlling interest, though the company published their songs and they received royalties.

In his 1997 book “Many Years From Now,” McCartney said: “There was always this voting share that could beat us. We could only muster 49; they could muster 51. They could always beat us.”

The agreement was mostly about leveraging the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team: In fact, Inventors Digest could find no mention of Harrison or Starr attending the fateful meeting at Epstein’s home.

“We’d signed the whole thing away one morning before getting on a train and we didn’t understand what it was,” McCartney told Mojo. “Later, when we tried to readjust it, the publisher said, ‘I can’t.’

“I know now through having a publishing company [MPL Communications] that you can, at any point. So in other words, yeah, we were signed to a slave contract.”

Lennon reportedly said James “carved Brian (Epstein) up.” A frustrated Harrison turned the experience into a Beatles song.

“I realized Dick James had conned me out of the copyrights for my own songs by offering to become my publisher,” Harrison said in a 1999 Billboard magazine interview. “As an 18- or 19-year-old kid, I thought, ‘Great, somebody’s gonna publish my songs!’ But he never said, ‘And incidentally, when you sign this document here, you’re assigning me the ownership of the songs,’ which is what it is.

“It was just a blatant theft. By the time I realized what had happened, when they were going public and making all this money out of this catalogue, I wrote ‘Only A Northern Song’ … just to have a joke about it.”

Extra frustrating for Harrison was the fact that in late 1964, he had the vision to start his own music publishing company, Harrisongs. But he had agreed to give Northern Songs publishing rights to his songs in a three-year deal in 1965—the year the company went public on the London Stock Exchange to help reduce the tax burden—and had to wait until that contract expired in 1968. (Starr followed the same course, launching Startling Music the same year.)

You can’t do that!

McCartney and Lennon met with James at Apple Records in 1968 to try to renegotiate their deal, which through past extensions bound them to Northern Songs until 1973. According to The Paul McCartney Project, this abject failure shifted a cold relationship to frosty.

Then in March 1969, James and Silver shocked the band by abruptly selling their shares in Northern Songs to Associated Television (ATV) for £1,525,000, giving the Beatles no shot at a buyout. 

There are conflicting reports as to where the Beatles were at this time. Many accounts say Lennon was on his honeymoon with Yoko Ono in Amsterdam when he read about the sale in the newspaper, then immediately phoned McCartney. But in an 11-second YouTube clip of McCartney recalling the incident, he claimed the Beatles were in Rishikesh, India, with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (although this well-chronicled visit was in 1968).

McCartney recalled: “When we got back to town, we say ‘Dick, you can’t do that!’

He says, ‘You wanna bet?’” 

Lennon and McCartney rejected an offer by ATV to buy their shares and attempted to gain a controlling interest in the company but failed. The two sold their stock (Lennon’s 644,000 shares, McCartney’s 751,000) in October 1969 for £3.5 million.

By the end of the year, Northern Songs was 92 percent owned by ATV, according to The Beatles Bible.

The March 1969 blockbuster came just five months before a newly signed Motown group from Gary, Indiana, the Jackson 5, made its national TV debut at the Miss Black America Pageant by singing “It’s Your Thing.” Ten-year-old Michael Jackson was described by Rolling Stone magazine as “a prodigy” with “overwhelming musical gifts” who “quickly emerged as the main draw and lead singer.”

The stars were aligning for a superstar pairing that would abruptly end with the surreptitious stroke of a pen. The day of The Fateful Dinner was coming.

The doggone songs are mine

McCartney does not recall the date of a strange phone call he received some 50 years ago.

He once told the British Daily Mirror: “Somebody rang me up and this high voice I didn’t recognize said: ‘Hi, Paul.’

“I thought, ‘This is a girl fan, and how the hell did she get my number?’ I was quite annoyed. It wasn’t a girl, it was Michael Jackson, and he basically said, ‘Do you want to make some hits?’”

According to Biography.com, the two became friendly in the mid-1970s and met to discuss possible songwriting collaborations. Meanwhile, ownership of the Beatles’ catalogue remained with ATV.

McCartney and Jackson eventually teamed for “The Girl Is Mine,” the lead single from Jackson’s Thriller” album (1982), and “Say, Say, Say,” from McCartney’s album “Pipes of Peace” (1983).

It was during work on the latter song that Jackson had dinner at McCartney’s estate near London. What ensued was a painful lesson for McCartney about the importance of protecting creative works; a financial and creative bonanza for Jackson that was arguably the signature music publishing coup in history; and a sudden parting note in a well-publicized friendship.

 After the meal, according to pophistorydig.com:

“Paul produced a thick booklet displaying all the song and publishing rights he owned, such as those of 1950s rocker Buddy Holly and others. ‘This is the way to make big money,’ he told [the young-20s] Jackson. ‘Every time someone records one of these songs, I get paid. Every time someone plays these songs on the radio, or in live performances, I get paid.’

 “McCartney was then reportedly earning about $40 million a year from other people’s songs. Jackson became quite interested as McCartney paged through his booklet. He wanted to know more about owning songs, and how they were acquired and put to use.”

The story goes that when McCartney was finished explaining, Jackson told him jokingly that someday he would own the ex-Beatle’s songs. A couple years later, he did.  

By 1984, per Celebrity Net Worth, McCartney and Yoko Ono—John Lennon’s widow since December 1980—had at least two opportunities to buy the Beatles music catalogue after ATV had been sold to Australian billionaire Robert Holmes à Court. But they passed, reportedly determining the $40 million price tag was too high. (Also, some speculated that even though McCartney was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he did not want to appear greedy or disrespectful of his and Lennon’s music.)

Jackson, through attorney John Branca, stepped in.

On Aug. 14, 1985, after back-and-forth negotiations, he outbid McCartney and won the approximately 250-song Beatles catalogue— and about 4,000 in total, including some from artists including the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley—with a bid of $47.5 million. (Rights to the hit “Penny Lane” were not included, according to Market Realist, because Holmes à Court had gifted those to his daughter.)

McCartney was furious. He called Jackson’s move ”dodgy,” per mccartney.com, “to do something like that, to be someone’s friend, and then buy the rug they’re standing on.” 

Not long afterward, Jackson began making deals in which Beatles songs appeared in commercials—another insult to the integrity of the music, McCartney said. He was particularly upset when Jackson licensed the song “Revolution” to Nike for $500,000 in 1987.

Jackson turned the catalogue caper into a staggering windfall. The perceived blow to the Beatles’ legacy was most crushing for McCartney, as was the blow to his ego.

“You know what doesn’t feel very good,” he said in 2006, “is going on tour and paying to sing all my songs. Every time I sing ‘Hey Jude,’ I’ve got to pay someone.”

McCartney said he wrote letters to Jackson in an attempt to improve the situation, to no avail. They did not speak to each other again. Jackson died in 2009 at age 50.  

Getting back, and a P.S.

Eventually, another opportunity arose for McCartney. As even casual observers of modern music know, he eventually got what he felt was rightfully his.

Amid reported financial challenges, Jackson had sold half of ATV to Sony in 1995 for about $100 million—more than twice what he bought it for 10 years earlier. The result was Sony/ATV Music Publishing.

When Jackson died suddenly in 2009, his share of the catalogue was assumed by his estate, run by attorney Blanca and John McClain. Sony bought out the Jackson estate’s share for $750 million in 2016.

In early 2017, McCartney sued for the rights of the Beatles catalogue while citing a provision of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. It allowed songwriters to retain the publishers’ share of their copyrighted works released before 1978 after a 56-year period. He received the copyrights to most of the catalogue in a private settlement with Sony/ATV.

Full control of the Beatles’ music publishing catalogue was finally his.

For centuries—and up to, say, 50 years ago—intellectual property was not a major consideration for creators and artists. Though Berman said the Beatles’ rugged publishing rights journey is understandable, he offered this advice for today’s content providers, inventors and others who rely on royalties:

  “Try to avoid being taken advantage of early in your career by being informed and try to improve your contract, if possible. But remember, you are not Paul McCartney or Taylor Swift; nor were they early in their career.

“You may need to take the deal on the table in order to get to the next better one.”

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Bass Innovation

The Beatles owned no known patents, according to Dick Davis, a research consultant at copyright.com. But he informed Inventors Digest of a key musical innovation, little known to many Beatles followers, which was the subject of a patent application.

When bassist Stuart Sutcliffe left the group in 1961, Paul McCartney had to replace him. And find a bass.

The 18-year-old McCartney, who could not afford a Fender bass, took a liking to the Höfner 500/1 (also referred to as a violin bass because of its shape). The German company had begun producing the instrument in the late 1950s.

McCartney’s loyalty to the instrument is evidenced by the fact that, according to Guitar World, he is seen using a ’61 and ’63 version of the bass during the “Get Back” sessions in 1969. Not surprisingly, the Höfner 500/1 is often referred to as the Beatles Bass.

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‘Why didn’t I realize?’

On Feb. 11, 1964, the Chiffons were among the opening acts at the Beatles’ first U.S. concert, at Washington Memorial Coliseum. Six years later, George Harrison released a song that reunited some of them in an improbable and unpleasant way.

“My Sweet Lord”—a late-1970 No. 1 hit in the United States and Great Britain—became the subject of a copyright lawsuit filed on Feb. 10, 1971. Struggling publisher Bright Tunes Music claimed the music stole from the 1963 Chiffons hit “He’s So Fine.” 

The case did not go to trial until 1976 because Bright Tunes went into receivership. Although Harrison said he had the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” on his mind when he wrote his song, he was ordered to pay $1.6 million in damages.

“I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity when I wrote the song,” Harrison said, according to Performing Songwriter. “But once it started to get a lot of airplay, people started talking about it, and it was then I thought, ‘Why didn’t I realize?’

“It would have been very easy to change a note here or there and not affect the feeling of the record.”

‘Come Together’—No

John Lennon and music publishing company owner Morris Levy played battling lawsuits beginning in 1969, when Lennon was the defendant in a copyright infringement claim over the Beatles’ 1969 song “Come Together.”

Levy’s Big Seven Music was the publisher of Chuck Berry’s song, “You Can’t Catch Me.” The first line of “Come Together” (“Here come ol’ flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly”) clearly borrows from a line in Berry’s song, and the music on the Beatles’ hit is arguably a slowed-down version of the Berry song.

The case was settled out of court in 1973, with the proviso that Lennon would record three of the songs for Big Seven’s “Rock n’ Roll” album. To further placate an impatient Levy, who reportedly had underworld connections, Lennon sent him three rough recordings—which Levy then released without authorization.

An unintimidated Lennon countersued and was a calm and determined witness in court. A final judgment in August 1976 awarded over $400,000 in damages against Levy and his company to Lennon and Capitol/EMI. Levy was later sentenced to 10 years in prison on extortion charges.

(Paul McCartney faced a possible legal complaint over the Beatles song “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” from the “white album.” According to Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Nigerian congo player Jimmy Scott—who introduced the Yoruba phrase to McCartney— sought a songwriting credit, but the Beatle disagreed because Scott had not originated the chant. When Scott was jailed for failing to pay alimony, McCartney agreed to pay Scott’s legal bills under the condition that he would no longer pursue a co-writer’s credit on the song.)

Apple bits

Apple Corps Ltd., conceived by the Beatles in 1967 after the death of their manager Brian Epstein and launched the following year, has had an interesting if not tumultuous existence. Much of that involved multiple court actions with Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.).

In a May 14, 1968, interview on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” John Lennon explained the origins of the Beatles’ holding company: “Our accountant came up and said, ‘We got this amount of money. Do you want to give it to the government or do something with it?’ So we decided to play businessmen for a bit, because we’ve got to run our own affairs now. So we’ve got this thing called Apple which is going to be records, films, and electronics—which all tie up.”

The Beatles did not run their own affairs for much longer. With Apple floundering due to a lack of professional management, the group hired Allen Klein as their manager in 1969.

Mick Jagger had reportedly recommended Klein to McCartney when Klein took over as the Roling Stones’ manager in 1965. By the end of the decade, Klein had bought the rights to the Stones’ early songs and the group was out of money (see October 2022 Inventors Digest cover story.) 

Bringing on the abrasive, notorious Klein divided the group (McCartney preferred his father-in-law, Lee Eastman). McCartney sued the other Beatles to try to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership, all but spelling the end of the band; Klein served as Lennon’s manager until he suggested Yoko Ono not perform at George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangladesh.”

McCartney and Ringo Starr still own and control Apple Corps (as do the estates of Lennon and George Harrison). The company remains a lucrative endeavor—with the 1995 “Anthology” CD and recent “Get Back” in-studio documentary, a collaboration with WingNut Films Ltd., among the highlights.

Apple Records filed a lawsuit against Apple Computer for trademark infringement in 1978. The case was settled in 1981, with the computer firm forced to pay $80,000 to the Beatles’ company.  One condition was that Apple Computer agreed to stay out of the music business. (This didn’t last.)

In 1989, Apple Corps alleged that computers’ ability to play back MIDI music violated the 1981 agreement with Apple Computer. That was settled in 1991; terms undisclosed.

In 2003, Apple Corps alleged that the iTunes Music Store and the iPod violated the agreement not to distribute music. The Beatles’ company lost the case in May 2006.

According to The Beatles Bible, to ensure final ownership, Apple Inc. filed trademark applications with the European Trademarks Office in March 2011 under 14 international classifications covering various purposes—including computer hardware, online social networking services, mobile phones, musical instruments, games, clothing/headgear, advertising, education and broadcasting.

Ironically, the trademark for the Beatles’ Apple Corps logo is now owned by its longtime court sparring partner Apple Inc., according to a notice posted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in 2012.

A win for fans: Apple’s need to conform to copyright law proved a windfall for Beatles fans in 2013, when 59 of their previously unreleased songs were released. 

Recent changes in European Union copyright laws prompted the releases. The stipulation is that unreleased recorded material can revert to the public domain after 50 years. So Apple had to release the material for public purchase, or essentially lose it for nothing.

Apple 1 (Do-Be-Do-Be-Do): It could only happen with the Beatles: The first song to be catalogued by their newly formed Apple Records was sung by the man who earlier figured the group “would die in New York” after being introduced in America in 1964.

“I guess I was wrong,” said Francis Albert Sinatra, who in 1968 recorded “Maureen is a Champ” in honor of Ringo Starr’s wife’s 22nd birthday. Commissioned by Apple executive Peter Brown, the record that became Apple 1 was given to her at her birthday party on Aug. 4, 1968.

The tongue-in-cheek cover of the Rodgers and Hart classic “The Lady is a Tramp” featured rewritten lyrics by Sammy Cahn that were personalized for Maureen, such as:

She married Ringo, and she could have had Paul

That’s why the lady is a champ.

No copyright protections apparently needed for this one. All stamping molds/tapes of the recording were destroyed, with many reports saying no other copies of the record exist (although it’s still available in mp3 form).

It isn’t known whether Maureen Starkey Tigrett’s family still owns the original record. She died in 1994. 

This much is certain: You must listen to this song to believe it—a fun and loving gesture by a music legend who never hid his contempt for rock ‘n’ roll but called George Harrison’s ballad “Something” “the greatest love song of the past 50 years.”

Go to youtube.com/watch?v=QyyF8_cq7SM while the ode to Maureen is still there.

Some IP, post-Beatles

Beatles bobbleheads for the car dashboard. Bubblegum cards. Coloring books. Even a Beatles Colorforms™ set (very hard to find today). People of a certain age remember some of the group’s early merchandising.

The cash cow has been milked in recent years via endeavors/products including anthology projects, a tour by Cirque du Soleil called The Beatles Love, Beatles Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit games, phone ring tones—and our favorite, a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream called Imagine Whirled Peace in honor of John Lennon.

Of course, the Beatles’ music is still the prevailing profit push. When the hit TV series “Mad Men” used the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” in a 2012 episode, the royalty fee was $250,000.

Beatles songs did not become available on iTunes until November 2010. When they did, within a couple of days 28 of the top 100 tunes downloaded were by the Beatles, according to the BBC. The group also made up 16 of the top 50 albums, including four in the top 10.

It was 1964 all over again.

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