Sir FAUL leaving EMI for Starbucks?

[TotalInformation]

Paul McCartney Leaving Capitol Records After 40 Years

Exclusive: Paul McCartney is splitting with the record company he’s called home for most of the last 43 years.

Except for a brief break in the early 1980s when he skipped to Columbia Records and then back, McCartney has been with Capitol since the Beatles’ first album in 1964.

But he’s leaving, effective immediately, and taking his entire back catalog of solo albums with him. That’s everything including bestsellers like "Band on the Run," "McCartney," "Ram," "Flowers in the Dirt," "Tug of War" and his critically acclaimed most recent album, "Chaos and Creation in the Backyard," nominated for four Grammys, including Album of the Year, in 2006.

That much is news. This much has also been reported: McCartney will be the first artist signed with Starbucks’ new record label. News of the label and McCartney’s potential involvement were first suggested in Sunday’s New York Post.

But I can tell you exclusively: It’s a done deal. It will be announced this week. McCartney will first offer just his new album to Starbucks for a fall release. The rest of the catalog he will sit on for the moment.

Capitol, I can also tell you, is not happy. They are part of the ailing EMI Records empire. EMI, like Warner Music, is suffering and could collapse at any time. This news is a terrible blow to them.

"They knew it was coming," a source says. "They did nothing for the 'Chaos' album, and they were reminded that McCartney’s entire contract was ending. Look, they did nothing for the Beatles’ 'Love' album this winter. It just sold on its own. Everything they do is outdated."

McCartney’s exit from Capitol is interesting in many ways. Every since the Beatles joined Capitol, all their albums and all their solo albums have come from the label.

Capitol’s association with the group since they broke up in 1970 has always been key. McCartney’s Wings albums were with the label, as was John Lennon’s "Imagine," George Harrison’s "All Things Must Pass" and Ringo Starr’s "Ringo!" Even Sean Lennon has released a Capitol album.

But all that may change now that McCartney has flown the coop. Starbucks has proven to be a much more effective seller of CDs and DVDs than record stores, thanks to their amazing retailing and branding.

Starbucks customers have come to regard non-coffee product merchandise as hip and attractive, while record companies have been unable to reach customers at all in recent years.

www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,258421,00.html#3

[fourthousandholes]

Incredible!

[-Wings-]

Can't say I blame him. I was a little outraged myself over the lack of promotion for Chaos & Creation and Love, two of the best Beatles-related albums since... well, Abbey Road.

[Doc]

wings said:

Can't say I blame him. I was a little outraged myself over the lack of promotion for Chaos & Creation and Love, two of the best Beatles-related albums since... well, Abbey Road.

Yes, it's time and it's a statement.

Perhaps EMI/Capitol will scramble, say, oops, we goofed, and woo him back? Of course words are meaningless. Contracts! Better PR must be in the contracts!

Probably all because of some young whippersnappers at EMICap that just don't know the value of putting support behind the proven horses. Brainwashed, Ringorama, Love, C&C AND the Requiem prove there's been plenty of pull left in the drays.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equine_conformation

Damn it sure is bizarre getting older. I will join the 50+ club in 6 short weeks. Five decades of perplexitude and still pondering.

I limit my caffeine to ONE caffeine beverage a day. Otherwise, oh God, well, you can't imagine. [You know me on 120mg.........I used to do 1,000 a day.......I've had to curtail my Bailey's to a small ration.....]

I would like to frequent Starbucks, but..........say, if they would introduce a de-caffeinated,
low sugar, low-fat Bailey's flavored cappuccino, I'd haunt the place.

[Mellow Yellow]

So, Sir Faul is siding with my sworn enemy, eh?

I cannot STAND Starbucks..... I hate it so much! Maybe it's because, being in college, everyone tries to fit into this "form" of being a college stereotype. And so they wear the funny hats, and drink their cappa mocha frappa latte's and such..... But not me, I can't stand coffee, and I can't stand those who can stand the things that I cannot stand. Understand?

[Doc]

melloyello said:

So, Sir Faul is siding with my sworn enemy, eh?

I cannot STAND Starbucks..... I hate it so much! Maybe it's because, being in college, everyone tries to fit into this "form" of being a college stereotype. And so they wear the funny hats, and drink their cappa mocha frappa latte's and such..... But not me, I can't stand coffee, and I can't stand those who can stand the things that I cannot stand. Understand?

Here, here! Absolutely! And don't take it sitting down, either!

[JoJo]

LINK

Monday, March 26, 2007

Upcoming Paul McCartney album to feature new and old material
Insiders say that Paul McCartney's upcoming debut for the Hear Music label will feature both new songs and outtakes from his last two albums. According the fan run website themaccareport.com, McCartney previewed the album a few weeks ago in New York City for the new label. Among the songs included in the set are songs that Nigel Godrich, McCartney's producer for his last album, Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, rejected for the project.

The album is said to feature his touring band on about half of the songs, with other studio musicians including a string section on other tracks, and some songs that only feature McCartney. The fact that David Kahne is being listed as a producer suggests that some of the material might date back to the 2001 sessions for his Driving Rain album. There's an unconfirmed rumor that the album might be released on June 18th to mark Macca's 65th birthday.

Another rumor is that the set might be titled McCartney III. McCartney released two completely solo sets, with minimal help from his late wife Linda McCartney, in 1970 and 1980, respectively. Seeing as how the new set features about a dozen supplemental musicians, it seems unlikely that McCartney would break tradition for a non-solo set.

Backstage at the recent Fest For Beatles Fans in New Jersey, Ringo Starr's longtime producer Mark Hudson said that McCartney switching labels enables him to focus on the music first: "I think that Paul McCartney is about his art. And I think that what ended up happening to all the Beatles is that they fell victim to the industry and I think that he's probably very, very happy to be back into the art again."

McCartney's upcoming album marks the end of his 45 year relationship with EMI Records, which first signed the Beatles in June 1962.

[JoJo]

This post at TKIN from Captain Truth got me thinking.

Since the sixties there is now and then rumor of the legendary lost Beatles album "The One after Revolver". The legend says, that the mastertapes from the follow up record -of probably the best Beatles album ever- were stolen and have never surfaced again since then.
On this tapes would be the last recordings with Paul McCartney and of Paul McCartney !
Does anyone in this forum know something else to this long lost record ? I guess, if the story is true, this should be the most valuable record of all time !!!


Back in 1966, the Beatles were probably thinking of leaving EMI, there were hints in the Revolver press conference from Paul, and John mentioned something about wanting to sign with an American record company in the Let It Be dialogs. (he didn't amplify much) Well, something happened to change their minds it would seem. Maybe this is a statement of some kind from Sir Paul?

Anyway, I'm not sure I believe this story, but it's possible there's a grain of truth to it. According to the book 'Epoch Moments and Secrets', there was some recording going on in August 26, 1966. I made a post some time ago about it here.

[DarkHorse]

jojo said:

This post at TKIN from Captain Truth got me thinking.

Since the sixties there is now and then rumor of the legendary lost Beatles album "The One after Revolver". The legend says, that the mastertapes from the follow up record -of probably the best Beatles album ever- were stolen and have never surfaced again since then.
On this tapes would be the last recordings with Paul McCartney and of Paul McCartney !
Does anyone in this forum know something else to this long lost record ? I guess, if the story is true, this should be the most valuable record of all time !!!


Back in 1966, the Beatles were probably thinking of leaving EMI, there were hints in the Revolver press conference from Paul, and John mentioned something about wanting to sign with an American record company in the Let It Be dialogs. (he didn't amplify much) Well, something happened to change their minds it would seem. Maybe this is a statement of some kind from Sir Paul?

Anyway, I'm not sure I believe this story, but it's possible there's a grain of truth to it. According to the book 'Epoch Moments and Secrets', there was some recording going on in August 26, 1966. I made a post some time ago about it here.

This reminds me of the documentary about the Beatles that mentions the album that the Beatles planned on making about their childhoods. I always thought that Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields(before Lennon changed the words) were songs that were intended to be on that album. Could this be the same album as the one mentioned above?

The truth slips out from time to time.

[B]

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article3046728.ece

Paul McCartney's Other Break-up

"....During a 50-minute conversation, there is one word he uses more than any other. If, as GQ recently declared, Paul McCartney is the Man of the Year, then “exciting” was his word of the year. And if something wasn’t exciting, Macca didn’t want to know about it.

It seems that excitement – or rather the lack of it – struck the death knell for what was already becoming a strained relationship with his old label. “Everybody at EMI had become a part of the furniture. I’d be a couch; Coldplay are an armchair. And Robbie Williams, I dread to think what he was,” he begins. “But the most important thing was, I’d felt [the people at EMI] had become really very boring, y’know? And I dreaded going to see them.”

Boring in what way? “Well, because I could guess what they were going to say – ‘Love your record, Paul’ – and I’d say: ‘Well, what should we do with it?’ Then they’d go: ‘Well, we think you ought to go to Cologne’, which is what they always say.

“This idea became symbolic of the treadmill, you know? You go somewhere, speak to a million journalists for one day, and you get all the same questions. It’s mind-numbing. So I started saying: ‘God, we’ve got to do something else’.”

Had his American producer David Kahne not been on hand to hear these grievances then McCartney may never have got as far as working out what that “something else” was. Unluckily for EMI though, Kahne had friends at Hear Music. By the time McCartney got around to telling EMI the bad news, the deal was as good as done. Someone at the coffee chain told him that 400 Starbucks in China would be stocking the CD. He liked the idea almost as much as the fact that no one had mentioned Cologne.

The clincher, though, was the meeting he had with Starbucks executives, in which Memory Almost Full was played back in its entirety. “You Tell Me came on and one of the team started crying. It was weird. I thought, ‘Oh, this is real feedback.”

Not much crying at EMI then, lately? “Well, there is, but for other reasons,” McCartney says. It might be argued that, for an industry monolith such as EMI – now owned by a private equity firm, Terra Firma – losing Paul McCartney in one year is unlucky. That the label went on to lose Radiohead because, in the words of the guitarist Ed O’Brien, “Terra Firma doesn’t understand the music industry” – starts to look like recklessness. Thom Yorke may bristle at the idea of jumping ship to Starbucks, but one thing he and McCartney have in common is their enthusiasm for new, faster ways of putting out music.

Actually, they’re strangely reminiscent of the old ways. McCartney was one of millions who downloaded Radiohead’sIn Rainbows, paying “something reasonable”, on the week it appeared. “This was how we used to operate,” he enthuses. “I remember John [Lennon], for instance, writing Instant Karma and demanding it was released the following week.”

It wasn’t the case with EMI. “I’d started saying to them: ‘Look, we could write a thing and have it released the next week.’ And they would say: ‘You can’t do that these days.’ So I would say: ‘Well, how much time do you need?’ And they’d say six months. I said: ‘Why do you need that long?’ And do you know what they said? ‘To figure out how to market it.’ I said: ‘Wait a minute, are you sure you need six months for that? Couldn’t some bright people do that in two days?’ Jesus Christ. I said: ‘Look boys, I’m sorry, I’m digging a new furrow.”

And a fertile one at that. This year he bought the domain name www.meyesight. com (a pun on MySpace but pronounced so that it rhymes with “eyesight”) as a platform for his poems, paintings and demos. Far from making him retreat behind locked doors, the fallout from his divorce from Heather has thrown him not just into work but into a whirl of social engagements. At the Q Awards in September he got talking to Damon Albarn and congratulated him on the success of his Africa Express “super-jam” at Glastonbury.

“He asked me to take part in it, actually. I couldn’t do it because of my personal difficulties. I was looking after my daughter and I couldn’t really schlep her down and do that. But I think they’re gonna do another one, so I might get involved next year.”

The way his 2008 is shaping up, McCartney might find it no less of a struggle to fit in the next one. In February he picks up an award for Outstanding Contribution to Music at the Brits. Between then and his Anfield stadium show in the summer, he goes into the studio to assist on an album of songs by his famously shy son, James.

Also nearing completion are a guitar concerto and a new album under his nom de plume The Fireman. While he’s under no illusions about the place these projects will have in the mainstream, you suspect that much of his current swagger stems from the reception accorded to Memory Almost Full. It’s a record on which the Linda years seemed to loom large – not just on Wings-style rockers such as Only Mama Knows andNod Your Head, but across a succession of confessional, contemplative songs. Writing about his happiest years as though part of some increasingly intangible dream,You Tell Me, That Was Me and The End of the End numbered among his most affecting tunes for years.

That McCartney takes as much inspiration from Wings these days as he does from the Beatles, is probably no accident. The Beatles don’t need anyone to stick up for them. But the same can’t be said of the band formed by Paul and Linda in the hangover of the decade that the Beatles helped to define. When talk turns to the subject of Wings, McCartney relays a favourite story about Bruce Springsteen. “We were at the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame and we got talking. He said: ‘You know what? I like Silly Love Songs. I really didn’t get it at first, but now I’ve got a wife and kids I get what you meant’.”

It isn’t difficult to work out the subtext of this story. Having spent the Sixties as you would expect a Beatle to spend the Sixties – seeing Jane Asher, getting high with his arty mates at the Indica Gallery, being a Beatle – he changed with the new decade.

And many of his contemporaries resented him for it, little realising that the changes he underwent would befall them too. Family. Kids. Mellow times. “Some people wanna fill the world with silly love songs/And what’s wrong with that?”

Does he ever get bored of being portrayed as easygoing, thumbs-aloft Macca? I suggest that his glass-half-full persona must have been manufactured as a method for coping with his extraordinary fame. He bristles slightly at the word “manufactured”. In fact, he says, it was probably a mechanism that activated itself during an adolescence overshadowed by the death of his mother. “If you knew anyone I went to school with, it was the same, you know. I was pretty optimistic.”

Besides, even happy songs have a way of turning sad as the years go by. Penny Lane pauses the videotape of memory on a moment to which its author knows he can never return. Even When I’m 64 carries a poignancy that he couldn’t have foreseen when he wrote it. “You know, I think you’re getting to the philosophical core of things when you say that. Things that are happy also contain the seed of sadness.”

By way of illustration, he pretends to be a brass band playing I Do Like to be Beside the Seaside. Images of Victorian ghosts in stripy bathing costumes suddenly abound. “See what I mean? One day, when we discover the meaning of life, that will somehow be contained within it – that happy is sad and sad is happy.”

At the risk of sounding like an enterprising Starbucks executive with a chopped onion secreted in his handkerchief, I tell Paul that the home movies on The McCartney Years – a new DVD anthology spanning his work with and beyond Wings – movingly underscores the point. Particularly affecting is the footage of the McCartneys revelling in anonymity at their Scottish farm retreat. It must have been incredible to raise children who had yet to rumble who exactly their dad was.

“Exactly,” he says. “There was one moment where they were riding their little ponies in Scotland, and Stella said to me: ‘Dad! You’re Paul McCartney, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes darling, but I’m Daddy really’.”

Were any reminder needed that he’s still Daddy, he has to leave his studio in a few minutes to pick up four-year-old Beatrice from school. On the way back they might do some Christmas shopping – a ritual with which he is quite hands-on. “I like to do that myself, you know?” In terms of getting the kids excited, I tell him I can recommend the Argos catalogue. It’s got nearly 2,000 pages.

“I don’t get the Argos,” he says, with the mock air of a man who may yet do – now that the idea has occurred to him. “But I do have others. There are catalogues that are even better than Argos. Believe you me.” "