maybe I'm amazed ❤️‍🔥

THE LOVELY LINDA

Howard Sounes: When he saw that Paul had married Linda, John decided to marry Yoko. On his way to see Aunt Mimi, John told his chauffeur to take them to Portsmouth and book him and Yoko onto a ship; they'd get the captain to marry them. John figured that would be quieter and more dignified than the way Paul had behaved, playing up to the press as he had in London. When a shipboard wedding proved logistically impossible, John and Yoko flew to Paris, thence to the British dependency of Gibraltar, where a British subject could be married instantly. They did so on 20 March 1969. Having gone to such lengths to avoid the press, John and Yoko then made sure they garnered maximum publicity for themselves by staging the first of their so-called bed-ins during a honeymoon in Amsterdam. This was a conceptual happening with a positive if infantile message: at a time of international political tension it was better to go to bed and think peaceful thoughts than make war. In practice it involved John and Yoko tucking themselves up in the Amsterdam Hilton under signs that read BED PEACE and HAIR PEACE, the latter a reference to their own extreme hirsuteness - John was now wearing a full beard, with hair down to his shoulders; Yoko's grew halfway down her back - as well as being a Lennon pun (hair piece). When they'd arranged themselves, Derek Taylor invited the press in to photograph and interview the couple. Paul and Linda watched news coverage of this wacky event on television from their honeymoon suite in New York. It looked for all the world like John and Yoko were trying to upstage them, and in the months and years to come this rivalry became a pronounced feature of their lives, with John and Yoko pitted relentlessly against Paul and Linda. It was true, as Paul always said, in reference to an old song the Beatles once performed as part of their stage show, that wedding bells broke up the old gang.

PAUL: I think we spurred each other into marriage. I mean, you know. They were very strong together, which left me out of the picture. So I got together with Linda and then we got strong with our own kind of thing. And I used to listen to a lot of what they said. I remember him saying to me, "You've got to work at marriage," which is something I still remember as a bit of advice. I still remember that. Um... And then yeah, I think they were a little bit peeved that we got married first. Probably. In a little way, you know, just minor jealousies. And so they got married. I don't know if that's - I mean, who knows...

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Danny Fields: When Linda married Paul, she brought to him not only the prodigious emotional strength that would help pull him through a very hard time, but also her family, corporately known as the law firm of Eastman & Eastman (that is, her father and her brother). As Linda guided her new husband through the devastated landscape of his old career as a member of the Beatles and into a tremendously successful new one as a solo artist, her family took control of his legal and financial position and made him the richest musician in the history of the world. What Paul McCartney would have become without men (and a woman) named Epstein no one can ever know; with his talent and intelligence he was not destined to be a loser. But with the guidance of Brian Epstein, without whom Paul readily acknowledges there would have been no Beatles, he was one half (or one quarter, if you will) of a creative force which no history of the twentieth century can ignore; and in the good care of Lee (ne Epstein), John and Linda Eastman, he survived and he thrived once the Beatles were, indeed, history. She hated 'business', she always said, but Linda was plunged into a maelstrom of such activity in 1969 when she married Paul, and it was coming at her from all directions. Not only was her new husband preoccupied on about half-a-dozen separate fronts (management; publishing; Apple; John and Yoko; John, George and Ringo, etc.) with the excruciating break-up of the Beatles, but now her father and brother had jumped into the fray as well. It hadn't taken long for Lee Eastman to reverse his position on the subject of his daughter's involvement with the degenerate world of rock and roll when he found himself with a Beatle in the family. Clearly, as a very successful player in the lucrative field of song publishing, Lee could see the possibilities of a connection with this celebrated songwriter - part of a team or not, Paul had written 'Yesterday' and 'Michelle' by himself, and those two songs alone had earned millions of dollars, although they did not all flow into Paul's pocket by any means. As Lee saw it, they should have done, and he no doubt saw an opportunity to make certain that in the future anything Paul wrote would enrich the ex-Beatle, Lee's daughter, Lee's grandchildren, Lee himself and his son John. He did indeed accomplish all that. The concept of music publishing is confusing, and although I wish it could be explained in twenty-five words or less, it can't, so bear with me. Everything will be much simpler if the process is even vaguely understood: the 'copyright' (literally, the right to make and sell copies) automatically belongs entirely to the writer, and it exists the moment a song is written or recorded on tape. Simultaneously, the writer owns the related 'publishing' rights. Music publishing, as a practical matter, consists of getting exposure for the song (having other people record it, or getting it on a movie soundtrack, etc.) and collection of the money thereby earned; even when the song is played on the radio, on a jukebox or in an elevator, there is money to be collected. When you record your own song, and the recordings are sold, the manufacturer of the record is required by law to pay money to the owner of the copyright. This might be you, the writer, or you might have sold the copyrights and attendant publishing, in which case someone else gets the money. Although it's only pennies a time, if 100 other people record that song (as with 'Yesterday', which has been recorded far more than 100 times) and it's played on the radio millions of times (it's all kept track of), huge amounts of money can be generated.