Paul McCartney has gotten some sweet revenge today.
His new album, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane,” is number 1 on amazon.com and number 2 on iTunes.
The raved about new album is outselling Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and greatest hits. That’s not easy considering they’re attached to the “Michael” movie, on its way to a billion dollar take around the world.
Why revenge? In the early 80s, Michael skunked McCartney and bought the Beatles song catalog out from underneath him. The enmity continued until Michael died and McCartney eventually got his rights back.
But the tug of war went on for decades.
When they were recording for “Thriller” in 1982, McCartney told Jackson about his the catalog of songs he wrote with John Lennon being up for sale. McCartney said he and Yoko Ono were not going to bid on it. Jackson cannily called his lawyer, John Branca, and told him about. They swept in and bought the catalog.
The rest was misery. Jackson spent the next two days leveraging his insane spending against the value of the catalog.
McCartney never got over it.
The Beatle has done an amazing press tour the last two weeks promoting his new album, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane.” The reviews are stellar, and the result is big sales right away. (Kudos to his PR people.)
So far, no singles have popped up on iTunes. McCartney was never good with singles. In the Wings days, he released one per album, leaving a lot of chart action on the table.
For “Dungeon Lane,” good impact tracks would be “Lost Horizon,” not to mention the Ringo Starr duet, “Home to Us,” and even “Life Can Be Hard.”
