Come together

You cannot believe the crap we are going through to make this Beatles licensing deal work out. EMI desperately wants the deal to happen too, so they leaked the story to our good pals at Fortune (much love, Brent) so they could crank up the pressure on the Apple dudes. We're having a few issues with Paul, or Sir Paul, as we have to call him. Friggin Ringo is good to go; he'd sell his toenail clippings on Ebay if it would make him a buck. The real hassle of course is Yoko. Sheesh. Don't even get me started. I've been back and forth to New York to kiss her ass about a thousand times already. And things are not going well. Case in point: We're drinking green tea on the floor of her living room and she's insisting that when we put the music up on iTunes that the band must be called "John Lennon and the Beatles" and she must be listed as a member of the group. Her big tactic is just to repeat things over and over in this monotone voice, to wear you down -- it's a Japanese business tactic, they all do it -- and so she starts going on for the millionth time about how she wants to guard John's legacy and what a precious gift to the world he was, and for a while I'm agreeing and trying to be all Zen about it, and Yoko is giving me the Zen right back, and we're both working our Zen and trying to be more passive aggressive and monotone and repetitive than the other one, and finally I just snapped and I'm like, "Jesus friggin Christ, bitch, it's bad enough you broke up the greatest band of all time. Now you're gonna frig this up too? Jesus, lady! Get a friggin grip! It's just a distribution deal!" She bows her head and says, in this voice that's barely more than a whisper, "I will pray for your soul." Well that did it. I won't get into details -- my lawyers won't allow it -- but let's just say that Yoko had to wear sunglasses in public for a few days, and Peter Oppenheimer had to drag me out of there by my ankles.

So hey, Yoko Ono, chalk one up. You managed to out-Zen the Jobsmeister. But I'll win in the end and you know it. Because at the end of the day you're just like me: All about the Benjamins. And to Sir Paul: Dude, I don't know how you kept yourself from killing this dame back in the day. Now some pegleg is trying to shake you down. Life isn't fair, my brother.