Victorino Matus, assistant managing editor

LAST JUNE, I wrote about how it seemed wrong for Paul McCartney to perform Beatles songs in concert. Herewith are a few reader responses, clarifications, and an update.

First, the responses: "You're insane!" "You're out of your mind!" "You're just a Paul-hater!" And those were just from my friends in the office.

Out on the web, it was worse. "Full of hot air" was how Dean Esmay described me on his website. "The most asinine article I've ever read," wrote Beatles fan Aaron Pillar. And on and on. Sure, there were some supportive e-mails along the way, but one major bone of contention concerned where and when ex-Beatles started performing old songs--and indeed, it has been pointed out to me several times now that McCartney was not the only one to do so and may not have been the first.

According to a history professor from Connecticut, John Lennon recorded "I Saw Her Standing There" on the B-side of Elton John's rendition of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in 1974. Many readers have also pointed out that when Lennon performed live with Elton John at Madison Square Garden, he referred to Paul as that "old fiancee of mine." And George Harrison performed Beatles songs at a fundraiser for Bangladesh around the same time.

One reader theorizes that Lennon and McCartney were disinclined to play many of their old numbers in the 1970s not out of sentimentality, but because of legal wrangling. "It all has to do with publishing rights," says Thad Ficarra, who works on Capitol Hill. "Recall that Northern Songs, formed in 1963 by Dick James, handled all Lennon/McCartney songs. James put Northern up for sale in 1968 resulting in a furious bidding war among different publishers as well as John and Paul. Everyone was snapping up as many shares as possible." Ficarra notes that Lennon compared this with playing Monopoly but with real money. "In the end, John and Paul didn't have enough shares and the sale of Northern went to ATV Communications. And all current royalties were frozen and held in litigation. It wasn't until the 1980s, in an undisclosed private settlement, that ATV paid McCartney and Lennon's estates millions of dollars in back-publishing royalties." As a result, McCartney played more songs from the Beatles than from Wings on his 1989-1990 world tour.

It's interesting to note that when the Fab Four broke up, McCartney's first thoughts were, "Well, this will be the start of a new phase now. The Beatles won't be recording together again, so do I leave the music business and not work again? I'm too passionate about it." As he notes in "The Beatles Anthology," "It's just a bug I've got. I knew I had to carry on in some form or other." Compare that with Ringo's first thoughts, also relayed in the "Anthology": "I just wandered off home, I believe, and I don't know what happened after that. I sat in the garden for a while wondering what the hell to do with my life. After you've said it's over and go home, you think: 'Oh, God--that's it, then. Now what do you do?' It was quite a dramatic period for me--or traumatic, actually."