Paul McCartney was promised induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 1995, and was less than impressed when Rock Hall co-founder Jan Wenner reneged on said promise.
McCartney was finally inducted into the prestigious Rock Hall in 1999, five years after his former Beatles bandmate John Lennon was inducted, and four years after he was promised he’d be inducted.
Famously, McCartney’s designer daughter Stella turned up to the 1999 ceremony wearing a white T-shirt featuring the slogan ‘ABOUT FUCKING TIME!’, a message she said “speaks for itself”.
In a 2015 interview newly published in Vanity Fair, Paul McCartney revealed that he was irritated by Rolling Stone founder Wenner’s broken promise, not least because he’d helped induct John Lennon into the Rock Hall at Wenner’s request.
“We had a thing which didn’t endear me to him later on. He asked me, ‘Would I induct John into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?’ And I said, Yeah, sure. Then I put the phone down. I thought, Well, what about me? I’m not inducted. Now John’s going to go in.”
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“The thing about John Lennon and McCartney was we were always equal,” McCartney continued. “But, of course, once John got murdered, he became the martyr – the Buddy Holly, the James Dean character- because of the atrocity. So a revisionism started to go on. And Yoko certainly helped it. Jann was a big part of that… Now John was it. He was it in the Beatles. He was the force behind the Beatles. He’d done it all. I “just booked the studios.” It wasn’t true.
“Anyway, so I said, Well, what about me? [Wenner] said, ‘Next year. We’ll do you next year.’ I said, Okay. And I bought the deal. Next year came around… Crickets.”
“Eventually I did creep in there,” McCartney added, “and my daughter Stella wore a T-shirt [that said], ‘About Fucking Time’… So as far as Jann is concerned – they did induct me. It was “about fucking time” and all that. But it was later, and it wasn’t when I was promised it. A verbal contract was not worth the paper it was written on.”
(In the interest of balance, Vanity Fair points out that Jan Wenner says he can not remember making any such promise to McCartney.)