The Day John and Paul Reunited!

Magic did not ensue.

It’s no secret that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were, to say the least, not getting along with each other in 1970, when the Beatles semi-officially called it quits as the biggest rock band in the world (an inefficient distillation of their iconic cultural standing that will have to do for the moment.)

There would be endless rounds of suing, counter-suing, bitching, counter-bitching, mocking, finger-pointing and more suing before the group officially dissolved in 1974. Their followers may have been hoping it was all just temporary, but it was easy enough to see that the Granny Smith apple had gone fully rotten by the beginning of the new decade.

Lennon could be shockingly—and quite obviously intentionally—mean-spirited in the press when it came to his opinions of Paul. And Paul could toss a bit right back at him, even while admitting he was hurt by John’s more pointedly vicious statements.

Neither one of them came off looking very good, although there’s an argument to be made that Lennon, who was kicking a heroin addiction in the immediate aftermath of the breakup and always had a gift for sneering belligerence, looked far worse. Hell, Lennon even threw a brick through the window of McCartney’s London home!

Beyond all that, Paul showed a grasp of just how special the Beatles’ mind-blowing adventure had been, both for the four band members and for millions of people around the world. John may have sung, “The dream is over,” but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been dreamt on a global scale.

This wasn’t like Three Dog Night hanging it up. Whether they asked for it or not, John, Paul, George, and Ringo represented a mass movement of social, intellectual, and musical freedom, and they were magnetic personalities to boot. The Beatles meant something to people.

It’s cringe-inducing to read about Lennon and McCartney being so publicly childish now. I can’t imagine how it must have felt for fans who grew up viewing them not just as dazzling, wildly creative musicians, but as beacons pointing toward a better world.

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The two finally got together for dinner one evening to agree that maybe, as far as public statements about each other were concerned, it would be wise for both of them to just shut the fuck up. They really had taken things way too far, and they eventually recognized it.

In fact, Paul even visited John in Los Angeles in 1974 to deliver a message from Yoko Ono that helped save Lennon’s marriage.

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Beginning in early 1974 and lasting for roughly eighteen months, Lennon tumbled through a freeform, Los Angeles-based group bender that came to be known as his “Lost Weekend.” It all started when Yoko kicked a drugged-up, philandering John out of the Dakota in the company of May Pang, her 19-year-old personal assistant.

The strong implication from Yoko was that Pang was to become John’s lover as well as his overseer while he got his midlife carousing out of his system. And that’s precisely what happened.

Setting your estranged husband up with a woman who, physically speaking anyway, could be taken as a passing facsimile of your much younger self, then having her take care of him the same way you do back home is a pretty strange way to work on a marriage. But, hey. Yoko ate chocolate cake in a bag. She looked at things a little differently than you and I do.

Anyway, Lennon and his new, wife-sanctioned girlfriend left Yoko in New York and headed out West, where the liquid refreshment was abundant and lines of coke stretched down Sunset Strip and broke off into Hollywood Hills tributaries. Rather than refinding himself after some partying, though, Lennon grew fully unmoored and chased through the city’s nightlife with abandon.

Whoops.

He did this in the company of rich-and-dissipating rock star buddies like former bandmate Ringo Starr, singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, the Who drummer Keith Moon, and sometimes Elton John at his most coked-up.

You know your friends are a mess when it’s up to debate whether Keith fucking Moon is the worst of the lot. All of these guys bounced around with Lennon from place to place, getting hammered, wasted, twisted, and sometimes passed out, and they didn’t care who saw it.

It was not a pretty sight.

The possible lowlight of this escapade—the world wasn’t privy to all of it, so I have to guess—was the evening Lennon and Nilsson (and a mortified Pang) went to a club called the Troubadour to see the singing comedy duo the Smothers Brothers, then ended up getting so drunk on Brandy Alexanders that John actually started heckling the brothers. He also went into the ladies restroom and came out with a feminine hygiene product affixed to his forehead. When a waitress refused to serve Beatle John any more booze, he asked, “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” she replied, “some asshole with a Kotex on his head.”

Lennon and Nilsson were physically tossed out of the club. It was in all the papers.

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Enter popular recording artist Paul McCartney (sporting an atrocious mustache and mullet combo, but we won’t get into that). Paul, who couldn’t help but crank out radio-friendly hit singles in the 1970s, was still hankering to work with John again. It’s thought that he was in L.A. to try to convince John to write some songs with him for what would eventually become the Wings album “Venus and Mars.”

That never came to be, but there is a studio recording from this visit that features former Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing together for the first time since the Beatles broke up!

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And it’s an embarrassment.

McCartney and his wife Linda suddenly appeared unannounced at a session where Lennon and Nilsson were theoretically laying down tracks for a new Nilsson album while mainly getting wasted with the Rolling Stones’ favorite sax player Bobby Keys, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, and some keyboard player named Stevie Wonder.

Paul later said he was shocked when he saw the condition John was in, and this was a man who had seen more than his fair share of wrecked people.

McCartney was greeted as a friend by Lennon, bad blood temporarily forgotten, and as Paul McCartney (!!!) by the other attendees, who realized that fifty percent of the Beatles were about to reunite! Everybody vaguely tried to jam while focusing most of their attention on John and Paul.

McCartney felt the significance of what was going on. So, rather than plugging in a bass and standing by an open microphone next to John, he banged on the drums and threw in occasional vocals when he felt like it. Lennon, for his part, tried to get Stevie to snort some coke, called out for more wine, repeatedly complained about his headphones and mic, and stood there improvising asinine “lyrics” while everybody tried to figure out what key they were in.

Once in a while, they attempted to play such chestnuts as “Lucille,” “Stand by Me,” “Sleepwalk,” and Sam Cooke’s hits “Cupid” and “Chain Gang.” But that didn’t work out too well.

Here’s a bootleg release of the big event, tellingly entitled A Toot and a Snore in ‘74. I’ve listened to this so you don’t have to, but I don’t blame you for wanting to at least scan through it.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Groovy.

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Here’s the happy ending to all of this.

Shortly before Paul and Linda left for L.A., they were paid an unexpected visit in their London flat by none other than Yoko Ono!

Yoko explained to Paul that her little experiment with John had gone kerflooey, and she was afraid their marriage was about to end. She wanted John now and wondered if Paul could deliver a message to him when he was in Los Angeles. She said that if John were willing to return to New York and start all over again, if he would literally date her and woo her and treat her with real love, she might be willing to take him back.

McCartney later said that he could see Yoko was an emotional wreck, that she was dressed in black “like a widow.” He agreed to give her a hand, which again, was a pretty magnanimous thing to do in light of how much dirty water had flowed beneath the Paul and Yoko bridge for the previous several years. These people lived in a much different, socially enclosed environment than you and I do. Their relationships were complex.

And Yoko and Paul both loved John.

A few days after that bedraggled jam session, Paul and Linda dropped in on the Santa Monica beach house that Nilsson was renting, where they hung out by the pool for a few hours with John, Nilsson, and a handful of other people (several casual photos were snapped that turned out to be the final shots of John and Paul together).

Near the end of the evening, Paul waved John into another room, where he delivered Yoko’s message.

It worked. Within a few months, John pulled himself together enough to return to Yoko in New York. Things calmed down, and they had baby Sean together in 1975.

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Then John started getting miffed when Paul would randomly show up with a guitar in his hand while the baby was sleeping. Though John and Paul grew more friendly with each other as time went on, it was never really the same again.

Paul loved showbiz, and John did not. Paul never seemed to turn off the musical valve, and John shut his tight for several years in favor of a quieter life. John was deeply cynical, and Paul was often romantic enough to seem downright silly (but, as the song goes, what’s wrong with that?). Paul was constantly on the move with his band, and John was fine just sitting at home and watching TV.

John was John, and Paul was Paul, in other words. They were no longer co-leaders of the Fab Four. They had moved on and were finally their own people. It truly had to happen sooner or later.

I don’t care what anybody says—if John had lived, the Beatles would have never reunited. No way. John may have proven you can go home again, even if Yoko had to send a famous messenger to ask him to do it. But the Beatles were another thing altogether.

Their time of collaboration was over. We should all be happy to have gotten what we got.