Odd this day
Today is the 50th anniversary of the time Paul McCartney and John Lennon met up in a recording studio in L.A., patched things up, and recorded some songs together — except, sadly, everything after the first comma there is complete balls.
This is the anniversary of a recording session known as A Toot and a Snore in ’74. You can hear Lennon on the surviving bootlegs saying, “You wanna snort, Steve?” because many of those present had, indeed, been at the old Colombian incoherence powder.
This evening is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of cultural history: not only were two Beatles in the room — Harry Nilsson and Stevie Wonder were, too. This was a remarkable collection of musicians, which launched into several numbers, and didn’t finish one of them successfully.
Lennon and Yoko Ono had split up for a time, and he was in the middle of the 18-month bender he called his ‘lost weekend’. He’d been producing an album by Nilsson — not a man known for the modesty of his appetites
Not that McCartney never dabbled. According to Rolling Stone, “We were stoned”
Ringo was in LA at the time, but not in the room that night, and his lifestyle — as described in Peter Doggett’s You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles after the Breakup — seems to have been typical of the place and time:
You can find the bootlegs online, but the idea that inspiration can be found in intoxication has never sounded less convincing.
What you can hear is no sign of tension between Lennon and McCartney. According to one telling, there may have been some initial ice, but Lennon broke it.
Lennon later said in an interview with Bob Harris that the problem wasn’t not getting on, it was timing — all four former Beatles thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to work together, but they never all seemed to think it at the same time.
Like I said: what if…?
