Last fall the Beatles released “Now and Then,” a long-awaited digital reunion between all four Fabs was made possible through cutting edge technology.
Touted as the final entry in the band’s storied cannon, it provided fans with a happy ending to a 60-year saga and the chance to hear Paul McCartney join voices with his late partner John Lennon once again.
Though indeed moving, it was a reunion that didn’t occur in reality. The Beatles tragically never reconvened in the studio prior to Lennon’s murder on Dec. 8, 1980 — robbing the world of more potential Beatles albums, and McCartney of his dear friend.
Many assume that Lennon and McCartney’s recording relationship ended with the band’s breakup at the dawn of the ‘70s.
But in truth, they quietly teamed up in an LA studio for a one-off impromptu session in 1974. The results were chaotic, unfinished, and (technically) unreleased, but the bootleg tapes are historic for capturing that iconic vocal blend for the very last time. It proves that despite the bitterness of the prior breakup, their bond remained intact.
The diverse and nuanced reasons for the Beatles’ split are as complex as the men themselves, requiring volumes of books — not to mention legal documents — to unravel.
The partnership was dealt its mortal blow with the death of band manager Brian Epstein in August 1967. McCartney did his best to navigate the group through the ensuing upheaval, but his de facto leadership was read as overbearing by his band mates — particularly Lennon, who, since the world beating success of 1967’s groundbreaking Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, had largely abdicated his creative role due to his own emotional maelstrom of insecurity, boredom, and resentment.
“After Brian died, we collapsed,” Lennon said in an infamous interview with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner in December 1970.
“Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”
McCartney’s perfectionism in the studio gave him a reputation as a hard task master — “He’s the workaholic!” Ringo Starr once joked, while the band’s producer George Martin chose the word “overbossy” — but beginning with sessions for the ‘White Album’ in 1968, Lennon began openly sniping at McCartney’s work.
He particularly loathed the music hall influenced numbers like “Martha My Dear” and “Ob-La-Da, Ob-La-Da,” which he memorably dismissed as “Paul’s granny music s—.
” The latter song nearly provoked a battle royale in the studio before Lennon stormed out — only to return again hours later, in a chemically altered state of consciousness.
(The sessions for the song were so unpleasant that longtime engineer Geoff Emerick resigned rather than tolerate the bad vibes.)
For McCartney, the hostility was painful. “John and I were critical of each other’s music and I felt John wasn’t much interested in performing anything he hadn’t written himself,” he told Life in 1971. “So I felt the split coming. And John kept saying we were musically standing still.”
Lennon wasn’t particularly taken with the high concept McCartney-helmed projects that the band were obliged to go along with.
The 1967 television film Magical Mystery Tour had been a costly flop that was barely salvaged by the soundtrack EP (and eventual album), and the tense sessions recorded for the Let It Be documentary captured just as many squabbles as songs.
“The film was set up by Paul for Paul,” Lennon told Wenner. “That is one of the main reasons the Beatles ended. I can’t speak for George, but I pretty damn well know we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul…
The camera work was set up to show Paul and not anybody else. And that’s how I felt about it.” The lead single from the project, “Get Back,” was a McCartney composition that Lennon (supposedly) took to be a thinly veiled dig at Yoko Ono, his new romantic partner, who attended each session along with the band.
“When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line ‘Get back to where you once belonged,’ he’d look at Yoko,” he claimed.
This particular instance is likely a product of Lennon’s own paranoia, but the Beatles hardly welcomed Ono with open arms when Lennon chose to make her a permanent fixture at the band’s sessions.
“It was like old army buddies splitting up on account of wedding bells,” McCartney reflected in the Beatles Anthology.
“He’d fallen in love, and none of us was stupid enough to say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t love her.’ We could recognize that, but that didn’t diminish the hurt we were feeling by being pushed aside.”
McCartney’s rejection of Ono — real or imagined, playful or malicious — stung Lennon in a way that few things could, and he began to emotionally distance himself from his longtime partner as a self-protective measure.
“[Paul] said it many times that at first he hated Yoko, and then he got to like her. But it’s too late for me,” he told Wenner.
“Ringo was all right, but the other two really gave it to us…I can’t forgive ’em for that, really. Although I can’t help still loving them either.”
