Ever since the end of the 1960s, the world wondered what would happen if The Beatles had gotten back together. Even though the band were comfortable leaving their legacy where it was, the prospect of hearing John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaborate again was too much to fathom. Although the pair had their personal and creative differences towards the end of the band, there was one point where they came close to collaborating again in the mid-1970s.
Following the band’s breakup, Lennon had some demons to work through while in primal scream therapy. After peeling himself apart on Plastic Ono Band, Lennon would find his tunefulness on Imagine and eventually return to his political side by working with Yoko Ono on Some Time In New York City. Seen as a commercial disappointment at the time, Lennon and Ono would find that their spirits weren’t working well together, leading to Lennon venturing out with their assistant, May Pang.
Aside from Lennon’s hangups, McCartney was entering a career renaissance with Wings. After a shaky start on albums like Wild Life, McCartney would finally reach the top of the charts again with Band on the Run, boasting massive singles like the title track and ‘Let Me Roll It’, the latter of which had more than a few production tricks from Lennon.
As McCartney visited Lennon in Los Angeles, though, he talked with his old mate about his plans to record in The States, venturing down to New Orleans to record the beginnings of Venus and Mars. Although Lennon was still in the process of making albums like Walls and Bridges, Pang recalled that there was a good chance that the songwriting duo could have gotten back together.
When talking about that time, Pang remembers Lennon considering going down to New Orleans and rekindling his creative spark with McCartney, recalling, “The pressure was off. All of them were now free to do whatever they wanted to do. So in January 1975, Paul and Linda were saying, ‘We’re going to go down to New Orleans and do a new album .’ A couple of days later, he’s tinkling on the guitar, and he goes, ‘What do you think if I wrote with Paul again?’ You talk about shock; the reference is like The Exorcist, the head flips back. And I said, ‘I think it would be great’”.
Although the signs were there for Lennon and McCartney to work together again, the plans fell through when Lennon moved back to New York City, rekindling his relationship with Ono and spending the next few years as a house-husband. Whenever he did see McCartney in the meantime, it usually came from Lennon talking to his friend about baking bread at home.
That’s not to say that McCartney did influence Lennon, with the song ‘Coming Up’ inspiring the former Beatle back into the music business with the album Double Fantasy. Although Lennon wouldn’t be long for this world after the release of his next album, the chance of him and McCartney putting the pieces back together for Venus and Mars remains the closest the duo came to collaborating again.
