Beatles Fiendish Thingy's and Other Great Stuff!

Took You By Surprise: John & Paul's Lost Reunion

The sun was beginning to set over a mostly deserted expanse of beach in Malibu, casting long shadows behind a pair of visitors as they strolled a few feet from the water's edge. 

They had the innocuous, no-particular-place-to-go demeanor of average beachgoers, except for the fact that their every step was being recorded by a local news cameraman. One was a guy who was intimately familiar with being filmed, photographed, analyzed, idolized, ridiculed, and praised: John Lennon.

An ocean breeze pushed Lennon's short brown hair away from his forehead, and his eyes were hidden behind small, oval sunglasses. There was a slight chill in the air of the early November afternoon in 1973, and Lennon kept his hands tucked inside the pockets of his bell-bottoms as he trudged across the sand. Trailing him was Elliot Mintz, a young television entertainment correspondent who had become friendly with Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, after he'd interviewed them separately two years earlier. Now, Lennon was looking to promote his upcoming album, Mind Games, and agreed to a fresh interview with Mintz.

Lennon didn't express any surprise, though, when Mintz steered the conversation to that other topic, the one that was an object of fascination for millions of people around the world. "When you think back during that period of time known as Beatlemania, are the thoughts happy ones, are they good ones, John?" Mintz asked.

It had been three years since the Beatles' magical, kaleidoscopic romp through the 1960s — one that forever redefined popular music, culture, and countless other aspects of Western civilization — came to a bitter end. The band's love, love, love ethos was replaced by subpoenas, lawsuits, and private resentments that became public fodder for their suddenly disillusioned fans. And in the early days following the Beatles' split, no one seemed more willing to discard their legacy than Lennon, who was learning to purge his personal demons through primal scream therapy. "The Beatles was nothing," he told Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner during an infamous 1970 interview.

His most visceral animosity was reserved for his old songwriting partner, Paul McCartney. "Paul thought he was the fuckin' Beatles, and he never fucking was, never," Lennon had said. Several years after they harmonized together about the importance of working out problems, Lennon and McCartney started using their music to bitch at each other. "That was your first mistake," McCartney sang on "Too Many People," from his 1971 album, Ram. "You took your lucky break and broke it in two." Lennon responded with even sharper jabs in his songs. Fans and record company executives who fantasized about Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr reuniting someday seemed to be yearning for the impossible.

But Lennon's perspective had since mellowed. "Most of them are good, you know. I've even forgotten what touring was like," he offered, in his nasal Liverpudlian lilt. Earlier that year, he'd recorded with Harrison and Starr, giving life to new rumors of a fully fledged Beatles reunion, despite the gulf that still existed between the once inseparable Lennon and McCartney, the creative engine that drove the band.

"Could they team up again?" Mintz asked.

"It's quite possible, yes," Lennon responded. "I don't know why the hell we'd do it, but it's possible."

No one could have known that four months later, Lennon and McCartney would be standing together inside a recording studio, surrounded by a handful of wide-eyed musicians, as they took the first tentative steps toward making music again — or that some of the details of that surprising night would still remain a mystery 45 years later.

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For people who weren't alive during the Beatles' mythical rise, it's hard to grasp how jarring it was to see the era's foremost proponents of peace and love succumb to a divorce like mere mortals, with all of the attendant finger-pointing and name-calling.