Jam session with John Lennon & friends

Studio:

The Record Plant West, Los Angeles, USA

Songs recorded

Staff

Musicians

Paul McCartney:

drums

Stevie Wonder:

keyboards

John Lennon:

piano

Harry Nilsson:

vocals

Bobby Keys:

sax

Jesse Ed Davis:

guitar

About

While in L.A., on April 9th they were guests of honour at a luncheon held at the Capitol Records Tower where they were presented with a platinum album representing the sale of one million copies of ‘Band on The Run’ …. They also went to the studios where Harry Nilsson was recording his next album, which features both John Lennon and Ringo. George Harrison was also in town ….. 

From Wings Fun Club newsletter N°1, 1974

From Rolling Stone:

We were stoned. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who wasn’t stoned. For some ungodly reason, I decided to get on drums. It was just a party, you know. To use the word ‘disorganized’ is completely understating it. I might have made a feeble attempt to restore order – “guys, you know, let’s think of a song, that would be a good idea’ – but I can’t remember if I did or not.

Paul McCartney

It’s very difficult to remember those days because it was all a bit crazy and every was getting out if it. But yes, John was doing some recordings in L.A. and I showed up. lt was a strange session. The thing that I recall, apart from the fact that Stevie Wonder was there, is that someone said, “what songs shall we do – I don’t know anything after ’63”, which I understood because the songs from your formative years are the ones that you tend to use to jam. I ended up on drums for some reason. And no, I don’t have a tape of it!

Paul McCartney, from The Beatles Monthly Book N°255, July 1997

Although this photograph has now been seen quite a bit, I can claim some part in the chain of events that established its historical significance. It was taken on or around April 1, 1974, at 625 Palisades Beach Road, Santa Monica, and it is important because, as far as I have been able to establish, it is the last ever photo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the same frame. True to his nature, and in one of the many bizarre happenstances that visited his short life, Keith Moon, also a house-guest at 625, happened to be in the middle while Linda, on the left, looks like she’s about to bash him over the head with a pool cue.  

The photographer, using his Polaroid camera, was my friend Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler, Moon’s long-suffering PA, and the original has long since been lost. It first appeared in his book Moon The Loon, published by Star books in March 1981, but the caption beneath it did not draw attention to its importance which suggests that neither the publishers nor Dougal had any idea of its significance at the time nor, indeed, for many years afterwards.

It wasn’t until Dougal asked me to help with his second book Keith Moon – A Personal Portrait in 2001 that it began to dawn on me what the picture represented. Before I went public with my discovery (by sending it to Mojo magazine with an accompanying story) I checked out the two photographers most likely to have taken pictures of John and Paul together in the seventies – Bob Gruen (John’s favourite New York photographer) and Linda McCartney. Bob told me he’d never photographed them together and Mary, Paul and Linda’s daughter, who nowadays curates her mother’s archives, said Linda hadn’t either, at least not after The Beatles disbanded.

So I put two and two together and decided this was, indeed, the final photograph of John and Paul together. I should add that John’s friend May Pang, another house-guest at number 625, also took pix of J&P together around this time but Dougal reckons this was before he snapped his shot.

Chris Charlesworth – From Just Backdated: JOHN, PAUL & KEITH, Santa Monica, 1974

Last updated on March 30, 2024