The geography of the last meeting matters. Los Angeles, 1974. The specific period known as Lennon’s Lost Weekend — the eighteen months he spent separated from Yoko Ono, living with May Pang, the personal assistant who had been, by various accounts, encouraged by Ono to be with him during the separation. A period of considerable personal chaos that produced, alongside the chaos, a significant body of musical work and a kind of desperate sociability. Lennon during this period was going out. Attending things. Reconnecting with people from his past in ways that the structured, Yoko-centered life at the Dakota had not permitted.
McCartney was in Los Angeles recording. He was in a productive period of his own — Wings was becoming a real band rather than a critical punchline, and the confidence that came with that was beginning to give him back the version of himself that the Beatles years had partially obscured. He was not yet fully at ease with the post-Beatles version of his own identity but he was getting there.
Lennon came to the recording session. Whether this was planned or spontaneous depends on whose account you consult. What is consistent is that at some point in the session the other musicians found reasons to be elsewhere and the two men were left in the room together.
May Pang has given accounts of the period that confirm the meeting happened and that describe the atmosphere before and after it in terms that suggest something significant took place. She has described Lennon returning from the room with an expression she found difficult to read — not the performed neutrality he sometimes deployed after difficult interactions, but something more unguarded than that. She did not ask what had been said. She understood that it was not a thing to be asked about.
McCartney has referred to this period in interviews with the careful navigation of someone who is telling a true story but choosing which parts of it to tell. He has confirmed the visit. He has said that they talked about music — about what each of them was working on, about the things they were trying to do that the Beatles format had never allowed. He has said it was a good conversation. He has said — and this is the part that carries the most weight given everything that came after — that it felt like something that had been broken between them was slightly less broken than it had been.
The full conversation is McCartney’s. He was there. Lennon is gone. What Lennon said and what McCartney said back exists in one surviving memory and that memory has chosen, across fifty years, to protect the most significant parts of it from public consumption.
What McCartney has given us is the atmosphere of it. Two people who had been the most important creative relationship of each other’s lives, sitting in a recording studio in Los Angeles in 1974, talking about music. Not about the lawyers. Not about the business. Not about the years of damage and the things said in public and the songs written at each other. About music. About what they were making. About what they were trying to reach.
The last time they were truly alone together and they talked about the thing that had always been the real language between them.
Six years later Lennon was gone.
McCartney has been carrying the content of that conversation ever since. He will carry it until he cannot carry anything anymore. Then it will be gone — the last private piece of the most public friendship in the history of popular music.
He is entitled to that. He earned it in ways that cannot be calculated.