A Toot and a Snore in '74

• 1. Introduction

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  A Toot and a Snore in '74 is the only known recording of John Lennon and Paul McCartney playing music together after the Beatles broke apart in 1970. On the 28th of March 1974, the two men found themselves in the same studio in Burbank, California, for the first time in three years. What came out of that night was not a triumphant reunion. It was not even, by most accounts, very good music. Yet the tape has circulated for decades, studied and argued over, because it is all that exists of the two most famous songwriting partners of the twentieth century sharing a microphone after their most public falling-out. The questions that linger around it are not just musical. How did they end up in the same room? What was the atmosphere like? And what does the recording tell us about whether the Beatles could ever have come back together?

• 2. The Night in Burbank

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  Lennon was at Burbank Studios that evening in his capacity as producer, working on Harry Nilsson's album Pussy Cats. The sessions had a nickname: the Jim Keltner Fan Club Hour. Paul McCartney and his wife Linda arrived after the first night of recording, an unplanned visit that would end up as the most documented drop-in in rock history. They were joined by a remarkable gathering: Nilsson himself, Stevie Wonder, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, Mal Evans, saxophonist Bobby Keys, May Pang, and producer Ed Freeman, who was working with Don McLean in the neighboring studio and stepped in to fill in on bass.

  Lennon at the time was living in Los Angeles with Pang, separated from Yoko Ono in the stretch of his life that became known as his "lost weekend". He and McCartney had not been in the same room for three years. During that interval they had taken public swipes at each other through the press. Yet Pang later recalled that when the two met that night, they fell back into the easy rhythm of their old friendship, as though the bitterness had never happened.

  McCartney did not pick up a bass. He sat down at Ringo Starr's drum kit, a choice that Jimmy Iovine, who witnessed the session, later interpreted as deliberate. Iovine said McCartney chose the drums because "he was alert enough to say, 'This is not how the Beatles are getting back together'. He was the one in the room who you could see got it." Starr, who had been recording with Nilsson's project but was absent that particular evening, turned up at the next day's session and complained that McCartney always messes up his drums.

• 3. The Tape Itself

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  Lennon takes lead vocal and guitar. Wonder sings and plays electric piano. Linda McCartney is on organ, Pang on tambourine, Nilsson on vocals, Davis on guitar, and Keys on saxophone. Bobby Keys was asked about the session on multiple occasions afterward and could not recall any of it.

  The session was not productive in any conventional musical sense. Lennon is audible on the recording appearing to be under the influence of cocaine. On the first track he is heard offering Wonder a snort, and on the fifth track he asks someone to hand him one. That exchange on the first track is where the album title comes from directly: Lennon can be heard asking, "You wanna snort, Steve? A toot? It's goin' round." Lennon also has audible trouble with his microphone and headphones throughout.

  When the bootleg eventually circulated, critics were not generous about the music itself. Jayson Greene of Pitchfork wrote that the title "came from cocaine, and it sounds that way", calling the session "mythical, and yet the result was atrocious." Tom Doyle described it as leaking the "shambolic results" of the session, noting that the musicians "proceeded to jam - and to get high." Rock's Backpages called the title a pretty fair description of many other sessions on which the hard-living Keys also played during that period.

  McCartney reflected on it in 2007, saying: "I'm afraid it was a rather heady session, shall we say. I don't think it was very good. I mean, that is kinda proof really that a Beatles reunion wouldn't necessarily have been great."

• 4. From Session to Bootleg

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  Lennon first mentioned the Burbank session in a 1975 interview, the year after it happened. More details came out in 1983, when May Pang published her memoir Loving John. The recording itself did not appear until 1992, when the bootleg surfaced on the Mistral label. It reached wider public awareness after McCartney referenced the session in a 1997 interview, speaking with Australian writer Sean Sennett in his Soho office. McCartney told Sennett the session was "hazy... for a number of reasons".

  Lennon biographer James A. Mitchell put it plainly: the impromptu performance was never going to be officially released. Mitchell described it as "scattered bits and pieces of songs pulled from strained memories amid the unspoken expectations. It was fun, but the time and place weren't feted for anything further." The recording stands not as music anyone would release but as a document of a particular night.

  In 2015, Uncut ranked A Toot and a Snore in '74 at number 40 in their list of the fifty best bootlegs. Their write-up described it as a recording of "unspectacular banter and similarly unlegendary music", noted that Wonder "attempts magnificently to paper over the cracks", and rated its sound quality as "documentarily satisfactory/quiet/poor". The magazine concluded that the encounter might be more romantically remembered through a photograph: a moustachioed McCartney visiting Lennon at home in Los Angeles, taken by Keith Moon's minder, Dougal Butler.