While Beatles fans dreamed of the group reuniting in the 1970s, David Bowie once revealed that he nearly managed to get John Lennon and Paul McCartney back together in 1974 to form a supergroup with him.
It was the year Bowie moved to New York City, just three years after Lennon himself had emigrated there. Shortly after Bowie’s arrival, he met Lennon at a party hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. Of all the Beatles, Lennon was his favorite.
“He was one of the major influences on my musical life,” Bowie said in an interview recorded in the 1980s. “I mean, I just thought he was the very best of what could be done with rock and roll, and also ideas.
Although he was nervous when the two met privately, they quickly formed a bond that led to Lennon visiting Bowie one night, with McCartney in tow.
As Bowie explained to Marc Riley on BBC Radio 6 Music, he was lodging at the time at the Pierre Hotel.
“I’d taken over a suite virtually for months and months,” he said. “I was kind of living there.”
Bowie explained that he was obsessed with the newly released Sony video recorder and would spend hours making his own films. “Fortunately, I was doing cocaine so I could stay up most of the night and complete these things,” he said, tongue in cheek.
It was on one of these late-night creative sprees that he was surprised by a pair of visitors.
“About three in the morning, there’s a knock on the door. And John was there and he had got Paul with him. It was the two of them been out on the town for the evening.”
Lennon was in the midst of his Lost Weekend, the period from roughly late 1973 to mid 1975 when he and his wife Yoko Ono separated. He was dividing his time between New York City and Los Angeles, and spent much of his time on a bender. It was also during this time that he began recording his album of rock classic covers, Rock ’n’ Roll.
Lennon, whose previous meeting with Bowie had lasted until nearly dawn, knew the singer would be up at that hour.
“He said, Can we come in?’” Bowie recalled. “He said, ‘You won’t believe what I’ve got here!’
“And I said, ‘I thought you two…’, and he said, ‘No. All that’s gonna change.’”
Bowie believed it was possibly the first time the two had been back together since the Beatles.
“It was great. We spent the evening just like rapping and talking. There was kind of a strange thing between them. There was a little bit of distance every now and again, but that must have been the first time they’d been back together for, you know, since the big bust up, you know.”
In the course of talking, the three music icons hit on the idea of working together.
“They actually asked me if I’d kind of join the two of them and become a trio with them, and we’d change the name to something else: David Bowie and the Beatles. They liked the idea there’d be two — like, DBB. I think they wanted to call it DBB.”
Sadly, it was all a long night’s pipe dream.
“The next morning, it just never came to anything,” Bowie concluded.
Soon after, however, Bowie and Lennon did go on to work together by recording a cover of the former Beatles’ 1968 song “Across the Universe” and co-writing “Fame.” Both songs would be included on Bowie’s 1975 album Young Americans, with “Fame” becoming the singer’s first number one song in America after it was released as that album’s second single.
Bowie wasn’t the only musician Lennon collaborated with at this time. He, along with Yoko Ono, performed with Frank Zappa and the Mothers at the Fillmore East. However, the couple ran afoul of the electric guitar virtuoso when they remixed their performance of Zappa’s song “King Kong,” released it under the name “Jamrag” on their 1972 album Some Time in New York City and claimed it as their own composition.
And in 1974, shortly before his sessions with Bowie, Lennon had piano rocker Elton John guest on his hit song “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.”
Considering all that, it’s not surprising Lennon would be open to a new collaboration with McCartney, his original writing partner. Unfortunately, it never happened.
