Guests on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast have brought up some fascinating anecdotes in recent months. Gene Simmons told how Ace Frehley lifted a guitar solo from the Doors for a Kiss track. Zakk Wylde revealed how a chance to work with Guns N’ Roses sidelined his career with Ozzy Osbourne.
But few have delivered a history-changing story quite like Elliot Mintz. A friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Mintz has challenged the long-held belief that Lennon and Paul McCartney last met on April 25, 1976. According to that rather sad tale, McCartney turned up unannounced at Lennon’s New York apartment at the Dakota and was turned away by Lennon, who was busy with his son, Sean. Supposedly, the two former musical partners never met again.
Mintz, however, says the two men crossed paths two years later, during the Christmas holiday. And he knows, he says, because John and Yoko invited him over.
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“They invite me to Dakota to spend one of the Christmas days with them,” Mintz tells Corgan. “And I go up to the Dakota, and I notice in the living room, there’s a vase with a single branch of a tree. That’s their Christmas decoration.
“I sat down on the white couch in the white living room, and we’re just making small talk,” he goes on. “Then there’s a knock on the door after the intercom. [Lennon] opens it, and Paul and Linda McCartney walk in.”
Mintz, who had been a radio DJ in the 1960s and went on to become a TV personality, had become friendly with Lennon over the years. But he says this was his first meeting with the other half of the iconic Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership.
“We sat and we talked for a while. It wasn’t overly jubilant. It wasn’t icy. It was just correct,” he says.
The McCartneys then suggested they go to Manhattan celebrity hotspot Elaine’s.
“Elaine’s had a reputation,” Mintz states. “I mean, you walk in and there’s Woody Allen, Gore Vidal, and there’s Tom Wolf and all those people. But the food was miserable, and everybody knew it.”
Leafing through the menu did little to inspire. Then an idea struck.
“Linda said, ‘You know, there’s a great pizza place not far from here. Really thin-crusted pizza. Do you think you could get a pizza delivered here?’ And she said it directly to me. Who else was she going to suggest it to? ‘Yoko, would you drop the dime?’”
Knowing that Elaine’s could be “problematic,” they arranged to have the pizza “delivered through the back door. It was taken out of the cardboard box,” Mintz explains, “put on Elaine’s beautiful plates, and brought out so a casual observer would think it’s a dish that they hadn’t seen yet.”
With the sun setting, the group retreated to Lennon’s white living room, and soon it was just the two Beatles and Mintz.
“John and Paul kind of wandered over to this very, very tall window that looked down upon the west side of Manhattan,” Mintz says. As he was still on the couch, he could hear only “spasms” of their conversation.
“It was small talk,” he says. “Nothing of substance. But I do recall Paul asking John, ‘So, are you making any music these days?’, and John replying, ‘No. My time is with my baby,’” he said, referring to Sean, who was born in 1975. “‘What about you?’
“And Paul says, ‘I’m always making music. I make music every day of my life. I can’t stop making music.’”
McCartney was always writing, sometimes solo, sometimes with Linda and, by the 1980s, with guests that included Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Elvis Costello.
Mintz believes that if Lennon had taken the bait, the pair could have “sat in the living room and changed the face of contemporary music one more time.” But that didn’t happen. The McCartneys were gone within the hour.
Corgan’s interviewee admits that this final-ever meeting of two of music’s greatest minds was “anticlimactic,” and yet it perhaps still represents a more touching final moment for their partnership than the alternative that has been passed down through history.
