1 of Paul McCartney’s Last Conversations With John Lennon Was About Making Bread
John Lennon and Paul McCartney are responsible for one of the most prolific rock acts in all of musical history: the Beatles. Throughout their decades-long friendship, the pair traveled the world, sold out stadiums, and created a legacy that is still present today.
Regardless of all of the glitz and glam, one of McCartney and Lennon’s final conversations was about something seemingly mundane: baking bread.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon from the early Liverpool days to the Beatles superstardom
Before they were the Beatles, Lennon and McCartney were two middle-class Liverpool boys who bonded over their passion for rock ‘n’ roll music and songwriting. The two famously met at a church social in 1957, when McCartney was just 15 and Lennon 16, per UDiscoverMusic. Lennon’s band at the time, the Quarry Men, was playing at the event, which captured the attention of the aspiring musician, McCartney.
McCartney has spoken at length about his first meeting with Lennon, saying: “I remember John singing a song called ‘Come Go With Me.’ He’d heard it on the radio. He didn’t really know the verses, but he knew the chorus. The rest he just made up himself. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’ Of course, he had his glasses off, so he really looked suave. I remember John was good.”
After hitting it off as friends and writing their first songs together, Lennon and McCartney went on to officially form the Beatles in 1960, though the “Fab Four” remembered today — consisting of Lennon, McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison — wouldn’t be established until 1962.
In the early days, the band did short-term residencies at clubs around Hamburg, Germany until they achieved international success around 1963. This sparked worldwide “Beatlemania,” leading the band to sell out venues around the globe until they eventually stopped touring in 1966.
During this time, Lennon and McCartney remained especially close, acting as the main songwriters for the Beatles. But towards the end of the Beatles, bad business, messy relationships, and the pressure of fame led to a major falling out between the two that lasted for years.
One of Paul McCartney’s final conversations with John Lennon was about baking bread
In Dec. 1980, Lennon was shot dead by Mark David Chapman in New York City. McCartney had just mended his friendship with Lennon at the time. The two would frequently chat over the phone.
While speaking with Howard Stern on Sirius XM, McCartney revealed that he spoke about baking bread in one of his last conversations with Lennon. “I was baking bread and got quite good at it,” he said. “So when I heard John was doing it, it was great. We could just talk about something so ordinary.”
Lennon had just welcomed his first and only child with Yoko Ono, Sean Ono-Lennon, in 1975. In his final years, the former Beatle spent a lot of time at home raising Sean while continuing to create music, making for a much more domesticated lifestyle than the one he’d experienced with the Beatles.
“It was really nice, and I was so glad that we got back to that relationship that we always had,” McCartney added. “We’d lived in each other’s pockets for so long that it was great to get back to that.”
Paul McCartney reconciled with John Lennon before his death
Although talking about baking bread might sound uninteresting to many, it was a deeply personal metaphor for McCartney fixing his relationship with Lennon.
“It was very special to me that we reached that point because you’d had the whole horrible thing of the group breaking up,” he said. “I think we just realized, ‘come on guys, we love each other, what are we doing? We’re messing around.’”
In a different interview with Stern, McCartney expressed his gratitude about the fact that he and Lennon “got over it,” saying, “I feel very blessed we got over it, because if we hadn’t, and then John goes and gets killed, I don’t know how I would’ve dealt with that.”
He continued: “I was very lucky because we sort of got it back together, and it was beautiful. I would ring him or go see him in New York.”
