Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Looking for a photo....

 

Joe Hagan and Paul 



I was listening to the podcast "Another Kind of Mind" podcast the other day.  They were talking to the author of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan.   He wrote the biography of Jann Wenner.    While on there, he talks about the photograph of John and Paul from 1974.  


In 1974, Wenner received a mysterious cream-colored envelope in the mail, care of “Johann Weiner” and postmarked Los Angeles, California. Inside was a single Polaroid picture of John Lennon and Paul McCartney hanging out on a garden patio with friends: Linda McCartney, hoisting a pool stick; Keith Moon, in shorts and Roman sandals; and May Pang, Lennon’s then lover, holding McCartney’s daughter Mary on her lap. On the white strip below the image, dated “Palm Sunday 1974,” was the message “How do you sleep???!!!”

This was a reference to the John Lennon song from 1971’s Imagine, a notorious attack on McCartney in which Lennon snipes, “The only thing you done was yesterday.” Now the message was being re-purposed to attack Jann Wenner. Wenner said he never understood the precise meaning of the picture, but it was obvious it was a bitter joke from the Beatle he had betrayed. At the time, Paul and Linda McCartney had just appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, while Lennon’s latest album, Mind Games, was torched by Jon Landau in the magazine for having “his worst writing yet.”

— Joe Hagan (biographer), Vanity Fair: Jann Wenner, John Lennon, and the Greatest Rolling Stone Cover Ever. (September 29th, 2017)


 While talking to the girls on the podcast about this photo, Joe says that he has shared this photo before.  The girls all acted like they had seen the photo.   I searched the internet and could not find it.  I must find this photo!  Has anyone seen it?

6 comments:

  1. http://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2014/06/john-paul-keith-santa-monica-1974.html

    The pic was taken by Dougal Butler, Keith Moon's personal assistant, and later publisher around 1980 in Butler's biography on Moon. I bought the book when it first came out. My brain melted and spilt out my nose when I first saw the pic.

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  2. For anyone who has not seen them, here are the 4 pics of J+P in Santa Monica. Taken on the same day in 1974:

    http://www.feelnumb.com/2009/07/12/john-lennon-and-paul-mccartney-last-photo-together/

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  3. scroll down here: https://www.vintag.es/2018/02/last-known-photos-of-john-lennon-and.html

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  4. I’m thinking he may have tweeted it but maybe deleted it? May’s book has others from the same visit and based on the description, im guessing it looks like a near duplicate of this, taken within the same span of minutes: https://i0.wp.com/webgrafikk.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/photo_len_mac_dougal.jpg?resize=400%2C287

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  5. I've heard about this photo, it's news to me that he actually shared the photo. Maybe it's in one of the Rolling Stone magazine? I do hope someone finds this!

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  6. Thank you everyone for the responses. However, the photo taken by Butler is not the photo Joe was talking about. The mystery photo has Mary McCartney sitting on the lap of May Pang. What is interesting is that the Butler photo shows John holding a Polaroid photograph. Perhaps that photo in his hand is the one that he sent to Wenner?

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