Member-only story
When John Met Lennon
Inside* the 1974 session where Elton John talked John Lennon into a famous bet
By mid-afternoon the control room at the Record Plant smells of cold coffee and cigarette smoke. Nobody is drinking. That is the first thing a visitor would notice, if they had been around John Lennon in Los Angeles a few months earlier. There are no bottles under the desk and no hangers-on draped over the couch. There is a schedule. Noon to 10pm, weekdays only, and the former Beatle is on time.
He’s leaning over the console in a faded denim shirt with a badge pinned to the pocket, round tinted glasses pushed up his nose, listening to a playback of the backing track for a song he still isn’t sure about.
“It’s a bit of a throwaway,” he says to nobody in particular. “Sounds like a jingle for a hamburger joint.”
Jimmy Iovine, barely 21, rides the faders and says nothing. He has learned that when Lennon talks like this he’s thinking out loud, not asking.
Out on the floor, Jim Keltner is loosening his snare. Klaus Voormann sits on an amp with his bass across his knees. Bobby Keys is running a saxophone line under his breath, the one that will open the record. Julian, 11 years old and over from England for the summer holidays, is perched on a stool near the drum kit watching…
