December 16, 1968: Countdown to the Get Back sessions

17 days until the start of the Get Back sessions

Last week had been a doozy for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, busy with added crazy: rehearsals then a return to the stage at the Rock and Roll Circus, a late-night radio appearance, multiple interviews at a dentist’s office on the heels of bridge work for the Beatle. Plus the couple had brief custody of young 5-year-old Julian, while his mom was on a vacation with her significant other.

December 16, 1968, was a Monday, and a good day to stay in. But a Beatle’s work is never done.

Nova writer Irma Kurtz spent the day at John’s Weybridge estate – she wrote his “castle is protected by nothing more menacing than a sign, and it could be called significant, which says: ‘Children Playing’” —   wrapping up reporting she began two days earlier at the dentist’s office. These interviews would eventually be published the following March.

John and Yoko continued to operate in promotional mode in taking the interview at their home, but after a week of so much hustle, we can revel in this documentation of the mundane.

For instance, these were crazy cat people, owners of “eight beautiful cats who warm themselves at the cooker between getting pregnant and, unlike the rest of their household, being carnivorous.”

Yoko worked in the kitchen, slicing leeks “with the artistry of a sea-cook,” tossing the vegetable in butter.

‘I feel that I’m getting younger. Even physically. It is partly the diet because, you see, you are what you eat,’ she said with a confidence that would astonish a biologist. ‘And it is also the fact that I have met John. This year has been hard.’

Maybe with the couple working at such a high velocity, thoughts of slowing down easily took hold.

‘We’re looking forward to our retirement,’ John said, stretching his tennis shoes toward the fire. ‘Having created everything we want, we’ll just settle down on a farm maybe. I don’t know if we’ll actually farm.’ added the practical man.

‘I’m still hung up on work; I can’t help working,’ Yoko said. ‘That’s beautiful, but’ she added with one of those butterfly leaps so difficult to make coherent, ‘if I get over it, it will be better. All this hassle! Then we’ll just be together,’ said the romantic from the East.

Yoko touched on the lows of the past year, specifically the recent drug bust and miscarriage.

“But it is like a game,” Yoko said. “Everything is like a game if there is somebody else, and now I have John.”

And for this brief period, Yoko and John had Julian, in what probably was the last week he got to spend in the house he was first raised in.

We’re blessed not only with descriptions and quotes from this day, but also photographs courtesy of Susan Wood and Bob Thomas. Just like he did during the Get Back sessions, John opted to wear “continuity clothes,” the same beautiful, and questionably laundered rainbow shirt he had on at the dentist’s office 48 hours earlier.

John is captured in one photo with a newspaper, a treasure to a researcher hoping to confirm a date.

The couple went outside for additional photos with John’s Rolls Royce and big, black hats, as one does.

About 1,500 miles away, Paul McCartney was near the end of a holiday in Portugal. Like John, he performed in the past few days, too – but Paul created a circus of his own, drunk at a hotel bar with not a single camera or recording device in sight (see the last entry, on “Penina”). Paul spent a week deliberately avoiding the media.

He enjoyed time at the beach, as documented by Linda Eastman and probably first seen by the public in the gatefold of the McCartney LP. All of these subsequent photos aren’t specifically dated, but fall within this week.

We also know he went sightseeing, shopping, enjoying outdoor pursuits — that is, the normal things you do on holiday.

It wasn’t entirely play for Paul. According to Hunter Davies, and as recollected in his memoir “The Beatles, Football and Me,” Paul began writing a novel.

He borrowed my typewriter, when I wasn’t using it. I did try to sneak a read at the odd page, behind his back, but didn’t manage it. (I have asked since about his aspirations to write a novel, as he has now done a book of poems. He says he has completed a work of fiction, but it’s locked in a safe while he decides whether to have it published or not).

When Paul vacationed in Portugal in 1965, he forgot his guitar. Not so this time.

“In odd moments, including going to the lavatory, we could hear him playing away,” Davies wrote.