How the United States banned Paul McCartney from a Beatles reunion
Anyone would have given their left arm to see any of The Beatles get together again back in the 1970s.
The early months of 1970 cast a dark shadow over the Fab Four once Paul McCartney announced that the band was done, but even when they were at their nastiest towards each other, everyone was wondering if they would ever find a way to put their cares aside and make a couple of songs together again. But right when it seemed like they were all on the same page again, McCartney managed to get himself blocked from being in the same room with his old mates all over again.
For a little while, though, it seemed like Macca was the villain of the band in many ways. He wasn’t the one who wanted to quit, but since he was the first to make the news public, he was public enemy number one for the rest of his bandmates, especially when he started to have major disagreements with what Allen Klein was doing to their work. But when the dust settled, it seemed like they all still enjoyed each other’s company.
Each of them would have fallouts with the other every now and again, but if Lennon and McCartney could find a way to mend their friendship after lobbing diss tracks towards each other, surely they could find a way to get back on the same page in the studio, right? Well, that occasion did arise to a certain degree, but it wouldn’t come until their hapless drummer friend needed a few more songs to fill out his album.
To put it bluntly, Ringo Starr is nowhere near the same kind of songwriter that his old mates were, so having a little help from his friends when filling out his record was the best he could have hoped for. But when John Lennon offered to give ‘I’m the Greatest’ to Starr for his 1973 album Ringo, it seemed like magic was happening when George Harrison was in Los Angeles at the same time to help Lennon finish off the rest of the song.
Having three members in the same place was unheard of, but since all of their business drama was becoming water under the bridge, it felt like the band could have easily reunited, if only for this one tune. McCartney had even contributed a song to the record and the session had other ‘Fifth Beatles’ like Klaus Voorman and Billy Preston in the mix, but McCartney’s absence was a bit more nuanced than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Long before he had been detained in Japan and sent to prison for cannabis possession, Macca had already been given a slap on the wrist for growing cannabis on his farm in Scotland in 1972. He wasn’t going to serve any hard time by any stretch, but since the rest of his former bandmates were performing in the US, the musical legend was banned from entering the country or even being granted a visa to travel abroad.
The whole thing seems like far too much red tape for the time, but you can chalk it up to being a different time for rock and roll altogether. And while the US has become a bit more lenient when it comes to cannabis possession in recent years, the fact that we never got to hear what the band members sounded like playing together one more time remains one of the greatest missed opportunities in rock history.
We can at least take comfort in knowing that the camaraderie among the bandmates was back after so many years, but it’s always going to sting a little more once you know what could have been. Drug possession was taken a lot more seriously at the time, but had this kind of thing played out in the modern age, people would be bending over backwards to make sure that all the Beatles were in the same place one more time.
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