“Reunion song”: The John Lennon solo track that seemed destined for The Beatles
On December 9th, 1980, an anxious David Bowie stepped out onto the stage at New York’s Booth Theatre. He was midway through the Manhattan run of The Elephant Man. It had been a wild success so far. Uncharacteristically, there were three empty seats in the front row that night. “I can’t tell you how difficult that was to go on,” Bowie later declared. “I almost didn’t make it through the performance.”
The empty seats on the front row of The Elephant Man belonged to John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the man who slayed the Beatle the night before, Mark David Chapman. “I was second on his list,” Bowie later revealed. This torturing presentment of capricious fate was one of many harrowing what-ifs that would scar those caught up in the tumbling dominoes that cascaded after the cataclysm of Chapman’s crime.
Nobody felt the brutality of fate more fiercely than Jack Douglas, the famed music producer who had been working with Lennon earlier that day. “We finished ‘Walking on Thin Ice’, and then he was assassinated,” he solemnly told Far Out. “I had years of regret, and that final take running through my mind over and over again. The only way to put that to sleep was to do some heroin. That would put me to sleep. It was horrible.“
Douglas had helped to coax Lennon back into his creative stride when they were working together on Double Fantasy. He was so effective at this that even the success of their collaboration would add to the burden of Douglas’ horrific hindsight. Buoyed by their recent success, the former Beatle cancelled plans to recline in Bermuda, which would’ve placed him safely out of the country and away from a prowling Chapman. ”He didn’t want the creative flow to stop,” Douglas still mournfully recalls.
So, he rushed home from Bermuda and back to the studio, but he did so with a string of Caribbean demos intact. There are rumours that these demos, marked “for Paul“ and pitted with the comment “this is for Ringo”, were set to be Beatles ”reunion songs”. Given discussions between Lennon and Paul McCartney at the time while work was underway on The Beatles Anthology, that’s certainly a possibility. But caught up in the trauma of what followed, not even the surviving members can corroborate whether that is just a fanciful embellishment after the fact, born out of the emotional weight of his fateful closing original works.
The songs in question were ‘Grow Old With Me’, ‘Free as a Bird’, ‘Real Love’ and ‘Now and Then’. Regardless of the harrowing light they would soon be cast in, Douglas ensured they would be fittingly redeemed, and Lennon’s “this is for Ringo” remark before tracking ‘Grow Old With Me’ would find its intended target. “Jack asked if I ever heard The Bermuda Tapes, John’s demos from that time,” Ringo Starr recalled in 2019 after ‘Grow Old With Me’ found its way, finally, onto his solo record, What’s My Name. Up until this point, he had only heard snippets, partly put off by the trauma attached.
But years down the line, with Lennon’s legacy still growing, he was happy to look at the demos in a different light. As the drummer continued in his press release: “The idea that John was talking about me in that time before he died, well, I’m an emotional person. And I just loved this song. I sang it the best that I could. I do well up when I think of John this deeply. And I’ve done my best. We’ve done our best. The other good thing is that I really wanted Paul to play on it, and he said yes.“
Whether the song was always intended as a Beatles reunion song or not, it was finally set to become one. “Paul came over and he played bass and sings a little bit on this with me. So John’s on it in a way. I’m on it and Paul’s on it. It’s not a publicity stunt. This is just what I wanted. And the strings that Jack arranged for this track, if you really listen, they do one line from ‘Here Comes The Sun’. So in a way, it’s the four of us,” Ringo emotionally concluded.
It is a conclusion that encapsulates the band entirely. Their greatest strength, above all else, was that they were the very definition of a band. That ‘old friends’ spirit magically galvanises their work with a wistful transcendence. Honesty, communion and fun abound in their work, imbuing it with a sincerity that only friendship can afford.
It is what makes ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ Ringo’s finest moment within the band and ‘Grow Old With Me’ his finest moment outside of it. That is, indeed, if you can justly say it is a solo track after all, and not the lynchpin bringing his buddies back together for one last outing—Lennon the brains behind it all, Ringo the glue, McCartney alchemically making a demo symphonic, and Harrison’s quiet spiritualism weaved into the ether of the mix. And Douglas, in the George Martin role, eases some of the problems that have plagued him since that sorry night.
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