Beatles News
Lennon and Ono's wedding and "bed-in" inspired media frenzy and a Beatles song.
"The Ballad of John and Yoko" was banned by over 100 U.S. radio stations.
Lennon called the song "a prayer... a gospel song," and it still became a hit.
It’s no exaggeration to say that John Lennon and Yoko Ono had one of the most iconic (and controversial) love stories of all time…or that the couple’s relationship was the target of one of the biggest media frenzies in history. One of the most turbulent periods on Lennon and Ono’s timeline happened over a two-week span in 1969 when the pair got married in Gibraltar and held their first “bed-in” in Amsterdam, being hounded by the press all the while. To top it all off, the now-classic Beatles song Lennon wrote about the experience ended up getting banned.
Recorded on April 14, 1969, and released as a non-album single on May 30, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” chronicled Lennon and Ono’s journey in a funny, sort of exasperated way:
“Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton / Talkin’ in our beds for a week / The newspeople said: ‘Say what’re you doin’ in bed?’ / I said: ‘We’re only try to get us some peace’ / Christ you know it ain’t easy / You know how hard it can be / The way things are goin’ / They’re gonna crucify me”
The song was recorded by just Lennon and Paul McCartney, as George Harrison and Ringo Starr were away at the time and Lennon was in a hurry to get the track out.
“Paul knew that people were being nasty to John, and he just wanted to make it well for him,” Ono said later, per Rolling Stone. “Paul has a very brotherly side to him.”
Since Lennon had gotten into a bit of hot water previously when he compared the popularity of the Beatles to that of Jesus, he anticipated that the lyrics about “Christ” and being crucified might ruffle a few feathers. According to the official Beatles website, he even sent a note warning record exec Tony Bramwell.
“No pre-publicity on ‘Ballad Of John And Yoko’ especially the ‘Christ’ bit,” Lennon wrote. “So don’t play it round too much or you’ll frighten people — get it pressed first.”
Alas, even after it was pressed, the song encountered plenty of backlash. In fact, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” was banned by over 100 U.S. radio stations, with radio program directors calling it “profane,” “sacrilegious,” “offensive,” and “objectionable,” according to a Rolling Stone article at the time.
Source: parade.com/Jacqueline Burt Cote
Almost everyone can sing along to “Maybe I’m Amazed” by Paul McCartney. The song was first released by him in 1970, not coincidentally the same year that the Beatles, made up of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison, split up. Fueled partly by Paul McCartney’s desire to do a solo project, his wish came true with his debut solo album, McCartney.
But it wasn’t until seven years later that “Maybe I’m Amazed” became a hit for him. The song is written as a love letter to his wife, Linda McCartney, whom he wed in 1969, and her devotion to him amid the upheaval with the end of the Beatles.
“Maybe I’m Amazed” says, “Maybe I’m amazed at the way you’re with me all the time / And maybe I’m afraid of the way I leave you / Maybe I’m amazed at the way you help me sing my song / You right me when I’m wrong / Maybe I’m amazed at the way I really need you.” What Paul McCartney Says About Writing “Maybe I’m Amazed”.
It was Lennon who first left The Beatles, departing the band in 1969. But it was Paul McCartney who first moved full-speed ahead with his solo career, with McCartney.
Buoyed by Linda McCartney’s devotion, he not only wrote “Maybe I’m Amazed” but also created a movie around the song, long before music videos were popular. The movie includes photos taken by his wife.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Gayle Thompson
The 85-year-old musician followed up on an announcement first made in March.
Sir Ringo Starr's new album release date is approaching and the former Beatle said he s excited for the new project to be launched on April 24. Ringo's new album, Long Long Road, is his second with T Bone Burnett. It features collaborations with Sheryl Crow, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz and St. Vincent.
He took to Instagram overnight to share an update on the release. A picture of Ringo holding the peace sign was shared with the caption: "Here it comes, my new record Long Long Road. Peace and love."
Fans of Sir Ringo commented on the post as they await the new music from him. One comment said "Looking forward to it" and another fan added "This is the day after my birthday, thank you Ringo. My favourite Beatle."
Other messages included: "And arriving exactly when needed. Heartfelt anticipation" and "You are such a treasure."
The new album follows on from Sir Ringo’s 2025 album Look Up which marked his first number one album on the UK's official country chart. Sir Ringo said: "I'm blessed to have T Bone in my life right now and working with me on these records. After we did the last record, which I love listening to, this one just sort of happened."
Sir Ringo added that the album includes musical influences from guitarist Carl Perkins, as he said: "I recorded two Carl Perkins songs with The Beatles, and both T Bone and I wanted one on this record and he found this beautiful track I'd never heard before, I Don't See Me In Your Eyes Anymore."
Source: liverpoolecho.co.uk/Courtney Eales
The Beatles started running out of steam towards the end of the 60s. Their fervor for recording wasn’t what it was during their heyday. But one song reignited their passion for the craft, at least among the band’s central songwriting duo, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. On this day in 1969, the pair recorded one of their final efforts together—a song so controversial that it was banned by the radio.
The Beatles’ Song, Recorded by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, That Was So Controversial the Radio Banned It
“The Ballad Of John And Yoko” was recorded soon after the namesake couple’s wedding in 1969. The simple ceremony was encapsulated into this track, which ultimately became a non-album Beatles single.
“It was very romantic,” John Lennon once said. “It’s all in the song, ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’, if you want to know how it happened, it’s in there. Gibraltar was like a little sunny dream. I couldn’t find a white suit—I had sort of off-white corduroy trousers and a white jacket. Yoko had all white on.”
“It’s a piece of journalism,” he continued. “It’s a folk song. That’s why I called it ‘The Ballad Of.’”
Lennon penned this song, clearly in his honeymoon phase. He then took the track to McCartney, who instantly connected to it. The pair then went to Abbey Road and finished the recording in a single day, without their other bandmates. Though this was a move of necessity rather than exclusion, it did reflect the band’s fracturing state.
This song was a recording feat for Lennon and McCartney, but it wasn’t a runaway hit. Thanks to its touchy subject matter, this song was banned by multiple radio stations.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Alex Hopper
The Beatles were the biggest and most important act of the 1960s, but you’d never know it by looking at Billboard’s Easy Listening chart (now called Adult Contemporary). Easy listening stations wanted to have a distinct identity from pop stations in the 1960s. Some artists did well in both formats, including Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark and Glen Campbell. But many artists fared much better on the Easy Listening chart than they did on the Hot 100. Among them: Jack Jones, Al Martino, Andy Williams, Perry Como, Vikki Carr, The Lettermen, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Eddy Arnold, Jerry Vale and Ed Ames.
Even “Yesterday,” one of the most classic (and oft-recorded) ballads in music history, failed to crack the Easy Listening chart. The 1965 single logged four weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, but it went nowhere (man) on Easy Listening. Those adult-skewing stations were more inclined to play the schmaltzy “Red Roses for a Blue Lady,” which was a top 10 Easy Listening hit for three artists that year — Vic Dana, Bert Kaempfert & His Orchestra and Wayne Newton.
The Beatles didn’t crack the AC chart until November 1969, with George Harrison’s ballad “Something,” which reached No. 17. That was a song so undeniable that genre GOAT Frank Sinatra often introduced it in concert, as he did here, by saying: “It’s one of the best love songs, I believe, to be written in 50 or 100 years.”
The Beatles finally broke through at AC in 1970, just as they were calling it quits. “Let It Be” logged four weeks at No. 1 that spring; “The Long and Winding Road” peaked at No. 2. In the 1970s, the gap between what pop and AC stations played narrowed considerably, as such acts as Carpenters (whose first single was a ballad remake of the Beatles’ 1965 smash “Ticket to Ride”), Neil Diamond, John Denver, Olivia Newton-John and Helen Reddy regularly climbed high on both charts. Bee Gees, Chicago and Elton John, who, like the Beatles a decade earlier, bridged pop and rock, became AC mainstays in the 1970s.
By 1976, when The Beatles’ 1966 track “Got To Get You Into My Life” was belatedly released as a single (to promote the then-current Rock’n’ Roll Music compilation), it made the top 10 on both the Hot 100 and the AC chart. Easy listening stations that wouldn’t even play an exquisite ballad like “Yesterday” in 1965 now hopped on a vibrant pop/rock track. AC radio had gotten hipper and more contemporary over the preceding 11 years, thanks in large to The Beatles and the generation of acts they influenced.
Source: billboard.com/Paul Grein
Biographies can be a tricky, difficult genre to pull off. The best are written from a distance and focus on a critical assessment of their subject. They’re not afraid to hold the person at the center of the story accountable for indiscretions in either personal or professional life choices. The key to a successful biography has always been objectivity, distance, and a willingness to take a stand. This is especially true when it comes to divisive artists whose legacies are rich but still questionable. In the matter of Yoko Ono, the multi-hyphenate visual/recording artist, poet, sculptor, pioneering performance artist, widow of Beatle John Lennon, any biographer who undertakes a manageable account of the nonagenarian's life and times has to make a choice. Should he cover the prolific output, the colorful life, or both?
Ono turned 93 in February, and has been retired for approximately the past 10 years. She’s living on a farm in upstate New York. She’s given over the family empire to her fifty year old son Sean Lennon, who oversees boxed set releases of work by his father (Mind Games) and both parents together (Sometime In New York City.) Early in the prologue of Yoko Ono: A Biography, Sheff discloses his access to the world of John and Yoko: It was the fall of 1980. They had been recording their comeback album, Double Fantasy, a release that alternated tracks as a sort of dialogue between each other. Sheff spent nearly three weeks with them that September, wrote the feature for Playboy, and was devastated like most of the world at Lennon’s December 8, 1980 murder:
Source: sampan.org/Christopher John Stephens
Every closed door leaves another waiting to be opened. When The Beatles split for good in April 1970, drummer Ringo Starr was more than prepared to embark on a new musical journey. Starr may not have been part of the prolific John Lennon-Paul McCartney songwriting partnership, whose volatile yet productive collaboration yielded roughly 180 songs for the band. With only two Beatles songwriting credits (or four, if you could include his co-writes), Starr seems like the last Beatle who would pursue a solo career.
Yet, with fewer creative constraints and more time at his disposal, the "song-first" drummer learned to trust his instincts over perfection. When he followed his heart into experimenting with different genres, it led him to create one highly misunderstood song — one that, contrary to popular belief, was inspired more by frendship than by hatred.
Ringo Starr Embraced '70s Glam Rock Realness in "Back Off Boogaloo"
They say drummers aren't great songwriters, but Starr seems to enjoy proving that wrong — even if it took him some time to find his footing. Before The Beatles split in 1970, Starr wrote his first song for the band, "Don't Pass Me By," which he originally worked on around 1963-1964. It was his first, and one of the few solo compositions he contributed to the group. However, the song sat in the vault for years before finally appearing on the 1968 album, The White Album.
Source: collider.com/Dyah Ayu Larasati
The album included two hit singles, the title track and “Jet.” It went to #1 in the U.S. and the U.K. and remains McCartney’s most successful non-Beatles album.
The cover featured McCartney, his wife, Linda McCartney, and guitarist Denny Laine posing as escaped convicts alongside actors James Coburn and Christopher Lee, British boxer John Conteh, U.K. broadcasters Michael Parkinson and Clement Freud, and English entertainer Kenny Lynch.
McCartney celebrated the 50th anniversary of the album by reissuing it in February 2024.
A documentary about McCartney’s post-Beatles career, including the formation of Wings, debuted on Prime Video in February. He also looked back at his time in Wings in the book Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, which came out in November.
Source: kslx.com
Because they arrived on the scene around the same time and sported two vastly different images, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were often painted as enemies. In actuality, the two bands maintained a cordial relationship, occasionally indulging in friendly rivalry.
As a matter of fact, The Beatles provided The Stones with one of their earliest singles. But only after they first deemed that they didn’t want to put the song out there in that same way.
The frenzy that started to greet The Beatles in late 1962 in Great Britain soon enveloped The Rolling Stones when they started their recording career a year later. Whereas The Fab Four came across as polite and happy-go-lucky, The Stones put forth more of a bad-boy image.
But both enjoyed dizzying levels of success. And even when some in the press tried to imagine some sort of animosity between the two groups, they actually harbored no ill will toward each other at all. They regularly interacted in London as the beat music craze rolled through England in 1963.
One area where The Beatles enjoyed a pretty good head start on The Stones was the songwriting department. The Stones mostly relied on cover songs for their early material. Meanwhile, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote most of the stuff for The Beatles. And, in one case, they donated a single to The Stones.
Lennon and McCartney wrote the song “I Wanna Be Your Man” for Ringo Starr to sing. Since Starr didn’t write his own material, The Beatles’ chief writers tried to make sure there was something for him to sing on each album. They planned it for their second UK album, which would be titled With The Beatles when released in late 1963.
How the song ended up in the hands of The Stones is somewhat debated. Paul McCartney remembered members of The Stones randomly driving by in a cab and picking up Lennon and him on the way to the studio. In this version of the story, Mick Jagger and company asked if the two Beatles had any songs they might want to hand over. That led to them offering “I Wanna Be Your Man”.
Other principals, including members of The Stones, remember Lennon and McCartney actively pushing the song to the band, with Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham acting as intermediary. In any case, The Stones recorded their version and released it as their second UK single in November 1963. “I Wanna Be Your Man” hit No. 12 in the UK, their first Top 20 hit.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Jim Beviglia
Every artist has songs they can’t stand, and for The Beatles, that song was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Recorded at a time when the band was already struggling, the song appears on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album. It was a bit of a pain to make, according to drummer Ringo Starr.
Starr told Rolling Stone, “It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for f***ing weeks. I thought it was mad.”
The year was 1969, and Lennon had been in a car crash with his wife, Yoko Ono, weeks prior. She accompanied Lennon to the studio for some of the recording, which probably didn’t help matters. McCartney, who wrote the song, also kept having new ideas throughout recording, which annoyed Beatles like George Harrison.
Harrison even admitted, “After a while we did a good job on it, but when Paul got an idea or an arrangement in his head ….”
Other Beatles expressed a similar sentiment. Lennon said he “hated it,” and that the track was done “a hundred million times.”
It took The Beatles four lengthy sessions to complete “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. The Story Behind the Song.
Even though the recording of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” was incredibly difficult, it’s ironic once you learn the song’s meaning. When Paul McCartney set out to write “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, he had become interested in the works of Alfred Jarry. After hearing his play “Ubu Cocu,” McCartney was inspired. He wanted to write a song about a character (Maxwell) who also lives in Jerry’s fictitious universe.
“I don’t know, to me, the silver hammer is like a medical thing, it’s a little bit ominous,” McCartney shares in his podcast A Life In Lyrics. Apparently, Maxwell was a medical student, and his silver hammer is kind of like a reflex hammer. You know, the kind the doctor uses to check your knees. However, this hammer works a little differently. Maxwell’s hammer comes up from behind and greets its victims (Joan, the teacher, and the judge) with an unhappy fate.
Source: americansongwriter.com/Kat Caudill
