Beatles News
After John Lennon left The Beatles, he didn’t frequently do performances. He never even went on a full tour. However, John Lennon performed in front of a large audience after losing a bet to Elton John. John recalls the performance being his first in a while, and he was “physically sick” before getting on stage.
John Lennon and Elton John became good friends. The two collaborated on two songs: A cover of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” by Sir Elton and Lennon’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.” Lennon helped Elton with his cover of the famous Beatles song but was credited as Dr. Winston O’Boogie, with Winston being his middle name. The song was commercially successful and reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles’ breakup shattered the rock and roll industry as fans struggled to believe the band was no more. While fans still debate who is to blame for the breakup, many are surprised about where it happened. The Beatles had already announced their eventual split, but John Lennon made their separation official at Disney World, the most magical place on earth.
In September 1969, John Lennon privately informed The Beatles of his intentions to leave the band. Later, in 1970, Paul McCartney publicly announced he would leave the band. The last collaboration between The Beatles would be Let it Be and Abbey Road, two great albums shrouded by legacies of feuds.
Lennon and McCartney both went on solo careers, with McCartney debuting his first solo album McCartney in 1970. Lennon’s first solo album Plastic Ono Band debuted in December 1970. While The Beatles had been separated for a few years, the dissolution was not official until Lennon signed the necessary paperwork in 1974.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
In 1980, Paul McCartney found that his celebrity wouldn’t help him avoid arrest when he brought drugs into Japan. The musician arrived in Tokyo with half a pound of marijuana in his bag, an amount that could’ve have landed him in prison for seven years. While McCartney ultimately avoided more than a few days of jail time, he said the experience was frightening. Still, he admitted it was stupid to have even been in the situation.
In 1980, McCartney flew to Tokyo in preparation for a multiple-city concert tour with his band Wings. When he arrived at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, a customs agent discovered half a pound of marijuana in his bag. While he said it was for his personal use, the amount meant that he was at risk for a smuggling charge and up to seven years in prison.
“We were about to fly to Japan and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything to smoke over there,” McCartney said in 2004, per History. “This stuff was too good to flush down the toilet, so I thought I’d take it with me.”
When reflecting on the incident, he said he’d been stupid to try to bring drugs to Japan.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison disregarded his ego and allowed his friend, Eric Clapton, to play on his song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” The Beatle thought Clapton did great work, but they had to make the tune sound more “Beatle-y.”
The Beatle and Clapton briefly crossed paths several times throughout the first half of the 1960s. However, they didn’t become friends until the latter part of the decade.
In Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Clapton said George recognized him as an equal because Clapton had a “level of proficiency even then that he saw as being fairly unique too.”
The Yardbirds guitarist also thinks George liked that he was a free agent. “And I think, if anything, he may have already been wondering about whether he was in the right place being in a group,” Clapton said. “Because the group politic is a tricky one. There was a lot about what he had going, which I envied, and there was a lot about what I had going that he envied.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
Fans were devastated in April 1970 when the Beatles announced they were splitting up. In fact, the band had been falling apart behind the scenes for the previous few years, amid fights, rivalries and resentments. In an extraordinarily frank and unvarnished interview in 1971 with The Daily Express, Lennon opened up about why for the rest of his life the musician would never waver from his conviction he could see "no reason" why they should ever reunite.
The interview was given to Daily Express entertainment journalist David Wigg in October 1971.
Lennon had been increasingly dismissive of some of the Beatles material. Towards the end of the group he also implied McCartney's compositions were rather lightweight.
Source: Stefan Kyriazis/express.co.uk
John Lennon died at the age of 40, after nearly two decades of unprecedented success as a musician. He’d been a creative person all his life and was able to make a career out of it. He said that, in many ways, he was using his creative career as a way to avoid maturing. Lennon didn’t want to age, but he was exhausting himself with his ways of preventing aging. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, Lennon decided that his method of maintaining immaturity was not working for him.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
After The Beatles broke up, John Lennon railed against his former bandmates in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview. Entitled “Lennon Remembers,” the lengthy interview sees the musician discussing his problems with The Beatles, his love of Yoko Ono, and his distaste for his bandmates’ solo careers, among other things. Five years after the interview, Lennon’s opinion of his former bandmates had softened considerably. He also said that they hadn’t cared about his harsh words.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
Paul McCartney had a passion for music at a young age. That passion expanded once he discovered rock ‘n’ roll. Later in his life, McCartney would become a rock legend with The Beatles and his solo career. The former Beatle still recalls the first record he bought that ignited his love for music. McCartney grew up in Liverpool in a working-class home. While his family wasn’t wealthy, they did have a piano in the house that his dad often played. He always loved music, even the old-school songs that his dad would play. However, Paul McCartney says everything changed once he discovered rock ‘n’ roll. In an interview for his website Paulmccartney.com, the British artist said rock was a “completely different sound” when it arrived in Liverpool.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles sometimes had to devise creative ways to get through their many interviews, which tended to be at the reporter’s expense. It didn’t help that the press gave them nicknames that didn’t truly represent their personalities or that they often asked stupid or irrelevant questions.
In The Beatles’ early career, the press observed the band during interviews and gave them “tags” based on their apparent personalities. John Lennon was the witty Beatle, Paul McCartney was the cute one, George Harrison the quiet one, and Ringo Starr was, well, Ringo Starr.
All of the nicknames couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The Beatles were many things, but the press didn’t care enough to discover who they were as people.
Their labels were only half the issue. Once The Beatles’ fame skyrocketed, they had to deal with tons more interviews filled with uninspiring, uninteresting, foolish, and often head-scratching questions.
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
George Harrison wanted to evoke the good times he had with The Beatles in his song, “When We Was Fab.” However, not all of the tune’s lyrics stem from fond memories. There’s a dark lyric that speaks about one of the things George hated about being a member of the Fab Four.
George Harrison performing at the Prince's Trust Concert in 1987.
Being Beatle George was hard. It was a constant push and pull between screaming fans and not being able to stretch his creativity to its fullest. Beatlemania aged him and made him paranoid. John Lennon and Paul McCartney often pushed him and his songs aside. However, on top of it all, George desperately wanted to break free and explore spiritualism. He didn’t want to be a glorified session man or a teen idol. George wanted to be God-conscious.
However, years after The Beatles split and everything settled, George came to terms with being a Beatle. When he entered the studio in 1987 to record Cloud Nine, he suddenly wanted to create a song that evoked the spirit of his old band. What resulted was “When We Was Fab,” a song (and music video) that had more Beatles Easter eggs than “Glass Onion.”
Source: Hannah Wigandt/cheatsheet.com
