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Ive never owned either the ABC or King Biscuit audio so cant be those but thanks mja. Guess it will remain a mystery why I have a 2 word shorter intro on a song I never knew I had twice and don’t know why I do.

John wasn’t doing the impressions out of loathing or not caring, it was a blend of a very childish sick sense of humour, not having a clue how to react to them, and (later) having legions of the handicapped etc thrown in The Beatles path thru the kids parents/carers. All four Beatles laughed and mocked them but John gets the boot as he’s on film doing the impressions and nowadays its not appropriate to do so.

Quotes from John, and the others, towards the impressions he did of the disabled, handicapped etc, all taken from the ‘Anthology’ book.

JOHN: I don’t think I’d know a spastic from a Polaroid lens. I’m not hung up about them. When I use the term ‘spastic’ in general conversation, I don’t mean to say it literally. I feel terrible sympathy for these people – it seems the end of the world when you see deformed spastics, and we’ve had quite a lot of them in our travels.⁶⁵

            Wherever we went on tour, there were always a few seats laid aside for cripples and people in Wheelchairs. Because we were famous, we were supposed to have people, epileptics and whatever, in our dressing room all the time. We were supposed to be good for them.

            You want to be alone and you don’t know what to say, and they’re usually saying, ‘I’ve got your record,’ or they can’t speak and just want to touch you. And it’s always the mother or nurse pushing them on you. They would push these people at you like you were Christ, as if there were some aura about you that would rub off on them.

            It got to be like that, and we were very callous about it. It was just dreadful. When we would open up, every night, instead of seeing kids there, we would see a row full of cripples along the front. When we’d be running through, people would be lying around. It seemed that we were just surrounded by cripples and blind people all the time, and when we would go through corridors they would all be touching us. It was horrifying.⁷⁰

            In the States, they were bringing hundreds of them backstage, and it was fantastic. I can’t stand looking at them. I have to turn away. I have to laugh, or I’d just collapse from hate. They’d line them up, and I got the impression The Beatles were being treated as bloody faith healers. It was sickening.⁶⁵ It was sort of the ‘in’ joke that we were supposed to cure them. It was the kind of thing that we would say. I mean, we felt sorry for them – anybody would – but it was awful. There’s kind of embarrassment when you’re surrounded by blind, deaf and crippled people – and there is only so much we could say with the pressure on to perform.⁷⁰

 JOHN: We’re not cruel. We’ve seen enough tragedy in Merseyside. But when a mother shrieks, ‘Just touch my son and maybe he will walk again,’ we want to run, cry, empty our pockets. We’re going to remain normal if it kills us.⁶⁵

And Paul

John used to do the spastic impersonations on stage a lot. He had a habit of putting a clear plastic bag on his foot with a couple of rubber bands. Brian wouldn’t like it – he had gone through RADA so he was straight showbiz and he wanted us to behave accordingly, not be too far out. But John would do his cripples impression just crossing a zebra crossing, which would make people stop.

We used to think certain words were very funny that out of teenage nervousness made us laugh: ‘cripple’, ‘harelip’, ‘cleft palate’, ‘club-foot’ – when a guitar came out, a Club 40, we used to call it a Club-Foot. A sign on the way down to London used to make us howl: ‘Cripples crossing’. We used to think it was a place rather than an event.

 I remember John and I, shortly after we’d listen to Gene Vincent’s album, walking out in the street near Penny Lane and seeing a woman with elephantiasis, and it was so sort of terrifying we had to laugh. A lot of what we did was based in that. And that was the kind of thing that separated us from other people. It meant we had our own world. A world of black humour and of nervousness at other people’s afflictions. The way we got through our lives was laughing at them.

Paul: I THINK THAT, PARTICULARLY IN THE OLD DAYS, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEATLES SEEMED TO SUGGEST SOMETHING VERY HOPEFUL AND YOUTHFUL. So, often, someone would ask us to say ‘hello’ to handicapped kids; to give them some kind of hope, maybe. But it was difficult for us, because part of our humour was a sick kind of humour. We were almost having to bless the people in wheelchairs; so there was this dual inclination going on for us.

and George

John was allergic to cripples. You could see he had a thing about them; I think it was a fear of something. You can see in all our home movies, whenever you switch a camera on John, he goes into his interpretation of a spastic. It’s not very nice to be afflicted, so John had this thing that he’d always joke about it. I think the reality was too much for him.
            We were only trying to play rock’n’roll and they’d be wheeling them in, not just in wheelchairs in oxygen tents. What did they think that we would be able to do? I don’t know. I think it was that those people whose job it was to push them around wanted to see the show, and this was a way to get in. It was a case of, ‘How many have we got tonight, Brian?’ We’d come out of the band room to go to the stage and we’d be fighting our way through all these poor unfortunate people.
            John didn’t like it. After a while, we used to call even normal people ‘cripples’, because most people are crippled in a way; in their brains, or in their legs. It’s somewhere. Like John wrote: ‘One thing you can’t hide, is when you’re crippled inside.’ When you look at some of the old footage of John, and read In His Own Write, and with a few other clues in his lyrics, you can piece it together that he definitely had a phobia about it. Most people do. It’s a question of, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’

Later on he gave something back because he wanted to help a cause in some way.