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The Beatles Breakup
1 October 2011
6.52pm
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peregrine9
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Ultimate Classic Rock
September 25, 2011
John Lennon Officially Ended the Beatles at Disney World

Leave it to John Lennon to make the Beatles break up official by signing the termination papers while on holiday at Disney World. Lennon, the last of the four to actually sign off on the contract, was the first to shout out “I want a divorce” before he walked out of a meeting at Apple headquarters with the other three members present back in 1969.Both Ringo Starr and George Harrison had already quit by 1968, prior to this incident, yet they were convinced to return, whereas Lennon never did. Then there’s Paul McCartney , the one who publicly announced the news to the press in 1970, declaring, “I’m quitting The Beatles.”After years of red tape and millions of dollars spent, the official dissolution papers were drawn up and ready to be signed off on at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1974. George and Paul had arranged to fly in and be present, while Ringo signed the necessary documents at an earlier time, while still in England.

http://ultimateclassicrock.com…..at-disney/

Note by Ahhh Girl 31 May 2014: this post originally was a one post thread. The thread title was “John Lennon Officially Ended the Beatles at Disneyworld”.

Life is what happens when your busy making other plans.  John Lennon

5 February 2012
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The Strawberry
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Is it just me, or is it true that it wasn’t Yoko’s fault? John said on TV that when he was 25, he said he did not want to be playing “She Loves You ” when he’s 30, so it was inevitable that The Beatles would break up. Plus, John probably wanted to be more of a father when Sean was born.

Note by Ahhh Girl 31 May 2014: this post originally was the beginning of a new thread titled “I don’t blame Yoko”. Posts 63-100 were a part of that thread.

"Time wounds all heels."
-John Lennon

5 February 2012
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cool.story.mum.
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I haven't got into this topic yet, but there's one vid. I watched – it's George on Cavett's show. In 1:00 he reacts at least weird when Cavett tells him, he's sitting in the chair, which was Yoko's the other time. no more talking. just have a look: feature=related      but every time I ask someone who knows about Beatles a bit more beside they've sang Help why did beatles break up, loads of them says yoko. maybe somebody knows more.

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5 February 2012
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meanmistermustard
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Yes Yoko played a part being in the studio and with John 24/7 but there were numberous reasons why the beatles spilt: lack of touring so that togetherness slowly ebbed away; the death of brian epstein; apple and how that evolved and crumbled; George emerging as a prolific songwriter yet only having 2 songs per album regardless of what John and Paul wrote; John and Paul growing apart; ego’s. But the main reason, in my opinion, was that they grew up, got married, had kids (apart from George), discovered other interests and wanted to try and do other things.

Maybe they could have got back together after they had split and made music together as a foursome as The Beatles but the pressure to create something incredible would have been a crushing weight right from the off.

"I told you everything I could about me, Told you everything I could" ('Before Believing' - Emmylou Harris)

5 February 2012
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The Walrus
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The Strawberry said:

 Plus, John probably wanted to be more of a father when Sean was born.

That was five years later!

I don't think Yoko was the main reason they split. I think she was a major part of why they didn't get back together in the months before John died though.

I told her I didn’t 

5 February 2012
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The Strawberry
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That's another reason I think they split up, they grew up. Exactly. I'm sure John felt that he wanted to be there more for his second son. (Sorry I'm only mentioning John, I mostly know about him.)

"Time wounds all heels."
-John Lennon

5 February 2012
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RevolvingPiggies
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I don't blame Yoko at all. They would have broken up anyway, Yoko might have just sped it up a little, but it was a small price to pay. Because she made John happy, and if John's happy I'm happy. Have you guys watched the documentary John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band? There's a scene where John writes “John Loves Yoko” in the sand, and they write until the waves wash out the words. I found that very sweet. And I do not hate her as a person either. I don't hate anyone, actually. Even a certain he-who-must-not-be-named-who-is-obsessed-with-Catcher-And-The-Rye- someone. Because we need to love the world, and accept everyone, and that's the only way the world will get better (think about it: if everyone wanted revenge, and they do something to someone, that someone's brother or something will have revenge, and whoever they had revenge's on friend will have revenge… etc. It needs to stop somewhere). There shouldn't be death penalties either, because then the last thing they'd feel is hate, and whoever ordered the sentence is no better than the murderer. Wow. Sorry. Off-topic. 

The only thing I have against Yoko is that she could have kept the others as happy while keeping John happy at the same timeheart

I am very happy, and one reason is because I have The Beatles. Thank you!!!! <3 <3 <3 <3

5 February 2012
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meanmistermustard
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George was having a laugh, nothing more in that video cool.story.mom.

 

Its been said that Yoko blocked a call from Paul to John during the Double Fantasy sessions whilst John was more at peace with whole Beatles thing. However I think George would probably have been a bigger hinderence to any reunion as he didnt want to go back to the whole hysteria which would have immediately blown into a hurricane.

"I told you everything I could about me, Told you everything I could" ('Before Believing' - Emmylou Harris)

5 February 2012
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cool.story.mum.
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RevolvingPiggies said:

I don't blame Yoko at all. They would have broken up anyway, Yoko might have just sped it up a little, but it was a small price to pay.

mhm. I do think so. ano, they were too big authorities, talents, personalities and egos to last for ever as everybody's expected. of course, they were friends and stuff but they were friends on the other level, if you know what I mean. they've got through things normal people (friends) don't go. they've spent almost TEN years permanently together. I do hope unusuall relations were between them, but nothing lasts for ever. I wouldn't find the answer in yoko, really, but more in “boys”.

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5 February 2012
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GniknuS
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I don’t think it’s Yoko’s fault, but I would call her the main reason as to why they broke up. I sincerely doubt that she set out to break up the Beatles, but the way John’s mindset shifted after they got together is ultimately the reason why they broke up. I think we’re just being polite when we mention the other reasons, sure Paul was bossy and Apple was put of control and George probably wanted and deserved more of an input. But when you’re talking about the biggest and most successful band in the world, to have the cajones to step away from that takes someone like Yoko. There is a zero percent chance that eventually George would’ve left first because nothing was guaranteed and Paul was smart enough to recognize that the group was better together than apart.
So take John who had been supposedly thinking about leaving or the inevitable split since ’66, at first he thought it would be like Vegas where he would just perform the old hits, but suddenly Yoko turned him on to this whole other scene of what his life could be like and it seemed pretty obvious that John was looking for any excuse to leave. Take the quote from John, “I’ve had two creative partners, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.” That to me is more telling than anything else and had the Beatles accepted Yoko as part of the group they most likely would have stayed together longer. I am tending to believe that it was a bit sexist of the others to be so dismissive of her. Sure, her music sucks, but she is a very smart person who had a lot of interesting ideas and for the others to completely ignore her input and at the same time have the mindset that “the girlfriends and wives generally stay at home” seems ridiculous to me. But it’s hard to imagine what she and John were like together so maybe it was more about that than just about Yoko, but still…there’s that one scene in Let it Be where you see John walk in and George is smiling at him while playing Octopus’s Garden and then his head just darts down when he sees Yoko and he won’t even acknowledge her presence. Call it bad vibes all you want, but something else was going on there.
Anyway, I think it was mostly because of the dynamic between how much John loved Yoko and how much the others seemed to despise her that caused the split. So not directly her fault but she still was the main cog.

I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine

6 February 2012
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robert
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For me, I won't say I “blame Yoko” however, I do see her as the single greatest reason they split up and why they never got back together.

In terms of the break-up, what Yoko did was get John hooked on heroin. John's heroin addiction is what made impossible for the others to communicate with him. Paul mentions this in one of his interviews – how John was on heroin and no one could deal with him.

We talk about how John and Paul feuded, but remember that during the Let It Be filming there was an argument so bad between John and George that it's speculated as to whether they actually came to blows over this. That is when George walked out and John talked about replacing George with Eric Clapton.

Point being, John's heroin addiction, which was on and off again all through the 70's, was a result of Yoko. So she is, to me, the single greatest factor in the break up.

Regarding a reunion, there's no doubt Yoko kept John and Paul apart – specifically during the recording of Paul's “Venus And Mars ” and during the “Double Fantasy ” sessions.

Consider, when John was in LA during the 18 months, he saw both Paul and George. When did he not see them? When he was with Yoko.

One man's opinion.

"She looks more like him than I do."

6 February 2012
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mithveaen
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a-hard-days-night-ringo-8 Ok I think Yoko was the excuse John had for breaking up the Beatles. But was she nice? I don't think so. But the Beatles were not that charming either….

Here comes the sun….. Scoobie-doobie……

Something in the way she moves…..attracts me like a cauliflower…

Bop. Bop, cat bop. Go, Johnny, Go.

Beware of Darkness… 

6 February 2012
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robert
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In her defense, I have never heard anyone accuse Yoko Ono of being nice.

"She looks more like him than I do."

6 February 2012
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mithveaen
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a-hard-days-night-ringo-8 That's what I mean. But honestly I don't hate her for breaking up the Beatles. I just don't care about her.. that's all.

Here comes the sun….. Scoobie-doobie……

Something in the way she moves…..attracts me like a cauliflower…

Bop. Bop, cat bop. Go, Johnny, Go.

Beware of Darkness… 

6 February 2012
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robert
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Well said. Despite all her attempts, she is not a Beatle.

"She looks more like him than I do."

6 February 2012
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kedame
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GniknuS said:

 That to me is more telling than anything else and had the Beatles accepted Yoko as part of the group they most likely would have stayed together longer. I am tending to believe that it was a bit sexist of the others to be so dismissive of her. Sure, her music sucks, but she is a very smart person who had a lot of interesting ideas and for the others to completely ignore her input and at the same time have the mindset that “the girlfriends and wives generally stay at home” seems ridiculous to me. But it's hard to imagine what she and John were like together so maybe it was more about that than just about Yoko, but still…there's that one scene in Let it Be where you see John walk in and George is smiling at him while playing Octopus's Garden and then his head just darts down when he sees Yoko and he won't even acknowledge her presence. Call it bad vibes all you want, but something else was going on there.

I don't see it that way at all. I don't think it was the fact that she was a woman so much as the fact that they didn't want someone else in the group. Paul wasn't offended that John asked Yoko to perform that line on Bungalow Bill because she was a woman. He was offended because HE was John's musical partner, HE was a singer in The Beatles…not Yoko. To have a completely new and unfamiliar presence inflicted on you in your working environment that you don't really like, replacing things you used to do (being John's creative partner) would sting, no matter how you look at it, especially someonw with a nice big ego who was used to things going his way We saw the same thing with Stu. Paul didn't like Stu, not only because he was a crappy bass player (sorry minime), but because he took John's attention away from the band and his partnership with Paul.

The Beatles always respected female musical acts. Hell, most of their early covers were of girl bands. Paul even produced women (Mary Hopkins, etc.). I just think they didn't want Yoko there.

I agree that Yoko played a major role in the break-up. I think it's foolish to say she didn't. I'm not saying I think she's evil incarnate for it, either. John used her as a means to drive a wedge between the band. He knew what he was doing, trying to reassert his control by introducing a new member. In the Slate article about John and Paul's partnership, the author says John never lost the mentality that it was HIS band, meaning he could introduce or kick out anybody he wanted (enter Paul, enter Stu, kick out that one dude [Pete Shotten, I think] by breaking a washboard over his head). He thought he could just make the others accept Yoko as an equal presence, when really, why should they? They were a Pop/Rock band, not an avant-garde artist's plaything. Yoko, despite her forays into…ahh, music…is no Pop/Rock mastermind. She has creativity and artistic drive, but should it have manifested itself in giving seasoned rockers vocal and instrumentation directions. Not from my point of view, and certainly, I'm guessing, not Paul's or George's, either. They took their music quite seriously, I think. They didn't want someone messing with that dynamic.

Now, I know a counter argument could be that George was perfectly willing to let Billy Preston be a potential fifth member. However, Billy WAS a seasoned rocker himself. He wasn't trying to change the COMPLETE creative direction of the band…not that I think that Yoko could, really. But on her suggestion, John could. He could be difficult, wanting to perform only his material and nothing the others had written, as we see with some of his non-involvement in George's later work and his almost refusal to even have his songs on the same side as Paul's on Abbey Road . He lost faith in the pop/rock dream they had. He looked down on it as being “less” than the experimentation he was doing with Yoko. Like somehow political songs are ultimately superior to a song about holding someone's hand. I think he became a music snob for awhile. Hehe…something he had worked against as a kid, but fell into as an adult.

You can't stay a band if you don't agree on what good music is. And Yoko's opinions colored John's perceptions. I'm not saying it was for the better or worse…just that she did.

Personally, I'm glad things played out the way they did. We have this great little self-contained band who can never produce shitty music to tarnish their images, along with some pretty damn good solo material from all four of them. And they got to have their nice little families and be happy (mostly). I'm ok with that, though I do wish it had come without so much anguish and pain between the four of them.

"You can manicure a cat but can you caticure a man?"

John Lennon- Skywriting by Word of Mouth

6 February 2012
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GniknuS
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That’s true, I suppose I’m not trying to label them as being sexist, but I just think there’s an attitude that a group of guys have when they’ve been together. I don’t think that they would have accepted Joni f-ing Mitchell into the group if she strolled through the door who obviously had a much different style than the group but who was someone that they undoubtedly could have learned from. So I just think it’s that attitude of being hung up on this idea of this band that they had to be that caused the main problem at least from John’s perspective. They were tapped out creatively in terms of working together and expanding music but seemed to keep this false hope that things could get back to what they once were. At the same time they were not flexible enough to accomodate John’s newfound perspective as a musician because it didn’t fit in with this false image they had of themselves. So the only way they could have continued would have been to rapidily change who they were as a group by following John’s lead down a much more experimental road. I’m
not upset that this didn’t happen, just curious I suppose at what could have been.
So I guess you have the inhibition of being the Beatles matched against not wanting to expand too much, but if you look at it their best stuff was always more experimental without crossing into that awful range of being too psychadelic. I think they could have worked with Yoko in order to combine these two polar opposites. But I sincerely doubt that anyone involved wanted this to happen, including John and Yoko.

I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine

6 February 2012
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The Strawberry
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Could it be possible that Yoko didn't know the others despised her? Maybe if she knew how much they hated her, she would've said something to John, don't you think? But still, as I said before, John knew he wasn't going to be a mop top forever.Again,  John said “When I was 25, I said I don't want to be singing She Loves You when I'm 30.” So Yoko or no Yoko, it wasn't going to last.

"Time wounds all heels."
-John Lennon

6 February 2012
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kedame
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GniknuS said:

That's true, I suppose I'm not trying to label them as being sexist, but I just think there's an attitude that a group of guys have when they've been together. I don't think that they would have accepted Joni f-ing Mitchell into the group if she strolled through the door who obviously had a much different style than the group but who was someone that they undoubtedly could have learned from. So I just think it's that attitude of being hung up on this idea of this band that they had to be that caused the main problem at least from John's perspective. They were tapped out creatively in terms of working together and expanding music but seemed to keep this false hope that things could get back to what they once were. At the same time they were not flexible enough to accomodate John's newfound perspective as a musician because it didn't fit in with this false image they had of themselves. So the only way they could have continued would have been to rapidily change who they were as a group by following John's lead down a much more experimental road. I'm
not upset that this didn't happen, just curious I suppose at what could have been.
So I guess you have the inhibition of being the Beatles matched against not wanting to expand too much, but if you look at it their best stuff was always more experimental without crossing into that awful range of being too psychadelic. I think they could have worked with Yoko in order to combine these two polar opposites. But I sincerely doubt that anyone involved wanted this to happen, including John and Yoko.

I totally understand what you're saying here. It's like the Battle of the Sexes. A group of women probably wouldn't want a man interfering, either, though it would be perceived differently.

And I didn't mean to imply that I think the Beatles weren't slightly sexist. I actually think they were, just not that that was the main reason they didn't like Yoko, though you are probably right in saying it played a part. Like most men raised in the 40s and 50s in their area, they had a certain amount of sexism instilled in them. You see it when Pattie quit her career when she married George, when Cynthia quit her artistic ambitions when she married John, when Maureen stayed home and cooked all the meals for Ringo (though she seemed to enjoy that), and when Paul wanted Jane to give up her career for him (more power to her that she stuck to her guns and didn't listen to him).  

"You can manicure a cat but can you caticure a man?"

John Lennon- Skywriting by Word of Mouth

6 February 2012
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Into the Sky with Diamonds
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Bands break up all the time – no big deal.

However, as The Walrus, Robert, and others above have pointed out:

– Ono got Lennon hooked on heroin

– Ono hastened the break up

– Ono made the break up more acrimonious than it needed to be

– Ono made sure the four would never get together again, even informally.

 

And that, my friends, is why I love it when I see someone in the street wearing a T-shirt that reads

” Still Hate Yoko”

"Into the Sky with Diamonds" (the Beatles and the Race to the Moon – a history)

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