In The Beatles’ touring years, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr dealt with screaming fans, natural disasters, and political unrest. The band felt exhausted and worn out by 1966, when they agreed to stop touring. This exhaustion came through during one early show, though. Harrison and Lennon were so fed up that they tried to leave in the middle of their performance.
George Harrison and John Lennon tried to leave in the middle of a concert
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In 1963, The Beatles played a show at the Wimbledon Palais for their Southern Area Fan Club Convention. Beatlemania was not yet at its peak, but the band got a hint of how their future shows would go. They had mentioned liking the candy Jelly Babies, and fans began pelting them at the band during their performance. They felt boxed in, and Starr said they all began to get nervous.
“I remember we were in a cage at that gig, because it got so crazy,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “It was like being in a zoo, on stage! It felt dangerous. The kids were out of hand. It was the first time I felt that if they got near us we would be ripped apart.”
Midway through the performance, Harrison decided he’d had enough.
“Halfway through, George said, ‘I’m not doing this,’ and he packed up, went to the stage door and began looking for a cab,” road manager Neil Aspinall recalled. “I ran after him and said, ‘What are you doing? You can’t walk out, we’ve got to finish.’”
When Lennon saw Harrison walking away, though, he took it as his opportunity to get off the stage too.
“And then John turned up with his guitar,” Aspinall said. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘Well, if he’s leaving, I’m leaving.’”
George Harrison and John Lennon stayed to greet fans afterward
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Though Lennon and Harrison were ready to walk away from the venue, Aspinall convinced them to get back onstage. They finished the concert and met with droves of their fans afterward.
“But they did finish the gig and they shook hands with all the fans — about 10,000 of them, actually, because they kept going back to the end of the queue and coming round again.”
The Beatles’ guitarist felt concerned about his safety while touring
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Of all The Beatles, Harrison was the most concerned about his safety while on tour. He felt the band had narrowly avoided disaster one too many times and didn’t want to push his luck.
“I wanted to stop touring after about ’65, actually, because I was getting nervous,” Harrison said, per the book The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “I didn’t like the idea of being too popular. There was that movie The Manchurian Candidate. … I think in history you can see that when people get too big, something like that can very easily happen.”
When the band stopped touring in 1966, Harrison breathed a sigh of relief.
