In 1966, John Lennon was terrified to travel to the United States, and bandmate George Harrison joked about it. Lennon had recently sparked controversy because he said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. While the comments went undetected for a while, they began to fuel protests in America just as The Beatles were headed there for a tour.
George Harrison joked about people threatening John Lennon’s life
In a conversation with journalist Maureen Cleave, Lennon offhandedly mentioned that Christianity would “vanish and shrink” and described The Beatles as more popular than Jesus (via Rolling Stone). Several months later, people rediscovered the comments, and Lennon found the backlash swift and unforgiving.
“The repercussions were big, especially in the Bible Belt,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “In the South, they were having a field day.
While The Beatles attempted to brush off their first major controversy — Paul McCartney noted that to burn their records, people still had to buy them — Lennon began to feel leery about traveling to America.
“I didn’t want to talk because I thought they’d kill me, because they take things so seriously [in the States],” he said. “I mean, they shoot you and then they realize it wasn’t that important.”
The band grew particularly concerned about their scheduled concert in Memphis. It was their only show in the South, and people there were the angriest. When their plane landed on a special tarmac surrounded by a massive security detail, Lennon waited in terror. Harrison, however, cracked a joke.
“Send John out first,” he said. “He’s the one they want.”
George Harrison was right about how angry people were at John Lennon
While nothing happened to the band, they were right to worry. A member of the Ku Klux Klan emphasized that the group was “a terror organization” and threatened to bring the concert to a premature end. As the band drove away from the airport, McCartney recalled reckoning with how angry people were.
“We pulled in there in the coach and there was this little blond-haired kid, he could have been no older than 11 or 12, who barely came up to the window, screaming at me through the plate glass, banging the window with such vehemence,” he said. “I thought, ‘Gosh, I wonder how much he knows about God? He’s only a young boy. It can only be what he’s been fed, but he’s been fed that we are the anti-Christ or something. This was the face of a zealot!’”
During the concert, a fan threw a firecracker onstage, and the band immediately assumed someone had shot Lennon.
“Every one of us and the other three Beatles looked at John, half-expecting to see the guy sinking down,” press officer Tony Barrow said.
The stress of this tour led the band to stop live performances altogether.
A psychic warned the Beatle about the risks of going to America
Lennon had another reason to worry about the tour. Just before the band left, he received a letter from a psychic, warning him that he was in danger.
“[F]or the past fourteen years John had lived with the fear that he would be shot,” Cynthia Lennon wrote in her book John. “In 1966, he’d received a letter from a psychic, warning that he would be shot while he was in the States.”
Cynthia explained that he’d received many such letters over the years, but this one stuck with him. When he returned home, they both felt palpable relief.
