When The Beatles broke up, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, were on decidedly bad terms. They were embroiled in a legal battle and spoke publicly about their gripes with one another. One of Lennon’s biggest problems with his bandmates was how unwelcoming they were to Yoko Ono. While it angered him, he still said he could understand their frustration.
John Lennon understood why his Beatles bandmates were unhappy with him
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Lennon and Ono were incredibly close, both emotionally and physically. She joined him in the studio, to the irritation of the other Beatles.
“He just wanted to go off in the corner and look into Yoko’s eyes for hours, saying to each other, ‘It’s going to be all right,’” McCartney said in The Beatles Anthology. “It was pretty freaky when we were trying to make a track.”
Lennon defended Ono against his bandmates and made it clear that he would always pick her over them. Still, he understood their frustration. Lennon said that if any of his bandmates behaved as he had, he would have been upset.
“And there were Paul, George, and Ringo saying, ‘What the hell are they doing? What’s happened to him?’” Lennon said. “And my attention completely went off them. Now it wasn’t deliberate, it was just I was so involved and intrigued with what we were doing… And then we’d look round and see that we weren’t being approved. But I understand how they felt, because if it had been Paul or George or Ringo that had fallen in love with somebody and got totally involved ….”
He thought it was ridiculous to blame her for the breakup
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Though Lennon understood why his bandmates were unhappy, he also thought it was unfair to blame Ono for The Beatles’ break up. The band had enough problems; their romantic partners didn’t do anything to push them toward a split.
“If it is Yoko and Linda’s fault for breaking up The Beatles, can they have the credit for all the great music that each of us have made individually?” he said. “Linda [McCartney] and Yoko never had an argument ever. How can two women split up four strong men? It’s impossible.”
He believed it came as a shock to his bandmates that Ono was so involved in his life. This didn’t mean she was to blame for their break up, though.
John Lennon still wasn’t happy with the other Beatles
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While Lennon could understand his bandmates’ frustrations, he could not condone their behavior. He said he wasn’t initially aware that they were trying to push her out of the studio.
“Paul was always gently coming up to Yoko and saying, ‘Why don’t you keep in the background a bit more?’” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on. It was going on behind my back.”
He said that the way McCartney and Harrison treated Ono infuriated him. He wasn’t sure he could forgive them for it.
“I’ll never forgive them, I don’t care what f***in’ s*** about Hare Krishna and God and Paul with his ‘Well, I’ve changed me mind.’ I can’t forgive ’em for that, really,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1971. “Although I can’t help still loving them either.”
