Beatles News
The Beatles got so big, so famous, that it started making some members of the band nervous. George Harrison was among the musicians who grew wary of the hysteria that surrounded himself, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney.
Though Harrison, Lennon, Starr, and McCartney gained fame and fortune through the rise of the Beatles, they gave up a lot, too — privacy, security, peace. Harrison felt the relationship between the band and their fans became “very one-sided.”
“The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give,” he said, as reported in The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines.
Around 1965, Harrison’s nerves really started getting to him. The chaos that surrounded the band felt, all of a sudden, too close to home. He worried that he or one of his bandmates would get assassinated.
“I wanted to stop touring after about ’65, actually, because I was getting nervous,” Harrison told the author of TLYM in 1987. “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.”
Source: Kelsey Goeres/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles still draw people’s attention more than 50 years after the band disintegrated. The slew of No. 1 hits in the United States proved their popularity, and their status has hardly waned in the decades since they broke up. The tunes have stopped flowing (more or less), but the Beatles’ money hasn’t. Surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr added to their stockpiles by earning nearly $4 million for the docuseries The Beatles: Get Back.
Ron Howard’s Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years landed in 2016 and gave fans a look at the band at the height of Beatlemania. Peter Jackson’s 2021 Disney+ series The Beatles: Get Back fast forwarded in the band’s timeline to the project that helped bring about the end of the group.
The Fab Four filmed the early 1969 recording sessions that gave us the album Let It Be (and director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film of the same name). Paul’s headstrong/forceful leadership didn’t sit well with his bandmates. The Beatles rebounded from the Let It Be/Get Back sessions with Abbey Road, the final record they made together, but they never fully recovered and officially broke up in early 1970.
Source: Jason Rossi/cheatsheet.com
When The Beatles broke up, George Harrison and John Lennon were not happy with former bandmate Paul McCartney. Lennon disparaged his solo music and wrote pointed lyrics about McCartney. Harrison said that he would never work with him in a band again. They talked trash about him privately too, but they made it clear that the people they were talking to shouldn’t join in.When The Beatles broke up, McCartney sued the band in order to take control of their catalog from manager Allen Klein. This, coupled with festering irritation over McCartney’s behavior in the studio, infuriated his bandmates. Lennon wrote the brutal “How Do You Sleep?” about McCartney, and Harrison said publicly that he wouldn’t want to work with McCartney again.“To tell the truth, I’d join a band with John Lennon any day, but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney, but it’s nothing personal,” he said, per the book George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters. “It’s just from a musical point of view.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles got so big, so famous, that it started making some members of the band nervous. George Harrison was among the musicians who grew wary of the hysteria that surrounded himself, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney.
Though Harrison, Lennon, Starr, and McCartney gained fame and fortune through the rise of the Beatles, they gave up a lot, too — privacy, security, peace. Harrison felt the relationship between the band and their fans became “very one-sided.”
“The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give,” he said, as reported in The Love You Make by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines.
Around 1965, Harrison’s nerves really started getting to him. The chaos that surrounded the band felt, all of a sudden, too close to home. He worried that he or one of his bandmates would get assassinated.
Source: Kelsey Goeres/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles collaborated closely with one another for almost a decade, writing songs together, swapping ideas, and switching their instruments to get the most creativity out of each record as possible. But one of the Fab Four noticed that once Paul McCartney had stopped working on his own music, he stopped caring about anyone else's songs. And, eventually, it got too much for the Beatles singer.
John Lennon and McCartney wrote the bulk of the songs for The Beatles. Making up the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, the long-time friends penned such iconic tracks as Help!, Ticket to Ride, Eleanor Rigby and In My Life.
But they also wrote many songs on their own, separately, before bringing their work to their pals.
Lennon spoke to Playboy in 1980 shortly before he died where he confessed McCartney sometimes irritated him during the recording process.
Source: Callum Crumlish/express.co.uk
John Lennon explained the origin of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Notably, the song doesn’t really resolve itself. Despite this, a famous movie created a narrative for the character of Jude.
“He said it was written about Julian, my child,” John said. “He knew I was splitting with [his first wife] Cyn and leaving Julian. He was driving over to say ‘Hi’ to Julian. He’d been like an uncle to him.
“You know, Paul was always good with kids,” he added. “And so he came up with ‘Hey Jude.’ But I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it … Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying, ‘Hey, Jude — hey, John.'” John felt the song was Paul giving him permission to leave the band.
John was asked what he thought of Paul as a lyricist. “I don’t think he’s made an effort to, but I don’t think he’s incapable,” he said. “I don’t think he’s as good as me, but he’s certainly not incapable. ‘Hey Jude’ is a damn good set of lyrics and I made no contribution to that. A couple of lines he’s come up with show indications he’s a good lyricist, but he just never took it anywhere.”
Source: Matthew Trzcinski/cheatsheet.com
Linda McCartney tragically died of breast cancer at the age of just 56.
After bravely battling breast cancer for two years, the American photographer and member of Wings sadly succumbed to the disease on 17th April 1998.
Naturally, her husband Paul McCartney was devastated having lost his beloved wife, his bandmate, the mother of his children, and his one true love.
After meeting during his time in The Beatles, Paul and Linda travelled the world together, started a family together, and were married for a total of 29 years.
When Linda was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1995, Paul took a step back from his to help her overcome her illness, and didn't perform altogether in the final two years of her life.
Sadly, Linda McCartney wouldn't make it through, died at the McCartney ranch in Tucson, Arizona surrounded by her entire family.
To celebrate her life and activism, Linda's good friends Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders and television writer Carla Lane set up a tribute concert at London's Royal Albert Hall on 10th April 1999 called: Concert for Linda.
Source:Thomas Curtis-Horsfall/smoothradio.com
Ringo Starr didn’t write many songs for The Beatles, but Paul McCartney and John Lennon often wrote music that catered to his talents. The drummer had many fans, and The Beatles wanted to ensure his admirers could hear his contributions. Lennon and McCartney wrote one song with Starr’s talents in mind that Paul called a “job to order” for the famous drummer. “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party” is from The Beatles’ 1964 album Beatles for Sale. Lennon primarily wrote it, but it is credited to Lennon-McCartney. The track contains themes of isolation and anxiety as the singer details being at a party and trying not to bring down the mood after their date stands them up.
Source: Ross Tanenbaum/cheatsheet.com
By 1963, the first flames of Beatlemania were ablaze, and The Beatles were on tour with Roy Orbison. Initially, Orbison was going to be the final act of the tour because of his popularity. By the time they got on tour, though, The Beatles were so popular that it didn’t make sense for anyone to follow them. This meant that Orbison played before they took the stage, which Ringo Starr admitted the band hated. The Beatles formed in 1960, and by 1963, their popularity was soaring in the United Kingdom. They went on a tour of the UK with a number of artists, including Orbison. At this point, Orbison was already a successful, established artist with hits like “Crying” and “In Dreams.”
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
The Beatles had a squeaky-clean image compared to some of the other bands in the 1960s, but they were still arrested more than once. For the most part, they, like many other bands at the time, faced arrest for drug possession. While several members of The Beatles landed in legal trouble, one person was arrested far more times than the others. In the pre-Beatlemania days, the band played a residency in Hamburg, Germany. When authorities found out George Harrison wasn’t old enough to be working in the country, they deported him. That night, Paul McCartney and one-time Beatles drummer Pete Best decided to move their belongings out of the place where they were staying. Needing light and finding themselves without a flashlight, they decided that the best course of action was to light a condom on fire and nail it to the wall.
Source: Emma McKee/cheatsheet.com
