I don't want to hear 'Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles' ever again
Some myths apparently never die. For some, it’s called conventional wisdom.
The conventional wisdom that Yoko Ono broke up the most famous pop group in history is a myth that surely should have faded away by this point. Yet, it hangs around, like the last stubborn dinosaur taking a breath long after the comet hits.
John Lennon and Ono first met each other in 1966. At the time, The Beatles were in a stage of transition. The group had gone from mop-top uniformity into splintering paths that would yield their most iconic work, but it marked the subsequent growing apart that would spell the end of the group.
But somehow it wasn’t the group growing into different people, nor was it creative or business differences – it had to have been the woman hanging around. Ono was quite the sitting duck in the blame game that followed the group’s dissolution.
Ono is perceived as a wrench in the works of The Beatles unit, yet the group’s eventual demise was already set in motion by the time she showed up. Her frequent presence in the studio was dubbed by the other Beatles as ‘intrusive’, but there is little to suggest much intrusion beyond her mere presence and giving an opinion at the request of Lennon. George Harrison’s issue with Ono was that the ‘bitch’ took one of his biscuits during a studio session. Seriously. Perhaps she should have just stood behind Lennon like the other wives of The Beatles rather than side by side as equal partners.
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Often Ono is portrayed as a hanger-on, someone who was desperate for recognition and sought to hijack Lennon and the Fab Four for her own personal gain and control. But Ono was already an established, financially independent, and respected artist by the time she met Lennon. If anything, it was Lennon who would have been in thrall and eager to impress. Is it a mystery that a working-class musician from Liverpool with ambitions that far outweighed his surroundings would fall in love with someone like Ono? She would have seemed sophisticated, liberated, credible, and, rather datedly, exotic. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the appeal was.
Source: Derek McArthur/heraldscotland.com
