George Harrison Said John Lennon Was Partly to Blame for the Misery of The Beatles’ Final Tour
By the mid-1960s, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were tired of touring. While Paul McCartney continued to push for The Beatles to keep performing live, his bandmates were fed up. Their tour stops in the United States were particularly draining because Lennon had recently made comments comparing The Beatles to Jesus. When Lennon complained about the situation, Harrison told him he was to blame.
George Harrison said John Lennon was ‘daft’ for a comment he made
In early 1966, Lennon mentioned in an interview that he thought The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
“Christianity will go,” he said, via Rolling Stone. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I know I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock & roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
Hardly anyone paid the comment mind for several months. By August of that year, though, his words had sparked major backlash in the United States. People burned their records and protested their concerts. The Ku Klux Klan even made thinly veiled threats of violence against the group. The atmosphere made their American tour remarkably tense.
“Bloody Yanks,” Harrison said after one show, per the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by audio engineer Geoff Emerick.
Lennon irritably told his bandmate that he was the one in trouble with the audience. Harrison snapped back, making it clear that he thought the backlash was entirely Lennon’s fault.
“‘Well I wasn’t the one who was daft enough to compare us to Jesus,’ Harrison retorted testily.”
Regardless of whether Lennon was the primary target, the rest of the band had to deal with the backlash and fear of retaliation.
George Harrison made a joke about John Lennon when The Beatles arrived in Memphis
The band faced particular backlash at their Memphis concert. It was their only date in the South, where people were most upset about Lennon’s comment.
“We were being told that there were now religious zealots who were actually threatening to assassinate John Lennon if the Beatles came to Memphis,” press officer Tony Barrow said.
They hired a more extensive security detail and landed on a part of the tarmac reserved only for the National Guard. They were concerned, but Harrison couldn’t help but make a joke about it.
“Send John out first,” he said. “He’s the one they want.”
He was tired of the tours much earlier than his bandmates
All of The Beatles decided their touring days should be behind them after their stressful tour of America. Harrison had been hoping to stop touring long before his bandmates, though. According to his friend Tom Petty, Harrison had never liked touring. It didn’t help that he always felt endangered on Beatles tours.
“I sensed this in 1965, and I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want ticker-tape parades,” Harrison told Rolling Stone in 1987, adding, “‘I don’t want to be put on this big pedestal.'”
After a show in San Francisco, The Beatles gave up their schedule of live performances.
