George Harrison Wanted to Stop Touring After ’65 for Fear of Being Assassinated
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.
The one-sided relationship between The Beatles and their fans
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.
George Harrison worried about getting assassinated
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.”
George Harrison felt The Beatles were dangerously ‘mixed up with the politics’
In the later years of the band, The Beatles were often performing in places with heated political ongoings.
“I mean, we used to fly in and out of Beirut and all them places,” said Harrison. “I mean, you would never dream of going on tour now in some of the places we went…. We were flying into race riots in Chicago. we flew into this situation where the French and the English in Montreal were having a big fight, and Ringo was threatened… It was nerve-racking, Everywhere we went, it was something like that. We’d go to Japan, where the students were rioting, and there’d be Beatlemania all mixed up with the politics. It just seemed to be like that all the time.”
John Lennon was shot in 1980
Over ten years after Harrison began worrying about his and his bandmates’ safety, Lennon was shot. Harrison took the news incredibly hard. Initially, he isolated himself and feared for his life. Eventually, however, Harrison made the decision to not live in fear.
“Everybody likes to say, ‘OK, one of your best friends got assassinated, so surely you must be nervous about being assassinated too,” said Harrison. “You know, I like to take care, but I don’t walk around fearing for my life… I don’t think anybody could be bothered killing me. What’s the point of killing me? There’s nothing. I don’t feel that important.”
Though, in 1999, someone did try to kill Harrison in his home. A man broke into Harrison and his wife’s home at about 3:00 AM and repeatedly stabbed them. Eventually, Olivia was able to subdue the intruder by hitting him with a brass lamp. Later on the family joked about the incident, but Harrison was forever changed.
