John Lennon Made George Harrison Laugh so Hard During a Beatles Concert That He Couldn’t Play

During one of The Beatles’ most stressful concerts, John Lennon managed to make George Harrison laugh onstage. He began behaving in such an outrageous fashion that all of his bandmates took note. According to Lennon, his joking was so successful that Harrison couldn’t play his guitar. 

John Lennon made George Harrison laugh during a Beatles concert

The Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium in New York was their largest up until that point. They were incredibly nervous before taking the stage. Once they did, though, Lennon began to behave comically. He did a Jerry Lee Lewis impression and began playing the piano with his feet. Harrison found all this hilarious.

“I was putting my foot on it and George couldn’t play for laughing,” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “I was doing it for a laugh. The kids didn’t know what I was doing.”

Paul McCartney also recalled laughing at Lennon’s behavior.

“John was having a good time at Shea. He was into his comedy, which was great,” McCartney said. “That was one of the great things about John. If there was ever one of those tense shows, which this undoubtedly was (you can’t play in front of that many people for the first time and not be tense), his comedy routines would always come out. He’d start the faces, and the shoulders would start going, and it was very encouraging: ‘OK, that’s good — at least we’re not taking it seriously.’ He kept us jolly.”

John Lennon and George Harrison once fought onstage

Several years before this, Lennon and Harrison got into a fight onstage. During their early concerts, they played for long hours after taking stimulants. As a result, they were often irritable.

“All the arguments were just trivial, mainly because we were f***ed and irritable with working so hard,” Lennon said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “We were just kids as well. George threw some food at me once onstage.”

They didn’t get into a physical fight, which had happened with the band before, but they began shouting at each other.

“We usually ate onstage as we were onstage so long,” Lennon explained. “The waiters would send us up beer onstage as well as food, so now and again we’d end up getting pissed while we were playing. Anyway, this time George threw some food at me over something stupid. I said I would smash his face in for him. We had a shouting match onstage, but that was all. I never did anything.”

The guitarist said he felt closer to Lennon than his bandmates

While Lennon and Harrison had their problems, they generally had a good relationship. Harrison said that of all the Beatles, he was closest to Lennon.

“John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death,” he said. “As Yoko came into the picture, I lost a lot of personal contact with John; but on the odd occasion I did see him, just by the look in his eyes I felt we were connected.”