John Lennon Once Said He Wished The Beatles ‘Never All Happened’ and Wanted to Be ‘Completely Forgotten’
Long before The Beatles found fame and a highly devoted audience, John Lennon had decided that he would be successful, no matter what it took. With the band, he achieved beyond what he ever could have expected. Though he liked being a musician, he admitted that the chaos of Beatlemania could be a bit much. He once said that he wished it had never happened.
John Lennon knew he wanted to be successful long before he was in The Beatles
Lennon didn’t put much effort into his studies, confident enough in his future success that school didn’t matter to him.
“I always felt I’d make it, though,” he said, per the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “There were some moments of doubt, but I knew something would eventually happen. When [Aunt] Mimi used to throw things away I’d written or drawn, I used to say, ‘You’ll regret that when I’m famous,’ and mean it. I didn’t really know what I wanted to be, apart from ending up an eccentric millionaire. I fancied marrying a millionairess, and doing it that way.”
He said that he’d even resort to making money by illegal means if necessary.
“I had to be a millionaire,” he said. “If I couldn’t do it without being crooked, then I’d have to be crooked. I was quite prepared to do that — nobody obviously was going to give me money for my paintings.”
He once said he wished it had never happened
With The Beatles, Lennon achieved his childhood dream. He was wealthy and famous, so much so that he could barely step outside without fans swarming him.
“Watching TV in Liverpool and looking at the photos in the papers of the crowd scenes I was a little alarmed — John and the others had almost been crushed by the mob as they tried to get to their car that night,” his first wife Cynthia wrote in her memoir, John. “What on earth was going on?”
It became nearly impossible to go out in public, something Lennon deeply regretted.
“We can’t do a simple thing together as a family, like going for a walk,” he said. “It’s terrible. Sometimes I wish it had never all happened.”
The idea of maintaining this level of fame for too long horrified him.
“You don’t think that would happen do you? Not famous forever? What if we disappeared for years and years, wouldn’t that work?” he asked. “I suppose we’d then just become famous in another way, like Greta Garbo. Perhaps a new group will come along and take over from us. It would be so nice to be completely forgotten.”
John Lennon knew it was time for The Beatles to break up
By the end of the 1960s, Lennon was ready to step away from The Beatles. Though Beatlemania was no longer at the frenzied levels of the mid-1960s, he was tired of that level of fame. He also believed it was time for the band members to work individually.
“It’s far better music (we’re all making now) because we’re not suppressed,” he said in 1971, per Express. “In the Beatles, by the time the Beatles were at their peak we were cutting each other down to size. We were limiting our capacity to write and perform by fitting it into some kind of format and that’s why it caused trouble … I knew I wouldn’t be doing the same thing. It just doesn’t work like that. It’s like a rugby team. Sometimes you just have to get married and leave the boys on a Saturday night. That’s just how it is.”
