John Lennon Was ‘Shaky’ and ‘Frightened’ After Getting so Angry He Tried to Kill a Friend
While John Lennon sang about peace and love, it didn’t take much to get him angry for much of his career. In the early 1970s, Lennon heckled comedians, fought with friends, and trashed his home. In the early 1960s and before, Lennon frequently brawled. He once got in a fight with a friend that left him stricken by just how angry he felt.
John Lennon seemed shocked by how angry he got at a friend
Long before The Beatles hit it big, Lennon spent many nights drinking at a local Liverpool bar. While his friends say he was mostly “very entertaining,” his mood could turn darker without much warning. He shouted at people and even got physical. His school friend, Jonathan Hague, recalled a time Lennon began hitting him.
“He got my duffel coat up over my head and started flailing away,” Hague said in the book The Beatles by Bob Spitz. “It actually didn’t mean a thing to me; I was too drunk.”
Lennon, however, was clearly rattled by the incident. The day after, he confessed to Hague that his behavior had frightened him.
“But the next day in school, in a very shaky, frightened way, John told me that he was trying to kill the person under the coat and didn’t understand the anger in him to do such a thing.”
He faced a lawsuit after a different fight
Lennon said that throughout his school years, he viewed fighting as a way to survive.
“I looked at all the hundreds of new kids and thought, Christ, I’ll have to fight all my way through this lot, having just made it at Dovedale,” he said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “There was some real heavies there.”
As he got older, though, grief, anger, and alcohol fueled his fights. He recalled a time that a local DJ, Bob Wooler, insinuated that Lennon had a physical affair with Beatles manager Brian Epstein.
“I was out of my mind with drink. (You know, when you get to the point where you want to drink out of all the empty glasses, that drunk),” Lennon said in The Beatles Anthology. “And Bob was saying, ‘Come on, John, tell me about you and Brian — we all know.’”
In retaliation, Lennon attacked him.
“I smashed him up,” he said, adding, “I broke his bloody ribs for him. I was pissed at the time.”
The fight was so brutal that Wooler sued Lennon. They settled out of court.
“He sued me afterwards for thumping him,” Lennon said. “I paid him two hundred pounds to settle it. That was probably the last real fight I’ve ever had.”
John Lennon said he swore off violence after the angry outburst
The fight with Wooler also frightened Lennon. He could hardly believe he let himself get that worked up over the other man’s comments.
“If somebody said it now I wouldn’t give a s***, but I was beating the s*** out of him, hitting him with a big stick, and for the first time I thought, ‘I can kill this guy,’” Lennon said. “I just saw it, like on a screen: if I hit him once more, that’s going to be it.”
After the attack, Lennon said he swore off violence.
“I really got shocked,” he said. “That’s when I gave up violence, because all my life I’d been like that.”
Despite what he said, Lennon continued to exhibit violent and aggressive behavior long after his altercation with Wooler.
