Why John Lennon Never Wanted a Beatles Reunion
When John Lennon was done with The Beatles, he was done with The Beatles. He wanted to concentrate on moving forward and not looking back. That meant a reunion was absolutely out of the question.
John Lennon quit The Beatles
Lennon officially told his bandmates, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, that he’d decided to leave the group during a meeting with Allen Klein in Sept. 1969. Klein convinced Lennon to keep his decision hush-hush so as to not compromise a renegotiation that was in the works with the group’s EMI/Capitol contract.
“We were discussing something in the office with Paul and Paul was saying to do something, and I kept saying, ‘No, no, no’ to everything he said,” reads Lennon Remembers by Jann S. Wenner, according to Beatles Bible. “So it came to a point that I had to say something. So I said, ‘The group’s over, I’m leaving.’ Allen was there, and he was saying, ‘Don’t tell.’ He didn’t want me to tell Paul even. But I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t stop it, it came out. And Paul and Allen said they were glad that I wasn’t going to announce it, like I was going to make an event out of it.”
“I must admit we’d known it was coming at some point because of his intense involvement with Yoko. John needed to give space to his and Yoko’s thing,” McCartney reacted, according to The Beatles Anthology. “Someone like John would want to end The Beatles period and start the Yoko period; and he wouldn’t like either to interfere with the other. But what wasn’t too clever was this idea of: ‘I wasn’t going to tell you till after we signed the new contract.’ Good old John – he had to blurt it out. And that was it.”
John Lennon was against a Beatles reunion
McCartney was right — Lennon was focused on the next phase of his life. In one of his final interviews, Lennon spoke about how fans begged the four to get back together for a reunion. He deplored the thought. He had a suspicion that people wanted The Beatles to get back together because they didn’t understand them the first time around.
“For the ones who want to relive it, ‘Resurrect the Beatles’ and all,” he told David Sheff of Playboy, as reported in The Love You Make. “for those who didn’t understand the Beatles and the sixties in the first place, what the f*** are we going to do for them now? Do we have to divide the fish and the loaves for the multitudes again? Do we have to get crucified again? Do we have to do the walking on water again because a whole pile of dummies didn’t see it the first time or didn’t believe it when they saw it? That’s what they’re asking; ‘Get off the cross. I didn’t understand it the first time. Can you do it again?’ No way!”
In 1970, John Lennon said being in The Beatles was ‘awful’
Another reason Lennon never wanted to do a Beatles reunion was because he didn’t exactly look back at that time in his life fondly.
“It was awful. All that business was completely awful. It was a f****** humiliation,” he told Jann S. Wenner of Rolling Stone. “One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. I did it, but I didn’t know-I didn’t foresee that- it just happened bit by bit till this complete craziness is surrounding you. And you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand the people you hated when you were ten.”
