Beatles Breakup

When I was thirteen years old, in the late spring of 1970, I was dismayed to find out that the Beatles were breaking up. I had heard rumors of breakups going back to 1966, but nothing had come of them and, perhaps, nothing would come of this, either. But it happened anyway. Back then, I didn’t know what caused it, but it came out when Paul McCartney released his solo album McCartney that year and revealed in a self-interview in its notes that he was leaving the group. Later, he filed a lawsuit against the Beatles’ manager Allen Klein has well as against his bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Why? McCartney had a number of reasons that he gave, such as that Phil Spector tampered with his song The Long and Winding Road on the Let It Be album and that the Beatles tried to interfere with his solo career by asking him to delay the release of his album so that it wouldn’t coincide with Let It Be’s release. But the real reason was pretty obvious: Paul was fed up with his manager, whom he vehemently opposed but was hired by the other three by a three-to-one vote. He resented the fact that the Beatles no longer performed publicly, something that Paul always felt was an energizing and fulfilling activity. He was also tired of the other Beatles who, one-by-one, had walked out on the group at various times, threatening to quit. I believe that Paul took to heart that John was serious about breaking up the band when he started ranting about wanting a “divorce” from the Beatles during a meeting the previous year. I also think that Paul disliked Yoko Ono and her constant presence with John whenever the band was together. He was used to informally collaborating with Lennon and putting out ideas for songs. But John had pretty much isolated himself with Yoko, whom he had recently married. John, likewise, expressed contempt for Paul’s new wife, Linda, and her family, the Eastmans, whom Paul had promoted to manage the band but had shown themselves to be both too snobbish and pro-Paul (so they were rejected in favor of Klein). George also had been in an antagonistic stance against Paul because he believed that Paul was trying to take over the band during recording sessions and interfered with his guitar playing on songs. Also, George resented that only two of his own compositions would be allowed on Beatles albums, in spite of his increasing critical acceptance. It seemed at the time that only Ringo was enthusiastic about keeping the Beatles together. But instead of trying to bring the bickering members together, he chose to take sides with John and George against Paul, giving Paul the excuse to consider himself as the isolated “victim”, justified in seeking legal recourse to his predicaments.

There is, despite the little feuds and resentments breaking out among the band members, no reason why the Beatles could not have stayed together as a band, at least until their contract expired in 1977 (or, for that matter, indefinitely). Even if they were not on speaking terms with each other, they could have recorded tracks on their own with an agreed-upon producer (why not George Martin?) putting everything together to give it a feeling of coherence. They had already been doing this for a lot of their recordings toward the end, anyway. George could have had his desired four songs per album, which I believe (since I like his music) would have only enhanced the quality of the albums. For some reason, Paul and John both seemed to feel in 1970 that they were on the spot, and it was now or never as to what had to be decided then. Nothing could have been further from the truth! The Beatles had lived under extremely tightly spaced, tightly scheduled conditions for several years and were understandably tired of each other. Why not have them all agree to take a year off (like 1970) do their own solo projects and their own “things” away from each other, and agree to meet together on such-and-such a date in 1971 to put together a new album? Then, they could disperse again, do their own solo work (and Paul could perform publicly to his heart’s content, still enjoying his popularity and status as a “Beatle”), and return sometime in 1973 to crank out another Beatles album! And so on, indefinitely. It would only have taken a few weeks out of every two years to do this. This is the type of pattern that wiser bands, like the Rolling Stones, adopted. And I challenge anybody to find a group that fought among themselves like they did! Yet they’ve endured as a band to this day.

The year 1970 would have been a very good time for each Beatle to take a “time out” and get as far away from the others as possible. And they did, but not enough. They couldn’t see that time was on their side, and because of that we’ve missed out on many good things that they would have contributed to popular music had they stuck together as an group.