The end of the Beatles devastated the music world — but who does Paul
McCartney blame for their breakup? How did it all go wrong? And how much
did Yoko really have to do with it? Keep watching to find out.
The Beatles became one of the world's most popular bands in the early 1960s. They played
concerts to tens of thousands of screaming fans, their albums dominated the record charts,
and then, at the height of the band's popularity in 1970, they broke up.
While this may have seemed sudden to fans, though, the end had been coming for a while. Their last
concert event together was in 1966, aside from a legendary impromptu concert on the roof of
their new recording studio in 1969. Sadly, the 1966 tour really drove the life out of the band,
and a number of drug problems in the ensuing years didn't exactly help things, either.
The dissolution of the Beatles came not as a big public fight,
but rather a very bland breakup note to the public that was penned by Paul McCartney,
in which he "interviewed" himself. The official breakup of the band came after years of legal
wrangling on each member's behalf. McCartney and George Harrison signed the paperwork at the Plaza
Hotel in New York, while Ringo Starr signed his in England. John Lennon was the last to sign,
at Walt Disney World's Polynesian Village Hotel, on December 29th, 1974.
Being a Beatle didn't come without its share of stress. In 1966, the band played a show in the
Philippines to cap off a tour which took them across Asia. They were subsequently invited
to a reception with Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos, but they didn't go.
"And so what they did was they said 'Beatles snub
first family,' which I'm glad we did. See, even in those days we had taste."
When this was reported in the media, it incited a lot of upset locals who hassled the Beatles
all the way to the airport, and the band was only able to flee once they agreed to give up
the money they made from their concert. After the incident in the Philippines,
the Fab Four had some time off to get ready for a U.S. tour,
which should have been much more relaxed — but Lennon's off-the-cuff remark about the
Beatles being "more popular than Jesus" angered many religious people in the United States.
Rumors swirled in the decades that followed that their final days together were rife with
tension and fiery argument, but Peter Jackson, director of the 2021 documentary Get Back,
says that just wasn't the case. Discussing the footage he had reviewed, he told ABC News:
"I just waited for it to go bad. [...] I waited for the sense that they hated
each other. I waited for all the things I had read in the books, and it never showed up."
Of course, when most people think of the reason that the Beatles broke up, they think of Yoko
Ono. She dated and then married John Lennon, and the band broke up not too long afterward.
But she was not to blame. Apparently, the band was in dire straits long before Yoko due to the
death of their manager, and she simply acted as a convenient scapegoat for many. Not even her
own denials were enough to appease the anger of some fans of the Fab Four. Paul McCartney,
however, has been much more direct about who caused the breakup of the
most popular band in the world: John Lennon. In 2021, Paul McCartney told BBC Radio 4:
"John walked into a room one day and said, 'I am leaving the Beatles.'"
Lennon wanted to have full creative control of his music,
and he told the group that he was finished, likening the split to a divorce. It seems that
the Beatles' runaway success wasn't enough to convince Lennon to stay.
Luckily, all four Beatles went on to find considerable success as solo
artists. McCartney started another band, Wings, that featured his wife, Linda,
and then continued to tour after her death; he is now a hugely popular solo
artist. George Harrison also found success as a solo artist in the '70s and '80s;
he died in 2001. Ringo Starr continued to play tours well into the 2020s. And Lennon had an
incredibly promising career ahead of him when he was murdered by Mark David Chapman in 1980.
McCartney believes the Beatles would have continued to make music if Lennon
had stayed. Sadly, we will never know — but maybe now people can stop blaming Yoko Ono.
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