A month to the day that they’d entered the studio together for the final time, The Beatles were over as an entity. John Lennon had taken the decision to leave the group, and the others couldn’t very well go on without him.
Lennon informed his bandmates that he was leaving on September 20th, 1969, “So, that’s the group, then,” Paul McCartney replied. Ringo Starr recalled in the group’s Anthology documentary that Lennon had asked them directly about breaking up The Beatles. “Well, that’s it, lads. Let’s end it,” he suggested. “And we all said ‘yes’,” Starr remembered, even though he personally wanted to keep the band going.
Starr wasn’t exactly in a position to decide their future, though, whereas Lennon, as one of the group’s lead singers and primary songwriters, held all the cards. He’d just returned from a concert in Toronto where he played with the first iteration of his new backing ensemble, the Plastic Ono Band. It included longtime friend of The Beatles Klaus Voorman, who’d go on to play bass on his first two solo albums, as well as drummer Alan White, who he’d recruit for his second album Imagine.
It was on the flight over to Toronto that Lennon first announced to anyone apart from wife Yoko Ono that he was quitting The Beatles. He confirmed to the band’s then-manager Allen Klein, “It’s over,” after which there was no going back.
So, he was starting a new band?
The founder of The Beatles was forging his own path. But it wasn’t going to be via a new band of brothers, as his first ten years as a professional musician had been. “Fuck it, I’m not going to get stuck with another set of people,” he told Jann Wenner in their famous 1970 interview, “whoever they are.” His intention certainly wasn’t to start a new band.
Instead he planned to continue where he’d left off with his work as a solo artist while still a member of The Beatles, releasing songs like ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and playing live with the likes of Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. Yes, he’d always need other musicians and even singers to be part of his recordings and performances, but the work would belong to him, and him alone, for the first time.
During the first years of his break with The Beatles, he was also keen to use his music as a platform for anti-war activism, as he’d done with his first peace single. He and Ono engaged in various avant-garde art projects around this theme and the pseudo-philosophical critique of social prejudice they’d invented called bagism. Further commitments with The Beatles would have stood in the way of this work.
As McCartney observed in Anthology, “John needed to give space to his and Yoko’s thing.” He believed Lennon needed a clean break with his former band. “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 this wasn’t the fundamental reason Lennon quit the group, even if it was a factor in the timing of his departure. As he told Dick Cavett in 1971, the band members were “drifting apart on their own” anyway. Each of the four Beatles was increasingly working on projects of their own from 1968 onwards, and even their writing and recording of Beatles songs was often no longer as collaborative as it had been in the past. He felt that someone needed to take the step of actually admitting the band couldn’t continue and that someone ended up being him.
Ono was the one who put it best when she explained to Cavett, “I think it’s very difficult for four artists who are so brilliant and talented to be together and do everything together.” In truth, The Beatles weren’t four artists when they first found success. Lennon and McCartney were the real creative forces within the band, and Harrison and Starr were talented musicians who were perfectly in sync with their bandmates. But over time, the band’s lead guitarist and drummer developed into artists and songwriters in their own right, just as Lennon and McCartney’s respective creative abilities outgrew their songwriting partnership.
The more The Beatles grew together, the more its members grew apart. “So whatever they were doing was almost miraculous, that they were together,” Ono added. We can be grateful that this miracle lasted as long as it did, resulting in so much extraordinary music.
