John Lennon’s cunning plan to keep The Beatles together
When The Beatles split, it all seemed very final. However, the reality was quite the opposite.
It was like any breakup. A big argument would lead to a walkout or a moment of certainty that the end was here. It would lead to a moment like George Harrison writing calmly in his diary on January 10th 1969, “Got up went to Twickenham rehearsed until lunch time — left the Beatles”.
However, Harrison was back in the studio by the 15th, agreeing that he didn’t actually want to quit and taking the band band, leading to a blissful makeup period that any on-again-off-again relationship knows well.
A clean cut is hard to make when there is love there, and between the Fab Four who had grown up together, the love was obvious and enduring. That’s what makes it so tough to assign the breakup of the Beatles to any one thing or any one person. At one point or another, all four of them had expressed annoyance or upset, and most had even stormed out. It was an extended period of back and forths, where Lennon, who was perhaps the most certain of them all that things had to end, routinely faltered on his plans.
If the official dumping of the band had to be assigned to anyone, it would likely be said that John Lennon was the one who finally cut it all off and prompted the end.
On 20th September, 1969, Lennon officially informed McCartney, Starr and their agent Klein of his decision to end the band, telling them outright that he wanted a “divorce.” But only a few days prior, on the 8th of that month, Lennon was the one hatching a plan to keep the band together.
Recorded on a tape while Starr was in the hospital, Lennon sat the other two band members down to discuss the future, laying out a whole plan he had in order to keep things together and improve tensions.
There were several points. First, he wanted things to be fairer when it came to tracklisting. “We have the singles market, [George and Ringo] don’t get anything! I mean, we’ve never offered George B-sides; we could have given him a lot of B-sides, but because we were two people, you had the A-side and I had the B-side,” he said, addressing McCartney to say that going forward, Harrison and Starr should have the chance to write singles too.
He wanted to carve out a formula for how things were shared. “I just want it known I’m allowed to put four songs on the album, whatever happens,” he said, not only demanding his share, but making it clear that he really did seem to believe that the band would in fact be releasing more records.
In this meeting, he made it clear that he seemed to want to, but he wanted things to change. He wanted to get rid of “the Lennon and McCartney myth” that the pair wrote everything for the band together, but make it more about all four members being respected and rewarded equally.
It wasn’t all cheery, though. Some of Lennon’s plans were pretty harsh, especially when it came to McCartney’s tunes. “Wouldn’t it be better — because we didn’t really dig ‘em, you know? — for you to do songs that you dug and for ‘Ob-La-Di’ and ‘Maxwell’ to be given to people who like music like that,” Lennon said, suggest that moving forward, McCartney should give away songs the rest of the band don’t like.
He tried to frame it in a positive light, adding, “For an album, we can just do only stuff that we really dug. It’s a drag to put that song on an album that nobody dug,” claiming that this, too, would help make everything good again between the four.
For the first time in a long time, Lennon seemed to be the committed one, fighting for the band’s future. He left the plan on the table and went off to perform at a festival. Who knows what really happened in the brief gap, but for some reason, when he came back, he wanted out; his own plan be damned.
