In 1966, The Beatles stopped touring, a development that terrified John Lennon. He and his bandmates had been dealing with chaotic tours and screaming fans for years. Suddenly, the absence of it in his life felt daunting. He explained that he had been wanting to leave the band, but he had no idea where to go from there.
John Lennon struggled to envision a future with The Beatles when they stopped touring
After a tumultuous tour schedule, The Beatles decided to stop touring. George Harrison described the decision to stop as a relief, but Lennon felt differently. He didn’t necessarily want to be touring with the band, but he didn’t know where to go from there. He made the movie How I Won the War because he needed something to do.
“I did it because The Beatles had stopped touring and I didn’t know what to do,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “Instead of going home and being with the family, I immediately went to Spain with Dick Lester because I couldn’t deal with not being continually onstage. That was the first time I thought, ‘My God, what do you do if this isn’t going on? What is there? There’s no life without it.’ And that’s when the seed was planted that I had to somehow get out of this, without being thrown out by the others. But I could never step out of the palace because it was too frightening.”
He felt a sense of terror about his future, but he couldn’t walk away from the band. That option seemed even worse to him.
“I was really too scared to walk away,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Well, this is the end, really. There’s no more touring. That means there’s going to be a blank space in the future.’”
The Beatles got better when they stopped touring
While Lennon toyed with the idea of leaving The Beatles when they stopped touring, he remained with the group for another three years. It wasn’t until 1969 that he announced he wanted to depart from the group. In these three years, the band made some of their best music.
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Albums like Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Abbey Road pushed their music in new, innovative directions. They had more time to focus on their music because they were not touring. Given what Lennon said, they also might have dove into their later albums because they felt lost.
John Lennon said he wanted to leave The Beatles as early as 1966
Lennon said that the moment he started working on How I Won the War, he was looking for a way out of The Beatles.
“I was always waiting for a reason to get out of The Beatles from the day I made How I Won the War in 1966,” he said. “I just didn’t have the guts to do it, you see. Because I didn’t know where to go.”
He explained that he thought about his future without the band, but he couldn’t think of a way to make it work. The future without the band seemed too daunting.
“At some time or other that’s when I really started considering life without The Beatles — what would it be?” he said. “And I spent that six weeks thinking about that: ‘What am I going to do? Am I going to be doing Vegas? But cabaret?’ I mean, where do you go? So that’s when I started thinking about it. But I could not think what it would be, or how I could do it. I didn’t even consider forming my own group or anything, because it didn’t enter my mind. Just what would I do when it stopped?”
In 1969, Lennon told his bandmates that he wanted to leave the group, effectively ending The Beatles.
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