When The Beatles broke up, John Lennon publicly aired his grievances with the band and his former bandmates. He made it clear that he was ready to move on and did not share the warm opinion of the band that so many did. Within a few years, though, Lennon said he had let go of these bad feelings. He claimed that his memories of The Beatles were fond, despite what he may have said in the past.
John Lennon said he had softened toward The Beatles not long after their split
In the early 1970s, each of the former Beatles constantly fielded questions about whether or not the band would reunite. Lennon, who broke up the band, said a reunion was a possibility. His friend, Elliot Mintz wrote about it in his book We All Shine On: John Yoko and Me.
“‘It’s quite possible, yes,’ [John] said as we sat on the sand. ‘I don’t know why the hell we’d do it, but it’s possible.’”
He’d spoken publicly about his problems with the band, but he claimed he’d moved past them. By 1973, he said he didn’t harbor any bad feelings about the band.
“No, no, all my memories are now all fond and the wounds have all healed,” he said. “If we do it, we do it. If we record, we record.”
Just two years before this, though, Lennon’s memories of the band weren’t quite as warm and fuzzy.
“F***in’ big bastards, that’s what the Beatles were,” he told Rolling Stone. “You have to be a bastard to make it, that’s a fact, and the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.”
He said he was happy to be able to move on to a creative partnership with Yoko Ono.
“I would have expanded the Beatles and broken them and gotten their pants off and stopped them being God, but it didn’t work, and Yoko was naive, she came in and she would expect to perform with them, with any group, like you would with any group, she was jamming, but there would be a sort of coldness about it,” he said. “That’s when I decided: I could no longer artistically get anything out of the Beatles and here was someone that could turn me on to a million things.”
George Harrison had no interest in a reunion
Even if Lennon agreed to go ahead with a reunion, his bandmates may not have. George Harrison was particularly opposed to the idea.
“They’ve got lots and lots of songs they can play forever. But what do they want? Blood?” he asked Rolling Stone in 1979. “They want us all to die like Elvis Presley? Elvis got stuck in a rut where the only thing he could do was to keep on doing the same old thing, and in the end his health suffered and that was it.”
He didn’t think anyone clamoring for a reunion had the band’s best interests in mind.
“We were just four relatively sane people in the middle of madness,” he said. “People used us as an excuse to trip out, and we were the victims of that. That’s why they want the Beatles to go on, so they can all get silly again. But they don’t have consideration for our well-being when they say, ‘Let’s have the Fab Four again.’”
