John Lennon was a founding member of The Beatles and rose to immense levels of fame and success with the band. He proved his skill as a songwriter while in the group and his solo music after they broke up. Despite his innate talent as an artist, Lennon didn’t think he would have gone places with it if it hadn’t been for The Beatles.
John Lennon thought The Beatles gave his life direction
Lennon’s estranged father, Freddie Lennon, reunited with his son during his Beatle years. Freddie worked as a seaman and picked up odd jobs after losing that position. Lennon believed he might have followed a similar path if it hadn’t been for The Beatles.
“If it hadn’t been for The Beatles, I would probably have ended up like Freddie,” Lennon told writer Hunter Davies in the book The Beatles.
Davies thought this was ridiculous given Lennon’s level of talent. Upon further consideration, however, he found it difficult to imagine Lennon in any traditional type of career path.
“I remember laughing at this at the time, but there is some truth in it,” Davies wrote. “It is hard to imagine John fitting in with a proper job, or office hierarchy, or even managing to make a living as an artist or designer, not of course that he had passed any of his art college exams. He would have become bored far too quickly. So he might well have ended up as a bum.
More than one person agreed with him
Lennon and Davies were not the only people to have expressed this sentiment. Lennon’s first wife, Cynthia, thought he needed Paul McCartney to push him to make music.
“He would have ended up a bum … It’s hard to say that now, after what happened, but he wouldn’t have cared that much,” she said in the book Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman. “I’d have gone out to work, he wouldn’t have any qualifications whatsoever because he was falling foul of the art college, and [his aunt] Mimi would have pushed him in all sorts of directions. He would have needed to learn a trade, or go back to school again, and I can’t see him concentrating. He’d have gone downhill.”
George Martin, the longtime producer for The Beatles, agreed.
“Paul needs an audience, but John doesn’t,” he explained. “John is very lazy, unlike Paul. Without Paul he would often give up. John writes for his own amusement. He would be content to play his tunes to [his wife, Cynthia].”
John Lennon lost control of The Beatles when he got ‘lazy,’ said a Beatles associate
Peter Brown, the band’s press officer, agreed that Lennon didn’t have the drive McCartney did.
“I could communicate with Paul. I suppose I was closer to him, but I was always enamored of John’s enigmatic personality,” Brown told Rolling Stone. “Paul was the thorough one, the workaholic, and John was lazy.”
He hadn’t been this way in the band’s earliest days, Brown said. Instead, Lennon took complete control of the group.
“But in the beginning, John was absolutely the boss. It was his group,” Brown explained. “It was John the leader, John everything. And John was never a compromiser. John did what John wanted.”
As the 1960s wore on, though, the power shifted McCartney, and Lennon began to look elsewhere to entertain himself.
“So when Paul took over, it was only because John had lost interest,” Brown said. “Of course, that was a problem when Yoko came along and got John to assert himself again. He wanted to take everything back.”
