Did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles?

No.

Paul McCartney joined John Lennon’s skiffle band in 1957, when they were fifteen and sixteen, respectively. George Harrison joined the following year, when he was fourteen. (Ringo didn’t join the band until 1962.) Who were your friends when you were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen? Imagine yourself intensely and inseparably joined with these same people professionally, socially and creatively, thirteen years later. When I was in my late twenties, I certainly wouldn’t wanted to have been trapped in a series of windowless rooms with my high school friends under enormous pressure to be brilliant. It would have been a miracle for the Beatles to keep a good working relationship any longer than they did under the best of circumstances. And the Beatles’ circumstances were not, emotionally speaking, ideal.

Let’s bracket the unimaginable pressure of sudden fame, the struggles over money, the generally chaotic business dealings. Just think about the creative relationships. Lennon and McCartney were both among the best musicians of their generation and would have been towering musical figures even if they had never met. As they got older and matured into their individual styles and attitudes, friction was inevitable. Their relationship is too complex to try to summarize here, but suffice to say, it was a competitive one. McCartney was the major musical talent, but he could be a condescending jerk about it. Lennon had a tendency to be viciously sarcastic and childlike. The stiff-upper-lip culture of working-class Liverpool favored passive-aggressiveness over open emotional communication. Therapy was not on the menu. Lennon and McCartney didn’t have much in the way of conflict-resolution skills, and they needed them.

Now imagine being George Harrison, one of the best rock songwriters in history in his own right, stuck in Lennon and McCartney’s shadow. (His first solo album, All Things Must Pass, was an explosive burst of all the material he’d been unable to get onto the last few Beatles albums, and it’s a must-hear.) And think of poor Ringo — when John Lennon was asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the world, Lennon replied that he wasn’t even the best drummer in the band. McCartney was and is an excellent drummer, and Ringo found himself dejectedly playing maracas or bongos on a lot of the later tracks. By the time Yoko Ono entered the picture, the Beatles were already showing signs of serious dysfunction.

If you’re a fan of the Beatles, the timing of their breakup is a source of heartache. They were at the absolute peak of their game in 1970, and they were greater than the sum of their parts. They produced plenty of strong solo work afterwards, but nothing remotely approaching the level of Abbey Road. It’s easy to look at the complexity of the situation and blame Yoko Ono for the whole mess, an attitude helped along by not-so-subtle misogyny and racism. She didn’t necessarily help matters, but the Beatles would have gone their separate ways with or without her involvement.

Original post on Quora

2 thoughts on “Did Yoko Ono break up the Beatles?

  1. Pingback: Olivia Munn slimed by the “Jessica Jinx” effect: We’d rather blame the girlfriend for a football losing streak than the players on the fieldViralStorms | ViralStorms

  2. I was just talking to a friend about Yoko Ono and whether she broke up the Beatles and had decided it was probably a matter of blaming the new girlfriend for years of pent-up resentment. I hadn’t thought of it in terms of being “trapped in a series of windowless rooms with my high school friends under enormous pressure to be brilliant” though.

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