Almost before the newspaper headlines about the snub to Mrs Marcos had begun to fade, the Beatles were back on the world’s front pages. At least John was, and this time his photograph was appearing alongside those of bonfires of burning Beatles albums.
What he hadn’t considered when he’d talked to Maureen Cleave the previous February was that her interview might be syndicated – which would make it possible for a little-known American teenage magazine called DATEbook to put his thoughts about Christianity on its cover. When the article had been published in the UK, and then in many other countries, there had been no cries of outrage. But when it appeared in the Bible Belt of the United States, in a totally different kind of publication from the sophisticated London Evening Standard, and, as a publicity stunt, a disc jockey in Birmingham, Alabama, read out that John thought the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’, the effect was, literally, incendiary.
As across the South preachers rose up in their pulpits and fulminated against the Beatles, in South Carolina the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan nailed Beatles albums to burning crosses and radio stations began to ban the playing of Beatles records.
Back in England, waiting to fly to America, John was at first mystified by the rumpus. Then he became annoyed. And then worried. Coming to his aid, Maureen Cleave wrote in the Evening Standard that he ‘was not comparing the Beatles with Christ. He was simply observing that so weak was the state of Christianity, the Beatles were, to many people, better known. He was deploring rather than approving this.’
It didn’t help much. In Pennsylvania, Republican Senator Robert Fleming announced that he would try to have the Beatles banned from the state, while in Cleveland the pastor of a Baptist church threatened to excommunicate any parishioner who attended a Beatles concert.
Brian’s first thought was to cancel the tour. But that, he was told, would cost at least a million dollars. The Beatles, and especially John, had no choice but to go to America and explain away the misunderstanding.
The mob hysteria that had created Beatlemania had now turned septic and gone into reverse. Love had turned to anger and local demagogues were using the Beatles as an excuse to attack a younger generation of whose questioning attitudes they disapproved. The vast majority of Americans were bemused by the actions of some of their Christian fundamentalist compatriots – John was only a pop singer, after all. But with his short-sighted stare-in-your face defiance, he made an easy target.
The new tour was due to open in Chicago, and after a media mob descended on John at O’Hare airport when the Beatles landed on 11 August, a more organised press conference took place in Tony Barrow’s squashed rooms that night. Those who regularly travelled with John during those days had never before seen him looking so exhausted and defeated. The cheeky bounce was gone as he explained that he hadn’t been ‘knocking or putting down’ religion, or saying that ‘we’re better or greater or comparing ourselves with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is . . .’ It was just that he’d been using the name Beatles as a phenomenon that was something separate from himself. ‘If I’d said that television is more popular, I might have got away with it.’
‘Do you think you’re being crucified?’ a reporter asked, mischievously trying to put words into his mouth.
John didn’t fall for it. ‘No. I wouldn’t say that at all,’ he answered.
On and on the questioning went and on and on the explanations. When on the following day he was told that the Alabama disc jockey who had started the whole affair was now asking for an apology, he smouldered. Swallowing his anger and indignation, he said: ‘I still don’t quite know what I’ve done . . . but if you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then okay, I’m sorry.’ The man whom Cynthia never saw cry in the ten years she was with him was close to tears of frustration.
Eventually the Chicago concert went ahead, and then, though the questions never ceased, the tour moved on to the other cities – Detroit, Cleveland, Washington, DC, and then on up into Canada, before eventually arriving in Memphis, Tennessee. This was the place the Beatles were most nervous about, a city with a reputation for deaths from gunshots, and where the Ku Klux Klan were making threats again. ‘You might just as well paint a target on me,’ John said morbidly before the concert.
Everyone was nervous as the Beatles took the stage for two shows at the Mid-South Coliseum. The first went off without incident. Then came the second. Still no problem. Then, halfway through the appearance: ‘We were on stage . . .’ John would often recount. ‘Our lives had been threatened and then someone in the audience let off a firecracker . . . It went BANG! And we all looked at each other because we each thought it was the other that had been shot. It was that bad.’
The next day they were on their way to Cincinnati as the tour wound down through New York’s Shea Stadium again, where 11,000 seats went unsold, the Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles and finally Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Up to this point no one outside their immediate circle knew that it would be the end of touring. Brian still hoped they would change their minds. But John and George had had enough.
Before their last appearance they set up a camera with a wide-angle lens on an amplifier. Then, after the last song, Ringo got down from his drums, put the camera on a timer and joined the other three as they all turned their backs on the 25,000 fans in the audience, faced the lens, and a last photograph of them all on stage together was taken. That was it. There was never a shock-horror public announcement. Word just crept out over the following few months.
George would happily have stopped touring a year earlier and had sometimes been quite afraid of the mobs and irrational hysteria wherever they played. But it was John who had led the revolt. ‘It was fucking humiliation,’ he would often say later. ‘One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were . . . I didn’t foresee it. It just happened bit by bit until this complete craziness surrounded us.’ He had no regrets, except perhaps for fans who hadn’t seen them and wished they had.
But the Beatles weren’t kids any more. The thousands of live performances that they’d done over their Beatles careers had caught up with them, to the extent that they often felt and looked older than they were. Now they had to find something else to do with their lives.