Did one song make The Beatles quit touring?
By 1966, The Beatles knew they had to quit touring. A myriad of reasons impacted this mindset, with Beatlemania pushing them to the point of exhaustion, where the original excitement they had for touring the world at the start of the decade now dissipated. However, that was only the beginning.
Speaking as part of a Dutch documentary about his classic Electric Light Orchestra song ‘Mr. Blue Sky’, Jeff Lynne, who starred in The Traveling Wilburys alongside former Beatle George Harrison, claimed that the 1966 number-one hit ‘Paperback Writer’ caused the ‘Fab Four’ to stop touring. He said: “The Beatles quit because they couldn’t do ‘Paperback Writer’. That’s why they couldn’t play it onstage. And here I was, 30-piece orchestras on record, pianos, guitars, and choirs, trying to do it with seven people. I didn’t like the sound at all. The live set was not much fun for me.”
Famously, it was the last new song The Beatles featured on their final tour in the US in 1966. It caused issues for the group, with the complex, layered vocal effect that marks it out as one of their best, impossible to bring to life in the live setting. The track proved to be another example that the quartet were moving into a new creative, more experimental area that placed emphasis on the recording studio over the stage.
Written during the sessions of the increasingly psychedelic 1966 album Revolver, it reflects this growing dedication to becoming purely a recording artist that their next album, 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s is the most expansive of their career. The concept record relies heavily on careful arrangements and bountiful orchestration. This means that if ‘Paperback Writer’ was causing complications in the live setting, what was to come in the years that followed would have been beyond the pale.
“We placed our cameras on the amplifiers and put them on a timer,” George Harrison later shared of The Beatles’ final show at Candlestick Park, per Rolling Stone. “We stopped between tunes, Ringo got down off the drums, and we stood facing the amplifiers with our back to the audience and took photographs. We knew: ‘This is it – we’re not going to do this again. This is the last concert.’ It was a unanimous decision.”
Why did The Beatles quit touring?
As is made clear by various comments from the band, it wasn’t solely the difficulty of performing ‘Paperback Writer’ that caused them to quit touring. It was a part of a more significant, complex situation. The final decision was fuelled by the terrible sound of their concerts. A group now obsessed with the fidelity of their art, the fact the group couldn’t hear themselves due to the insane noise from fans was compounded by poor set-ups and commercial exhaustion.
On top of this, John Lennon’s comments in March of that year that the Liverpudlians were “more popular than Jesus”, caused an intense backlash, particularly with the WASP elements of American society. The remark led to an array of threats, one of which was aimed at Ringo Starr directly, let alone George Harrison’s consistent battery via audience-thrown sweets — another sign that it was time to step away from the road. However, the intensity didn’t stop there. After a July show in Manilla, The Philippines, when armed thugs intercepted The Beatles on the way back to the airport, manager Brian Epstein was punched in the face. “How much of a good thing can you have,” Paul McCartney would later ask.
“Later then, it got a bit worrying because now the first sort of flush of the excitement had been going for quite a few years, and we were maturing, and we were sort of out of that phase,” McCartney told NPR. “It was like, OK, it would be quite nice to be able to hear the song we’re playing. And we couldn’t because it was just a million seagulls screaming.”
“The sound at our concerts was always bad. We would be joking with each other on stage just to keep ourselves amused,” recalled Harrison in the Anthology.
It was also revealed years later that The Beatles were so drowned out by their fans that John Lennon would often make lewd alterations to famous lyrics, such as “I Wanna Hold Your Gland” because nobody could hear him. “It was just a sort of a freak show,” he later reflected. “The Beatles were the show, and the music had nothing to do with it.”
“In 1966 the road was getting pretty boring,” Ringo Starr also asserted in the Beatles Anthology. “It was coming to the end for me. Nobody was listening at the shows. That was OK at the beginning, but we were playing really bad.” Things were so pointless for the drummer because of the immense sound of fans that he resorted to following the movements of his bandmates’ backsides to understand where they were in the song.
After discussing the band’s future after their final show at Candlestick Park, McCartney told Teen Set the main reason they quit touring. He said: “We’re not very good performers, actually. We’re better in a recording studio where we can control things and work on it until it’s right. With performing, there’s so much that can go wrong, and you can’t go back over it and do it right.” They spent five months recording Sgt. Pepper’s, a record that proved to be their masterpiece, showing that the decision to retire from touring was not in vain, as arguably their best period followed.
So, unless Jeffy Lynne knows something that we don’t know, it wasn’t ‘Paperback Writer’ that caused The Beatles to stop touring. The screaming was already on the wall.
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