“Load of baloney”: how George Harrison’s nemesis destroyed The Beatles’ farewell
Every story in history imparts a simple truth: you can’t be a hero without an enemy. George Harrison might have embodied the new-age peace and love of the zeitgeist like a human day-glo rolling paper, but he, too, had a nemesis to battle against. This unlikely foe was the actor Lee Marvin, and he was oddly woven into Beatles lore in a large, mystical way.
On October 17th, 1962, The Beatles first appeared on TV in the UK. They played ‘Some Other Guy’ and their latest single, ‘Love Me Do’. It wasn’t quite the grand fanfare that their legacy might lead you to believe. It wasn’t even a national broadcast. It was for a regional show in the Manchester area called People and Places. Lord knows how many weary eyes managed to catch the would-be momentous show.
Nevertheless, they would soon become the biggest artists in human history and then rather suddenly split, releasing their final UK single, ‘Let It Be’ on March 6th, 1970. There are a mere 2,697 days between those two points. To put that in context, their journey from local TV to unprecedented globetrotting giants and bitterly broken-up buddies took less time than the period between Brexit and the present. Hell, there were 2,954 days between the first episode of Game of Thrones, airing on April 17th, 2011, and the final one gracing our screens on May 19th, 2019.
Strangely, in this mind-bendingly brief window, Lee Marvin presided over more than one pivotal moment. Over the course of their rise, one distinct moment of diegesis was when LSD entered their world. The stone-faced actor effectively watched over their first trip. In a weird way, he seemed like the right fellow to do so. You see, Marvin’s breakout role was in the Marlon Brando-led movie The Wild Ones, where he played the leader of a rival gang who called themselves ‘The Beetles’. While the Fab Four insist this isn’t where their own name derives, it doesn’t stop it from being an interesting little curio, given what follows.
By the time they got to America, the Liverpudlians really were the wild ones in a sense. They were propelling the zeitgeist forward at a rate of knots uncomputable. They needed to slow down. So, one sunny day in the States, the Fab Four were trying to lay low and cool off in California when some LSD came their way via David Crosby. Paul McCartney abstained, but the others dropped a tab of acid and floated around in a swimming pool. They decided to take the edge off by watching a movie. It turned out to be a mistake.
“The movie was put on, and — of all things — it was a drive-in print of Cat Ballou,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “The drive-in print has the audience response already dubbed onto it, because you’re all sitting in your cars and don’t hear everybody laugh. Instead, they tell you when to laugh and when not to. It was bizarre, watching this on acid.”
It was bizarre for the band, but it changed the world for the rest of us. Suddenly, they ventured down a kaleidoscopic road and pushed culture far out into a weird new avant-garde direction. That mindset began to take shape in a movie starring the old leader of the Beetles in the lead role. “I’ve always hated Lee Marvin,“ and unimpressed Harrison recalled, “and listening on acid to that other little dwarf bloke with a bowler hat on, I thought it was the biggest load of baloney shite I’d ever seen in my life.”
Harrison might’ve hated it, but Cat Ballou was a hit. It launched Marvin to new heights. Soon, Harrison would have another hit by the downbeat actor to hate, too. The Quiet Beatle already had problems with Marvin when it came to his acting, but he would haunt the legacy of the band in a much more ominous way later down the line. By rights, the group’s final single, ‘Let It Be’, should’ve been a smash-hit send-off, encapsulating the mammoth journey of a band who blazed so brightly that they were bound to burn out.
Sadly, they didn’t go out with one final fitting explosion but rather a wistful puff of smoke. The spiritual ‘Let It Be’ only peaked at number two in the UK charts. It was kept off the top spot by none other than Marvin and his dastardly single, ‘Wand’rin’ Star’. Their last UK single might’ve sounded like a sweet farewell, but the public opted for cheesy kitsch from Tin Pan Alley instead, and the world has never been the same since. Thanks, Marv.
