John Lennon on the best period The Beatles ever had: “We were kings”
Hearing any of The Beatles talk about their bouts with fame can be very disorienting. While Paul McCartney has been one to discuss the pleasures of being able to go outside and have thousands of girls screaming for you or running after him, it’s hard to look at George Harrison’s interviews from around that time, sounding like he had survived the musical equivalent of war in those few years. Despite John Lennon being the one who was most desensitised by fame, it wasn’t like being one of the biggest stars in the world didn’t have its perks or anything.
Looking at their ascent, Lennon was the one who seemed to be the most gung-ho about being the biggest act of all time. He may not have had the most amount of chops out of the band, but he was more than willing to do everything he could to push them over the line, even leaving behind his leather jacket from their Hamburg days for the matching suits they had when they came to America.
At the same time, being everyone’s favourite artist did come at a strange time for Lennon. He had only recently been married to his wife, Cynthia, and while he may have had the stamina to play for hours at a time, there were a lot of moments when the hysteria waiting outside that hotel room could get extremely overwhelming.
That’s probably why Lennon was the least likely person to be talked into the band getting back together at some point. Outside of the fact that they were all on different creative pages, Lennon was finally at peace towards the end of his life, having settled into his life as a family man and baking bread at home with his baby son, Sean. He may have slowed things down, but The Rolling Stones hadn’t thought about stopping since they began in the 1960s.
Even though Lennon and McCartney helped give The Stones their first major singles, it was only a matter of time before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards made their own classics. Much has been made about ‘The Glimmer Twins’ riding off the coattails of the Fab Four, but by the 1970s, they had transformed from being the cool younger brothers of the Liverpool lads to their own blues rock institution.
Lennon may have still been paying attention to what The Stones were doing, but he looked back on those early days with The Stones as one of the few major highlights of his touring life, saying, “I spent a lot of time with them, and it was great. We were kings, and we were all just at the prime, and we all used to just go around London in our cars and meet each other and talk about music with the Animals and Eric (Burdon) and all that. It was really a good time. That was the best period, fame-wise, we didn’t get mobbed so much. I don’t know, it was like a men’s smoking club, just a very good scene.”
Granted, that kind of attention was always bound to wear on a person, and by the time the band took themselves off the road for good in the 1960s, it wasn’t even their decision. Their songs had become much bigger than the world could handle, and turning themselves into a studio-only band was the only way for them to get out all of the creative energy still left inside them.
Still, the days of The Beatles and The Stones crossing paths on the road is the perfect balance between the Fab Four’s fantastic songwriting and performance chops. The girls had only begun to scream, but looking at each band circa 1964, it was like they were sitting around waiting for the musical bomb to go off.
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