The 1960s shows John Lennon never wanted to play again: “I can’t stand”
John Lennon never had the most comfortable relationship with the live stage after The Beatles broke up.
The entire point of them performing just for the hell of it and having fun had all but evaporated the moment that they couldn’t hear themselves over the crowd, and even if they had a lot of great songs to offer, it was going to be impossible for them to soak in the moment when they could hardly hear themselves over the roar of the crowd. There was a definite learning curve that they needed to go through, but by the time they left the stage for the final time, Lennon didn’t really feel the need to dust out the cobwebs when it came to their live chops.
The Rooftop Concert was still one of the best parts of their later career whenever they started working on the Get Back project, but when Lennon eventually went solo, he almost did everything in his power to try and minimise the effect that his music had on the world. He didn’t want to be the kind of musician who toured for years at a time, and if you look at Plastic Ono Band, he was much more happy building a life with Yoko Ono over everything else.
But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t use his platform for the right reasons. He had a far more muted role whenever he played live, but when he was centring himself around political causes, it wasn’t out of the question for him to jam with a few friends and talk about the real problems going on in the world. His 1972 performance in New York is still one of the finest shows he ever played, but by the time he left the performing world, he seemed to have had his fill.
A lot of his collaborators, like Paul McCartney and David Bowie, lived to perform onstage, but when you look at the way that Elton John talks about Lennon’s final performance, he wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about coming back. He was already going through crippling stage fright just to get on the stage, and he even made a few remarks during the concert that he needed to find a song to bring it home with, so he could get backstage and be sick.
Which is strange considering the way that Lennon was used to working during the Fab Four’s salad days. His cunning wit whenever the band played live in Hamburg is what kept them interested throughout every single show, and even though he had a lot more material to work with amongst the bar crowd, something seemed to shift the minute that they graduated to playing Shea Stadium.
Lennon belonged in a tight-knit room, and the idea of him graduating to stadium rock never really appealed to him at all, saying, “I’ll probably go out on the road again before too long, but it’s just the itty-bitty things about it that I can’t stand. If something comes up that interests me, then I may do it. I think I’d sooner play the Roxy here than a ballpark, but the complications of someone like me doing a show anywhere are endless.”
And that’s probably why he ended up relishing the idea of performing on the rooftop all those years ago. The idea of him performing with no one figuring it out until they started playing was a novel idea, and he didn’t have to worry about thousands upon thousands of people cheering every single time he said anything.
For someone who had spent years at the top of the rock and roll world, Lennon liked the idea of falling back down to Earth, and the fact that he wasn’t cut out for stadiums wasn’t a bad thing. He knew what made his songs work, and he was going to spend his career tweaking everything in the studio and worrying about whether he would perform anything else later down the line.
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