Credit: John Lennon

“Screw it”: Why did John Lennon stop touring as a solo artist?

Thu 12 December 2024 22:05, UK

When you hear about legendary rock stars, you hear about legendary gigs they were a part of. When you think of Queen, you think of Live Aid. When you think of Jimi Hendrix, you think of Woodstock. However, despite being the biggest band in the world, The Beatles never had a great history with touring.

It’s not that The Beatles couldn’t play live—quite the opposite. If not for the strength of their live show, they would likely never have become as popular as they did. When they took to the stage on The Ed Sullivan Show, they captured the hearts of people nationwide, but that wouldn’t have happened were their music not tight.

Years prior spent gigging in Liverpool and Germany meant that when they were eventually thrown into the mainstream, The Beatles had a stage show that sounded just as good, if not better, than they sounded on records. “By the time they came to the US, they were halfway through their career,” pointed out E Street guitarist Steve Van Zandt, “They had been going since ’57 and were gone in ’69. So by ’64, they were quite sophisticated and highly evolved.”

So, while The Beatles may have been excellent live performers, their history of live performance was less impressive. In 1966, they stopped gigging altogether after a run of controversial tours and poorly attended gigs put the band’s safety at risk. They began making music because it was fun, and they loved it; after such a long string of poor shows, they no longer found touring fun, so they decided to call it a day.

This ended up being a positive move for the band, as when they made music from then on in, it was more experimental and catered less for the live show as they were no longer concerned about how a song would translate from the studio to the stage. That being said, it is a shame that we don’t have as many stories about The Beatles playing live as we could do.

Another reason The Beatles stopped touring was poor sound quality and organisation. Screaming fans who did attend made it difficult to hear, and therefore, the quality of their shows went downhill. Plus, it became hard to organise shows amid Beatlemania, so many of their gigs ended up having to be stopped early, with many lasting under 30 minutes.

So what happened to John Lennon’s solo career?

After such an adverse history with live shows, when The Beatles eventually split up and Lennon was asked to perform as a solo artist, he had a very short fuse. He wasn’t willing to put up with poor organisation, sound quality or press teams. Overall, he wasn’t that keen on playing live to begin with. He did a few shows but realised not much had changed since his time with The Beatles except for people’s expectations of him. Subsequently, he stopped performing again.

“I wouldn’t mind doing it, but the organisation frightens me. I could probably earn a lot of money, which wouldn’t be a bad thing because all my money is tied up in England and they won’t let me have it,” he said when discussing performing, “I get lots of people wanting me to do things for charity, but usually when I show, it turns out the whole thing is a fiasco and I end up running the whole show.”

Lennon also said that when he agreed to gigs, people expected him to bring every famous friend he had. “Not many people know how to put a show on properly: most of them think that if they get a famous name, he’ll call everybody he knows and they won’t have to worry about anything else,” he said, “Now people ring me and they think that if I say ‘Yes’ then Dylan, George and God will appear, too. If Yoko appears anywhere, they automatically expect me to appear, so I now say screw it for the time being.”