When did John decide to leave The Beatles/what was the "final straw"?

IMO, John was never the same since he met YOKO...that's not a positive statement. I'll bet he was thinking of quitting way before....

 

no, we like it..LOL! sure wish it was 1965 again!

 

No? LOL...

 

YES, we are Beatle fans...embrace it, accept it or ignore it...3 great choices...

 

he wouldn't have told the truth anyway...LOL

 

I think a better analogy would be a guy who breaks up with his girlfriend, and then is annoyed when she goes and tells all their friends that she dumped him.

As has been noted, there is no indication that Lennon did anything in his private behavior after September 1969 that indicated he wanted to work with the Beatles again. No one has reported any private conversations with him in which he expressed ambivalence or talked about possible future recording plans. When they did record in January 1970, he did not take part. If he was ambivalent, wouldn't he have mentioned it to one of them over those several months?

 

Heh, well. Ok. I can't say that I blame you much. I wasn't around then, but it seems like it was a great time to be alive.

 

John and Yoko have stated that they first hooked up as lovers AFTER India. But John and Yoko were also secretly writing letters to each other while he was in India. So it is possible that there may have been something going on that they purposefully have never revealed. We'll need Lewisohn to dig up the exact details.

 

But John didn't file for divorce, did he? He just let things hang there unsettled for months. He absolutely was ambivalent about ending the band or he would have filed suit himself or held a press conference about it. After all, he held no shortage of other press conferences.

 

do you think we will be around long enough Arnie ??

 

Even as late as 1974, when Paul and George convened in New York to sign the papers officially dissolving the Beatles partnership, John wouldn’t travel a few blocks to join them, instead sending his helium ‘Listen to This Balloon’ message.

Personally I take ‘Listen to This Balloon’ as another abdication of responsibility on John’s part, but one that certainly says he’s still not quite ready to end it. Otherwise he would have shown up.

(The other way to see it is as a power play, giving him the final option to decide when, where and if he signs...)

 

unbelievable time for everything; music, toys, TV... a kids dream...I could write a book about that wonderful time...it seems like it was a dream compared to the sick and twisted world we live in today...what happened?

 

I'm only 3 and a half years old, so I'll be around ...

 

But his action -- or rather -- his utter inaction demonstates that he didn't want to pull the plug legally. Or he would have.

Yes that's what John said. My point is no one persuaded him to do anything he didn't already want to do. He wasn't a child. He was responsible for his own choices, and he chose to listen to Klein. I don't at all buy that he listened to Paul about this when John wasn't listening to Paul about anything else.

 

Vietnam....

 

Have you been outside lately in 2017? It's nasty out there. I think I'd rather stay here in the late 1960s, thank you.

 

Not prepared to, or not able to?

It seems that he just traded one drug dependency (LSD) for another (Heroin) between 1967 & 1969, when Paul was coming up with project after project.

It's possible that if he hadn't fallen into heroin addiction in late 1968, he could've taken charge. 1967 was a Paul year - Sgt Pepper & MMT. 1968 started out with them following one of George's ideas (the Rishikesh retreat). What if John was sober & motivated enough to propose a Beatles project of HIS creation in 1969?

 

The world became much more cynical. Also, the internet and social media ruined everything.

 

I thought he was a vegetarian at this point. Or was that why he was hiding it?

 

BOTH reasons might have played an equal role. John's subconscious seems to have made him make these types of seemingly opposite decisions.

 

John and Yoko went ‘public’ soon after the official story says they got together in May 1968. But IIRC Tony Bramwell’s book contains an undated story in which he describes John asking him to go to Yoko’s and pick up some things he left there because he didn’t want to face her after a fling, and Tony was surprised about him having slept with Yoko. Yoko wouldn’t give Tony John’s things. Anyway, I think this story this clearly dates from well before India, maybe during the MMT era.

 

Is there a source for that quote? I know it was published in Rolling Stone, but who was it attributed to?

 

that's a fact, yes...

 

I guess one can always find something...NEGATIVE.

 

Is all this talk below from the Nagra Tapes?


“he felt he had no place in telling John to leave Yoko at home. It did, however, always rankle McCartney when Ono would refer to the Beatles without "the" – as in, "Beatles will do this, Beatles will do that." Paul tried to correct her – "Actually, it's the Beatles, luv" – to no avail.


Finally, Harrison reached a breaking point. Early in the afternoon of January 10th, Harrison and Lennon got into a fight that they had to later deny came to blows (though George Martin would tell Lennon biographer Philip Norman that the argument indeed became physical, but "was hushed up afterwards"). The moments of that confrontation are among the few that Lindsay-Hogg was unable to capture for posterity. He did, however, manage to film Harrison apparently quitting the Beatles. "I'm out of here," he said, packing up his guitar. "Put an ad in [the papers] and get a few people in. See you 'round the clubs."