How John Lennon’s Reunion Plan Got Rejected By George Harrison

When The Beatles broke up, John Lennon didn’t hold back his feelings about the band and his former bandmates. He made it clear that he had serious grievances and was ready to move on. In the years following the split, though, Lennon’s perspective softened, and he reflected on the band’s legacy in a more positive light, even admitting that the memories of his time with The Beatles were fond.

Lennon’s Thoughts on a Reunion

In the early 1970s, the question of whether The Beatles would ever reunite was on everyone’s mind. Despite being the one to break up the band, Lennon did not completely rule out the possibility of a reunion. He said it was a possibility, though not one he was certain about.

“‘It’s quite possible, yes,’ [John] said as we sat on the sand. ‘I don’t know why the hell we’d do it, but it’s possible,’” his friend Elliot Mintz wrote in his book We All Shine On: John Yoko and Me.

At that time, Lennon was no longer holding on to the bitterness he once felt. By 1973, he had moved on from the past.

“No, no, all my memories are now all fond and the wounds have all healed,” he said. “If we do it, we do it. If we record, we record.”

This was a far cry from his earlier public outbursts, where Lennon had voiced harsh criticisms of The Beatles and the way they operated as a band.

Lennon’s Harsh Words Post-Breakup

Just a couple of years earlier, Lennon’s feelings toward The Beatles were far from warm. In an infamous interview with Rolling Stone, he had very little positive to say about his former bandmates.

“F***in’ big bastards, that’s what the Beatles were,” Lennon said. “You have to be a bastard to make it, that’s a fact, and the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.”

At the time, Lennon was also focused on his creative partnership with Yoko Ono, whom he believed could help him explore new artistic directions.

“I would have expanded the Beatles and broken them and gotten their pants off and stopped them being God,” Lennon explained. “But it didn’t work, and Yoko was naive, she came in and she would expect to perform with them, with any group, like you would with any group, she was jamming, but there would be a sort of coldness about it.”

This sense of disconnect led Lennon to decide that he could no longer get the creative satisfaction he wanted from The Beatles. Instead, he found a new artistic spark in Yoko, who opened his eyes to new ideas.

George Harrison’s Reluctance to Reunite

Even if Lennon was open to a Beatles reunion, his bandmates, especially George Harrison, were not as eager. Harrison made it clear that he had little interest in going back to the past.

“They’ve got lots and lots of songs they can play forever. But what do they want? Blood?” Harrison asked Rolling Stone in 1979. “They want us all to die like Elvis Presley? Elvis got stuck in a rut where the only thing he could do was to keep on doing the same old thing, and in the end his health suffered and that was it.”

Harrison also had no patience for the public’s demand for a reunion, feeling that fans were not considering the well-being of the band members.

“We were just four relatively sane people in the middle of madness,” Harrison said. “People used us as an excuse to trip out, and we were the victims of that. That’s why they want the Beatles to go on, so they can all get silly again. But they don’t have consideration for our well-being when they say, ‘Let’s have the Fab Four again.’”