You're Wrong About - ‘Yoko Ono Broke Up The Beatles’

Episode Date: September 10, 2019

Mike tells Sarah how the myth of meddling wives serves to exonerate terrible husbands. Digressions include "50 Shades of Grey," Marie Antoinette and the end of the 1960s. This episode, we’re sorry to say, contains descriptions of domestic abuse.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

They just kept getting weirder until they stopped existing and so probably what you regard as their masterpiece is like what level of weirdness do you most cherish your Beatles? Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we make you feel real sad about 50 years worth of sitcom jokes. What? Well, I just grew up watching sitcoms unlike some uncultured people. You had cable. We've talked about this. Yes, I was really educated by Nick at night. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The New Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About.

And we are in your hearts forever. And today we're talking about Yoko Ono. Yeah, I'm very excited about this one. I know I say that every time but I really, it doesn't make it less true. I am too actually because it draws together actually a surprising number of themes that we've talked about in other episodes that a lot of this episode ends up being about the thing that we mentioned in the Victims Rights episode about like the end of the 60s. Oh, they blame her for ending the 60s. It's like, was she president secretly? I mean, that would have been great.

We would have been a much more, well, we were a pretty absurdist country. Well, I think what's interesting about Yoko is that she perfectly personifies exactly what non hippies hated about the hippies, right? That she was this perfect symbol of how sort of the hippie free love thing that had begun as exciting and interesting and refreshing sort of morphed over time into this thing that was decadent and repellent and naive. That's interesting. And so Yoko Ono, who is a woman, who is an Asian woman, who has all of this other baggage that people are assigning to her, all of a sudden she's this ditzy person who's saying, give peace of chance. She's saying,

if people were happier, they wouldn't kill each other. All this sort of stuff that gets coded as hippie-dippy. I say that all the time. Yeah. And it's not clear that Yoko was wrong particularly, but she represents the shift back from the counterculture sixties back to the majoritarian seventies. Oh, no. Poor Yoko. And so do you want to summarize for me the case against Yoko Ono? Well, the prosecution present the state's case against Yoko Ono, the people versus Yoko Ono. I don't want to go down too many rabbit holes, which is basically what I've been doing for the last month. Our show could be called, I don't want to go down too many rabbit holes. Yeah. Because the myth that I'm kind of trying to debunk and the sort of you're wrong

about here, I think, is really this narrative that Yoko broke up the Beatles. Right. Which is the thing that she is known for. Yes. And I think sort of subtly or on some level believed by like a remarkably large number of people. I think even I, in a way, believe it. Okay. So the narrative I grew up on is she broke up the Beatles like maybe vindictively or something. And then there's like the joke where like, if you're in a band and one of your bandmates starts dating someone who and the relationship interferes with the band in any way, then you call them and usually it's a woman, a Yoko. Totally. Yes. That's like just a nice sitcom joke for you to put in when you're tired and also a nice probably trope to believe in your real life. And my sense of her at this

point is that John Lennon had started a relationship with her during the time that the Beatles were getting all like sitar meditation, going to India with Mia Farrow's sister and like, you know, because they'd started out as a boy band and then they went really psychedelic and they were kind of attempting to alienate their previous audience. Yes. And I guess that the idea is that she was like an art witch who drew him toward this like fancy pants, abstract art and away from rock and roll. Yeah. That's what I know. And I don't really know much about their relationship and I don't really know much about why the Beatles broke up. I mean, I grew up listening to the Beatles, but I don't know the details of the Beatles story. The use of the word which is really

interesting because that's a term that comes up a lot at the time too that really which and dragon lady tend to be the terms that people apply to her dragon lady. It's sort of like she's mean and kind of conniving. I mean, one thing that as we typically find in these stories is there's sort of two reasons to hate Yoko Ono and they're exactly the opposite. So one is that she's sort of ditzy hippie. Kind of like we made fun of her in the same way we would later make fun of Bjork. Yeah, exactly. You know, one of the infamous headlines about her at this time is an Esquire headline that calls her John Rennan's Exclusive Gloopy. That's so horrible. It's awful. That's so fucking gross. What's so interesting about that headline beyond the obvious racism is that it's

calling Yoko Ono a groopy, right? And so this is sort of one half of the case against her is that she's often labeled an actress. The AP refers to her as his mistress when they get married in the wedding announcement. That's gross. They refer to her as someone who sort of takes off her clothes on stage, which she's done as part of like we will get into it, but she has done this as part of a avant-garde art project. Like she's not like dancing in clubs at night. Yeah, it's interesting how American mainstream press is actually really hostile to performance art. Like we periodically get very upset about like there's these women and they do weird stuff on stage and I don't like it, you know? But so that's sort of one half of the myth is that she's this ditzy hippie. She's into

astrology. Oh no, not astrology. Well, I mean, you know, all of these things are kind of coded as like fundamentally unserious, right? Yeah, she's an art way. And then at the same time, you have the witch myth where she's controlling, she's manipulative, she's conniving, she's done this premeditated, taking over of John's life that she pretends she doesn't know who he is when they first meet when she obviously does. This is part of the myth. She then stalks him. She shows up at his house. She gets into his marriage because he's married at the time that they meet. She worms her way into that marriage and destroys it. And then she sort of brings herself into the beetle. She starts inviting herself to the studio where they're recording Abbey Road and Let It Be and kind of

manipulating him into putting her onto the tracks. She's manipulating him into not liking the beetle. She sort of forms a wedge between him and the other beetles. It's interesting in the Yoko as art, which theory John Lennon has no volition at any time and makes no choices for himself, has no emotions. He has no agency in that story. He's like, what's her face in 50 Shades of Grey? Right, exactly. And one of the things I kind of love about this is the idea of like, she's stalking him, she tricks him into marrying her. It's like, people get obsessed with rock stars all the time and show up at their houses and rock stars don't marry all the people that do that. Right, John Lennon has had thousands of people obsessed with

him by this point. What would it matter if it was the four thousand and third? Right. I mean, it turns out to be not true for a million other reasons too. But it's fascinating that this story is one where we're also like, he's not attracted to her at all. Like she has to force him to marry her. And it's like, are we saying that we can't make sense of someone being attracted to Yoko Ono who's like beautiful and even like Kate Bush kind of way? Like, I mean, she is witchy and she is compelling. And like, I think if you met her in the 60s, he would be like, who is this person? Like maybe I want to get a little obsessed with her. Oh, good. I mean, she's wildly enigmatic. She also, to be fair, has an album called Yes, I Am a Witch. So I looked actually really hard for the

origin of the Yoko Broke Up the Beatles myth and I couldn't find it. I think partly because a lot of the journalism from that era sort of hasn't ended up online. So it's really difficult to trace these myths back. But also people hated Yoko from like day one. There was never a time like a honeymoon period when they liked Yoko and then they turned against her after the Beatles broke up. No, from literally his first appearance in public with Yoko, they absolutely loathed her. How much do you think that was based on racism? I think it's an interesting mix between racism and sexism. So on the racism side, I read two biographies of John Lennon and one biography of the Beatles. And in one of the biographies, it says like, you know, we really can't overstate how rare it was

to see Asian people in 1960s London. Unless you were saying the movie South Pacific. Basically, the only depictions of Japanese people, Chinese people, Cambodians tie everywhere in East Asia really was like movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's. Where they were played by Mickey Rooney. Exactly where they're played by a white dude. And all of these World War Two myths about sort of the conniving, sneaking Japanese person. And so the fact that Yoko is seen as sort of clever like a fox is not a coincidence. That's so fucking weird. And then you're gonna love this on the female side of things. One thing that sort of didn't click into place for me until I started listening to this completely unrelated podcast about activism in the 1960s and 1970s, which I

will put in show notes and is great, was that all of the gatekeepers of rock and roll at the time, all of the journalists, all of the DJs, all of the record company executives, I mean, you cannot overstate how fucking male they were. I mean, wasn't there a belief also that women biologically couldn't rock? Yes, as evidenced by, you know, the rock and roll charts. If you look at any week from the 1960s and look at who was charting, it's like, you know, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, like women were invisible. I mean, there's like Janice Chaplin. Janice Chaplin rocked and everyone knew it. I mean, I'm sure there were, there were, there are people that were forgetting, but like, yeah, if you were a woman on the charts, then you were

singing like soft rock adult contemporary or something. You were allowed to be like Janice Ian or somebody. Right. Or Joni Mitchell. Yeah, like you imagine a song like, you know, I can't get no satisfaction. The idea of a woman singing something swaggery with kind of like the rock and roll attitude behind it, completely invisible. This is why Susie Quattro changed a generation. Yes. I mean, this is a bit of a tangent, but one of the best details from this podcast was about Helen Reddy, the woman who recorded the song I Am Woman Hear Me Roar. She was basically a housewife. She recorded the song. She started playing it to radio DJs, which again, were 100% male, trying to get it onto the radio. And the response from DJs, the response from sort of the

institutional taste makers wasn't just like, sorry, it's not for us. It was like, this disgusts me, you should be ashamed of yourself. Like people would ask her to leave their offices after listening to it of like, this is revolting. It's horrible. Like the amount of just raw anger that you can feel directed at women in this time. I mean, it's not different than today, but it's really, it's still, it's astounding when you uncover it. But so the only way she actually gets it on the radio is she starts playing it live on afternoon talk shows, TV talk shows. Because women watch them. Yeah. And so she would perform the song. And then at the end of the song, she would say, hey, ladies, call your local radio station and get them to play it. And eventually,

under all this public pressure, the radio stations relented and started playing it. And it became a number one hit. That's amazing. And so that's a bit of a tangent, but I think it's instructive for just understanding the extent to which men dominated this industry. And the way that Yoko talks about it now is she says, John was their treasure and I took it away. Interesting. Why does he belong to them less if he's in a relationship with her? I mean, this is what's so interesting to me is like this palpable sense of ownership over this musical artist who, of course, nobody's ever met, who's an independent human being, who they end up exonerating of all of his human complexity and foibles and huge faults

to create this narrative in which she sort of swoops in like some sort of raptor and pulls him away completely without his consent. That is the vision of her as thief and taking something that fundamentally belongs to them. Because he doesn't belong to his girlfriend or his wife. He belongs to the men who listen to his records. And he has to put out songs. And how dare he leave the Beatles? How dare he not put the Beatles back together in the 1970s? How dare he leave and go do this weird avant-garde stuff and like anti-war stuff that makes me pretty uncomfortable? Like how dare he? He should be putting out three and a half minute long songs.

So basically it's a story where she has to be whatever she needs to be to deprive him of any agency personally or politically. Yes, exactly. Okay, so how do they meet? Can we tell the John and Yoko story? Yes. So I want to tell the Yoko story. And then I want to tell the John story. And then I want to tell the how the Beatles broke up story. That sounds great. So Yoko is born in 1933, obviously in Japan. She is born to one of the richest families in

the country. Her parents are kind of like aristocrats. Her dad is some sort of banker, and her mom is essentially housewife, socialite, something. What she talks about in her childhood is that she was extremely wealthy, but the wealth acted as this weird bubble where other kids were not allowed to play with her. The way she puts it later, and I think this is great, I was never able to get a hold of my mother without touching her manicure and fur. My father had a huge desk in front of him that separated us permanently. So when she's a teenager, they end up moving to New York. Her father gets some job in New York, they end up moving to upstate New York. She goes to Sarah Lawrence University.

Wow. And so while she's there, she ends up meeting a guy named Toshi Ichiyanagi, who ends up becoming a really famous Japanese film composer. But at the time, it's just like a chilled out art dude who she meets, and immediately drops out of college to sort of hang out with him and move to New York. That's what happens when you meet an art dude. I think I went to college hoping to meet an art dude who'd be like, come to my art dude loft, and then I would drop out. But then I never did, and so I just finished college like some kind of jerk.

So she and Toshi get married, they move to Japan, and he's doing all of these shows in Japan and getting really noticed. She feels like she's kind of living in his shadow. She shows some things in Japan, but they're not all that well received. And at that period, she feels terrible. She tries to kill herself. She ends up institutionalized. And this is a wild story that there's an American jazz musician named Toni Cox, who knows her work from when she had been in New York. He starts writing her letters in the institution where she's staying in Japan. She starts writing back, and they start to form a relationship. And then he flies to Japan,

convinces her to leave the institution, then they get married and move back to New York. So John Lennon is actually her third husband after these first two dudes. And her life has already been extremely eventful. Yeah. And so it's really once she leaves Toshi, marries Toni Cox, and comes back to New York that she really starts to get noticed in the New York art world. So in 1964, she publishes a book called Grapefruit. Her whole art thing then and now is these things called instructional paintings or instructional art, where it's just a piece of paper with instructions written on it. The purpose is to break down this idea that it has to be a statue, it has to be a painting,

it has to be a work of music. She's like, no, no, the entire thing is an experience, and it only exists in your head. So some of the ones that she publishes in Grapefruit, one of them says, light a match and watch it until it goes out. Another one says, make a key, find a lock that fits. If you find it, burn the house that is attached to it. Another one says, listen to the sound of the earth turning. I think my favorite one is tuna fish. It says, imagine 1,000 suns in the sky at the same time, let them shine for one hour, then let them gradually melt into the sky, make one tuna fish sandwich and eat. Have you done that? I don't like tuna. I think what's really interesting here is

so much of what she's doing is really earnest. They're almost like self-help-y. Well, they're sort of like motivational surrealism. It's like little instructions to have a surrealist stay. I love how playful they are too, that one of my favorite ones is it's a chess board with all the normal chess pieces on it, but all the pieces are white. And so she invites people at the museum to play chess with each other, but they're not allowed to mark any of the pieces as their own. So they just have to remember, oh, this is my pawn, this is your pawn. And so, of course, it completely breaks down after 10 or 15 minutes once the pieces are mixed up, and it just becomes completely arbitrary and useless. And so a lot of her work is like this,

where it is sort of like you can see it as political if you want to, but you can also just see it as whimsical and fun. Jumping ahead, I think you can see that ethos and some of the best of John Lennon's later work, where he had this kind of playful profundity, which certainly was there for him from the beginning, but you can also see how joining forces with her artistically could have brought that out in him. So it's interesting that it doesn't even occur to us to think that we should give her credit for what he was able to do as an artist. Absolutely. One of her most well-known pieces is called cut piece. The piece is her sitting. She's wearing an evening dress, like a really nice dress.

And the piece is every member of the audience is invited to cut off a piece of her dress. It's not choreographed. Sometimes there's a minute between people cutting stuff off. Sometimes people take a little tiny piece off. Sometimes they take a huge chunk of fabric. The experience of the audience is really the artwork because it gets much more uncomfortable as you go on. I mean, there's also the discomfort of having a female artist sitting there becoming increasingly naked as people with sharp objects take scissors to her clothes. I mean, it's really riveting just to think about. Yeah, so eventually her and Tony end up moving to London. She gets famous enough that the show where she meets John, it's something called the Indica Gallery,

and it's advertised as just Yoko at Indica. This kind of shows the extent to which she's already a one-word name and already a famous person, at least in the art world. And so that is where she meets John is at this Indica Gallery show in 1966. Okay, so she's an up-and-coming conceptual artist basically, and she's doing stuff that, looking back now, it seems clear has been highly influential on a lot that has followed since that moment. Okay, so what's going on with John Lennon at this time? Okay, so rewinding to John. There's a lot of like Beatles stuff that I'm gonna skip over. You're not telling the story of the Beatles? I'm not gonna do, just because then this would be like 200 hours long. All right, you're a loss, man. But I do think I think it's worth talking about

sort of psychologically John's deal because there's a lot to talk about with John. Yeah. So he's born in 1940. He's seven years younger than Yoko. His mom, whose name is Julia, is what we would consider now to be a just sort of normal person in her early 20s living her life, but at the time was seen as kind of unconscionably promiscuous because John's dad is kind of a deadbeat dad. He works on boats and he's oftentimes gone for months at a time. He gets arrested by immigration authorities in America at one point. He's in jail. So he's like not a big presence in John's super early life. And his mom is sort of having affairs and dating other guys while married to this guy who's in jail or whatever. Yeah. And like he doesn't seem super invested in John when

he's a young child. So I think she's just kind of like, well, I'm just going to keep living my life. Who knows if this guy's ever going to get a shit together. So basically his dad leaves around the time when he's five, John's aunt Mimi, who is his mother's sister, ends up taking over custody of John. And the narrative about this was always that John's mom kind of wanted to live her bohemian lifestyle. She was like an independent spirit. She wanted to leave. What seems to be the case is that John's aunt Mimi called social services on her own sister because she always had the sense that John should have been her child. Oh God. She couldn't have kids for whatever reason and her sister had a child but was still kind of living this kind of carefree existence

that she disapproved of. You can be a good mom if you're like dating and having sex with people. I don't know why we've been so confused about this for all of time. What's so interesting is so Mimi sort of has this sense of ownership over John. And so she apparently calls social services and says, you know, there's this woman. She doesn't have a husband. Her apartment is small. She's not making very much money. And so John is not sleeping in a bed. He doesn't even have a crib to sleep in. He's sleeping on the couch. And so social services comes. Mimi apparently orchestrates this to be like, well, you know, she's not fit to be a mother, but you know, I'm right here. And so I can take John. That's a terrible betrayal. It's unbelievable. And then what's really

interesting is throughout the rest of his life, John is basically raised by his aunt Mimi and his mother. He only sees her once or twice a year. And what he says much later is that he thought she was miles away that, you know, she lived in Amsterdam or something. But it turns out she lives like a 10 minute drive away. I don't know if that was like partly that she sort of didn't fight to get him back or that Mimi kind of blocked her. But what's really interesting is John's mother reenters his life. When he's about 15, she kind of shows up and says, I want to be part of your life again. And then when he's 17, she gets hit by a car and killed. Oh God. So the way that John describes it later is I lost my mother twice. For kind of the rest

of his life, he has this huge chip on his shoulder about his mother, this sort of, you know, feeling like he's been abandoned by both his father and his mother at the same time. And then finally, when a relationship is starting to form, she's ripped away from him again. And so that is like a deep psychological pain. There's also the deep psychological pain of Aunt Mimi, who by all accounts was intensely critical of him, never approved of his musical talent or sort of said that she was proud of him. Who could imagine that someone who connived their way into stealing their sister's child would be wanting as a parent? And what's really interesting about Mimi is she has this sort of thing that she should be the number one person in John's life. And so when John finally, you

know, gets his first girlfriend, Mimi moves to sort of sabotage the relationship because she wants to be the number one person in John's life. And so Cynthia, who eventually becomes John's first wife, she sees Mimi throw like a sort of plastic figurine at John in front of her. Oh my god. And so he's got this sort of, you know, longing for his parents, this feeling of being removed, you know, ripped away from his parents, and also this extremely cold, extremely emotionally needy, and yet not emotionally giving presence in his life. What's really interesting about this, and I think, you know, extremely human is that this is exactly the pattern that John repeats

in his own life, that John has a long pattern of sort of finding people and getting really, really, really attached to them, sort of like they are his new shiny object and he gets super obsessed. And then they will do something to offend him, something to hurt his feelings, something to demonstrate that he is not the number one person in their life anymore. And then he will turn on them immediately and become extremely abusive, physically abusive, unbelievably emotionally abusive. This happens with Cynthia after his child is born. He ends up marrying Cynthia after dating her for three years. She gets pregnant, they get married afterwards. And according to two of the London biographies I read, when it becomes clear that she is going to

put Julie and Lenin first, that she's really going to step into the role of motherhood, John feels like, well, I'm not number one anymore. And how dare you? And he starts to withdraw from her and he starts to get much more emotionally abusive to her. In what ways is he emotionally abusive to Cynthia? The Cynthia thing is heartbreaking. She wrote two memoirs. I read the second of them. She died in 2015. Her and John met in art school when they were both super young. Like I said, she gets pregnant, they get married, he's 21, she's 22. He is only physically abusive to her once. This guy, Stuart Sutcliffe, who ends up being the first drummer for the Beatles because

he's John's friend. There's some party, college, whatever. She ends up dancing with Stuart. They're friends. They've known each other for ages. So she dances with Stuart. Somebody reports to John that they have danced together. He confronts Cynthia. She's like, it's not a big deal. He doesn't say a word. The next day, she is, I believe on campus, she's coming out of the bathroom. He walks up to her and slaps her so hard that he sort of knocks her head back into like a pipe behind her. Like he hits her really hard and then just walks away without a word. And so three months goes by, eventually they reconcile and she basically says, you can never do that again. That crosses the line. How dare you? And according to her memoir,

that's the only time that he hits her. But the emotional abuse is just off the charts. As the Beatles form, as the Beatles get more famous, obviously she has to be out of the public eye because like you said, they're kind of a boy band. And so you have to maintain this myth that they're all single. And so she is always in the background. She's never mentioned the press, never asked about her. She's like this invisible presence. And so he's cheating on her extremely regularly. He's also self-medicating. I mean, one of the only consistent patterns of behavior in his life is self-medicating. He drinks constantly. They start using speed when the Beatles are touring in Hamburg. They do these long weeks where they're playing, I think five or six nights a week.

And the only way to really maintain that, you know, they're playing four hours a night. And the only way to maintain that is to take like a shitload of amphetamines and also alcohol too. Like it's just kind of like this party-ish atmosphere. Later in his life, he starts doing LSD basically every day. In the late 60s, he starts using heroin. So he was really just and could not stand to be in his own head. Completely. I mean, there's no defending the behavior, but he's a deeply, deeply hurt guy. And one of the things that's really interesting about the dynamic of the Beatles is that he basically considers the Beatles like his band. So like he doesn't think of it as like

him and Paul and George and Ringo sort of coming together and creating this thing that's more than some of their parts. He sees it as like, oh, I put together this band of a bunch of people and sort of I'm the one that's in charge. Is that true? Did he like take out an ad like Jimmy Rabbit and put them together or what happened? It is kind of true that sort of he was the first person that puts together the Beatles. Paul's a friend of his. George is a friend of Paul. So he kind of gathers up the group. But you know, everyone else sort of starts to see them as a group. Well, it's not as if they were Jim Morrison in the doors. Right. I mean, Ringo gets a lot of crap, but at least, you know,

Lenin and McCartney were always, I think, equal in celebrity. Yeah. Also, you know, what's really interesting about their dynamic, and I don't think John would necessarily have admitted this at the time, but they're both really trying to impress each other that they're really different songwriters. Paul is a workaholic. He's great at being like, no, we need to keep doing, you know, 65 takes of this one track to make it perfect. And John is much more intuitive. He just kind of comes up with these sort of chanting lines that sound good, but they're not necessarily structured as songs. And so Paul has all these, you know, just melodies flowing out of him,

but they're kind of, they can be kind of trite or a little bit sort of a little bit modeling. And John is basically the one that's like, well, that fucking sucks. Well, nah, don't do that. And so they're both sort of trying to appeal to the other one and sort of subtly trying to one up each other as well. And so this is one of the reasons why they're so productive is that John, without someone sort of cracking the whip and making him work, will just sort of fall into doing like whatever tone poems, whereas Paul left his own devices will produce 10 million songs, but they're all going to be really mediocre. So they're like Holmes and Watson. They're like the weirdo and the normal guy.

Yeah. And they both extremely need each other. And so the way that one of the biographers describes the breakup of the Beatles is that like, there are cracks, and then those become fishers, and those become chasms, and eventually they break up, right? And so the cracks in the band are already starting to appear super early. So they do, of course, you know, they do like all of their kind of pop boy band style early career stuff, which are still very good, by the way, like they're very good pop songs. And I stand by the belief that pop can be great. You were just in my car and you I had Disney soundtracks playing the whole time. So it's all it's all good stuff. And then eventually it starts getting more experimental. There's a song on Revolver

that is considered to be like the first EDM song ever, like it's very weird. And then, of course, they do Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is sort of this concept album. At the time, it's super groundbreaking. It's like the tracks all kind of bleed into each other. So it's like one unbroken work, which is blowing people's minds. What's interesting about that is that Sergeant Pepper's is Paul's idea, like it's Paul's baby. And so because John struggles to acknowledge the creative talents of other people, there's sessions from after Sergeant Pepper's, where he's like, guys, we really got to get out of this creative rut that we're in. We've really got to reach our previous glories. And everyone else in the band is like, we just like recorded one of the top

selling albums of all time. And like, it's already considered a masterpiece. Like what what rut are we in? Like, what are you talking about? So John is just he's a little baby. And he's like, everyone has to love me most. And I have to be the most talented person in the world. And if I can't be the most loved and the most special, then what's it all for? Because just like the way you see people behaving a lot when they grew up without a steady source of love. Totally. And you know, he also needs he needs constant validation. The way that Cynthia puts it is, you know, you're so attached to that band, you love the band more than me. But it sort of feels like you need them more than they need you. And so that is a structure that he really needs in his life and gives him a lot

of meaning. But he also he prefers the band to be separate. So what's interesting is the album after Sergeant Pepper's is what's known as the white album, all of the songs on that album are made by separate Beatles. So basically, John will write something and then they'll be like, Hey, Paul, you know, do you mind playing piano on this? And I'll be like, I'll play it a little bit faster. It's a John song. And he's almost using the other musicians as sort of hired talent. And then, you know, the other ones will be like Paul will say like, Hey, John, you know, I need you to play guitar on this. Not like that, make it a little bit more like this. A lot of their sort of managers and engineers and people that know them in the background say that, you know,

the white album is really sad to listen to because every single song is like, Oh, it's a Ringo song. It's a Paul song. It's a John song. Like, it's not that they're more than the sum of their parts. And so this dynamic becomes more and more distinct as they go on. He even suggests John wants Abbey Road to be, you know, two sided record and one side is the John songs and one side is the Paul songs. Wow. That's a bummer. It's a fucking huge bummer. That's like they're already divorced, but they're like holding things together for the children. Yeah. Oh, totally. And by the way, this is all before Yoko shows up. So yeah, it's interesting that like they're already kind of going to different parts of the house musically, like they're keeping their creative finances

separate. And so this is also the time when he meets Yoko. So John and Yoko meet in 1966 as the cracks are starting to appear in the Beatles. So they meet at this Indica gallery show. The artwork that makes him fall in love with her is this thing where there's a ladder in the middle of the room with a magnifying glass hanging from the ceiling. And so he climbs up the ladder, grabs the magnifying glass, looks at this tiny little piece of paper on the ceiling, puts the magnifying glass to it, and it just says yes. And so what attracts him to her is this sense of positivity and earnestness that he's an art school kid, he went to art school, so he takes art really seriously, and he hates the cynicism of art and art that sort of satirizes the art world

or is really self-referential or is kind of like, I'm cooler than this is like aloof type of art. He loves that it's just being itself. And so he chats to her at the gallery. There is a lot of debate about this first meeting because what they have both always said is that Yoko has no idea who he is. She's like, oh yeah, I don't really know who you are, tell me more about what you do. And then there's a lot of sort of after the fact sort of like, come the fuck on, like she must have known. Do you think though that she must have known because like if you're a conceptual art type person and an adult, which she was a grown woman at this time. Yeah, she was 36 when they met, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I can see her like not even listening to pop music on the radio,

you know, she's just like, who knows how connected she is to popular culture. I mean, this has always been a huge part of the case against Yoko that she's lying and that of course she knew who he was. She had her target set on Lenin. And it was, and her plan was to pretend she didn't know who he was because men love it when you're oblivious to their fame. It's seen as how manipulative she is, right? That she's like, oh, I have no idea who you are. I'm, I'm but a tiny wave and I love you for who you are, whatever. And then really, she's like, you know, cold and calculated. Yes. What Tim Riley does in his book that I think is really useful is he points out that like, there's a huge spectrum between she knows who he is and she has no idea who he is.

Oh, that's a good point. So it's pretty likely that like she knew who the Beatles were, right? In the same way that like my parents probably know who Taylor Swift is. Or they're like, I know who Ariana Grande is. Like, I know that she's a person and she sings songs. I couldn't recognize one of them or name one of them or recognize a picture of her. But like, I know that she exists. Yes. Yeah. Also, the Beatles are four people and they all kind of look the same. So like, you wouldn't necessarily have picked out any one of those individuals. He also points out that John has really long hair and he's just started wearing these wiring glasses that sort of he wears for the rest of his life and are kind of his trademark of late John Lennon.

But he's just started wearing them. So even if she sort of maybe sort of vaguely knows who he is, he looks quite different. So it wouldn't sort of pop out immediately like, oh, you're John Lennon, who I've always seen with short hair and no glasses. Also, people meet celebrities all the time and don't quite place them. Yes. Especially when you're in your mid 30s, you're like, I know that I know you from somewhere. Yes. Right. But she probably looked at John Lennon and we're like, were you? Did I make you in Tribeca? Right. Yeah. I mean, another thing that I think is really important to note too, is that even if she did know exactly who he was and lied and said that she didn't, it's not that big of a deal. Right. Like, who cares? Does that destroy all her future

credibility? Like who's trying? Exactly. Who's agudicating the case of the fans versus Yoko Ono? I mean, I think this is like a theme in Yoko stuff, is that like what she's being accused of, if you actually think about it, isn't that bad, right? That like, if at the time she pretended not to know who he was, or if she sort of knew who he was at the time. But like later on, when people ask, how did you two meet? This is like the story that she concocted. Like lots of people make their how we met story like slightly better than it actually was when they, you know, after they've been together for years. Right. It is like a better how we met story. And I guess like if you have a preexisting hypothesis that she's a terrible manipulative person, then that

doesn't contradict it. Yeah. But it also doesn't support it all that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So after this, I mean, it seems like they like each other immediately, she says she's always had a thing for working class guys. And there's actually some debate about how quote unquote working class John really was. But he sort of has that affectation, right? He has a Liverpool accent. He shows up at the gallery wearing like a sweatshirt and jeans, right? He comes off as like a normal guy. And so they kind of click. And so it's 1966, both of them are married. So she's still married to Tony Cox. She has a five year old daughter. John is still married to Cynthia and has a five year old son. The period after they meet is really interesting, right? Because they meet in 66,

they don't get married until 68. So there's this long period in between where there's sort of like this courtship going on, while both of them are married to other people. So she sends him a copy of her book. He puts it next to his bed. He gets really into it. He starts like reading it before bed every night. Nothing like romantic work sharing. Yes. It's how little artist bees like to do their dance. They're both, you know, they're both intrigued by each other's work. She starts listening to the Beatles more. You know, he at one point invites her over for dinner, like with Cynthia, with a couple of other people. He's like, she's an interesting artist who's living in London. Why don't we have her over to discuss art and ideas? And no one will have any affairs with art.

And at this point they aren't. Like there's no romantic. Yeah, because they're telling themselves that. There's also this really cute story where they're sort of hanging out. I think it's at this dinner where he's like, weren't you thinking of building like a lighthouse? Like I heard you talking to some other artist about like you wanted to build a lighthouse. And, you know, me and my wife are thinking of building a lighthouse in our backyard of our like manor. John, get it together. Which is like so like teenager, like, oh, I love my gloves at your house. Can I come over again? Like he's obviously just coming up with reasons to hang out with her. Oh, I might build a lighthouse if that would mean he wouldn't come over. And then she has to sort of gently break it to him

that like, John, the lighthouse is imaginary. We're building an imaginary lighthouse. It's part of an art project. And he's like, oh, I'm sorry. That's really adorable. And as we can see, she's stalking him. Yeah, this is clearly like a stalking behavior to say like, no, I don't want to hang out with you and do this art thing together. But anyway, so he's sort of stalking her too. He finds excuses to invite her to the studio to like come hang out like, hey, we're recording a song tomorrow. Do you want to come and meet the Beatles and say hi and just hang out in the studio all day? So all the Beatles fans are like, Yoko had a plan to systematically destroy the greatest band in the world. And it's like, no, apparently John Lennon was like, hey, Yoko, maybe do you want to see my

band practice? So we're pretty good. Yeah. And it's clearly like there's there's developing a connection between the two of them. You know, I want to sort of shift perspectives here and tell this story from Cynthia's perspective. Because in her memoir, this period in Cynthia's life is fucking terrible. He's basically completely abandoned her to take care of Julian. There's a time when they're all sort of trying to get a train, they're all running for the train. And the train pulls away while she's still lagging behind, she can't make it to the train before it pulls away. And she finally gets a train, she finally gets to where they're going, she shows up the hotel later on. And John is immediately just like, well, why didn't you run faster? Right? Like

not seeing it from her perspective at all. Not a great husband. He's an awful husband. He on their wedding night, he plays a show. He wasn't there for the birth of Julian. He wasn't there until three days later, because he was touring. When he is home, he invites other people over, like he'll go out to clubs, because he's using all these drugs at this time. And then he'll bring five or 10 people into their house to party at four in the morning when she's trying to take care of a toddler. So he just doesn't want to be a father and he doesn't want to be married, especially. This happened when he was very young and he's like, I'm just not going to do the stuff that I have to do. Exactly. And so he just doesn't, he doesn't appear to have ever taken any interest

in Julian. I mean, Julian Lennon talks about how his dad was just this empty, hollow presence in his life that even when he was around, he'd be on the phone or recording music. He just didn't really engage with Julian at all. And during this period, Cynthia knows that there have been women that John has slept with. She knows that there's been other flings. She's not stupid, right? And so she sees that there is a connection growing between John and Yoko. At one point, she says, I don't know if I'm the person for you, this Yoko person actually seems better suited to you. And John is like, oh no, sweetie, no, I only love you. It's like, John, just listen to your very perceptive wife who's like, every indication suggests that you would prefer to go off and

write things on ceilings right now and not pretend to want to be a husband and father despite being completely useless in those areas. Like, no, no, no, everything's fine. And so, I mean, as this courtship is taking place between him and Yoko, there's this really heartbreaking moment where, you know, all of the Beatles go to India. They're all in these attempts to sort of do group therapy with the band and like get the band back together and like each other again. Is that when they went to India? I didn't know that. I mean, it's part of it. There's lots of other stuff going on, but it sort of sucks because Ringo gets food poisoning immediately. And then George gets really mad at Paul and John for writing songs. He's like, we're here to meditate. We're here to

not work and you guys are fucking working. George. But then in India, there's this really sad moment where John has these moments of sort of lucidity where, I mean, this is so typical of abusers generally. Well, I have these moments where he'll just sort of look at Cynthia and be like, you know what? There's no one I've ever loved as much as you. And there's this moment in India where he's sort of having one of these euphoric moments and he says, let's have more kids. Like, I want to come back to you. I want to be the husband that you've always wanted. And she just burst into tears. Wow. She understands that like this isn't, he doesn't mean it, right? Like, she sees right through it. Or the part of him does or wants to mean it, but that it's like,

it's never going to happen. It's never going to work. You can want to be able to be the person that someone needs you to be, but that doesn't mean that you can be that person. Right. And also, it turns out later that as they're in India, he's sending postcards to Yoko every morning, sneaking out every morning to send a postcard to Yoko and receive one. So like, as he's telling her, let's have more kids, he's also forming this bond with this other person that he's lying to her. And so he's, you know, of course, telling her this absurd lie that like, oh, we're just friends, we just hang out, which like, come on. And then, you know, they get back to London. She goes off on a vacation to Greece. He's like, you know, this will be good. Like,

you'll be able to relax. Like, let's talk about it more when you come back. She comes back into the house to find John and Yoko sitting on the floor in bath robes. Oh, John, cut it together. It's this heartbreaking moment, right? Because like, everything clicks into place. He doesn't even really seem ashamed. He's like, oh, hey. Yeah, that's like a Nora Efron novel. Yeah. And all she can think of to say is she's like, oh, hello, Yoko. We're having brunch at a restaurant next weekend. Do you maybe you want to join it? Like, she doesn't know what to say.

I love how she's like, when in doubt, do something courteous. Ends like peacemaking, right? Like, oh, this is all this is all fine. And then, you know, she leaves that night. She's of course, completely humiliated, completely hurt. And then she takes him back. This is very recognizable to me as like the behavior of someone who has been in a an abusive relationship for a really long time. So he's admitting they're sleeping together. But now he says, oh, she's just a fling. All get over it. You know how I am. I get excited about other people. It's probably not going to last. And then she finds out from his business manager

that he's filing for divorce. So he doesn't even tell her himself. Oh, God, that's really, that's rough. She has to bear the consequences of all of his inability to face himself and all of his childishness. Exactly. And this just like chicken shit thing of not just like coming clean and just telling her everything. And also this is like the worst part. He files for divorce on grounds of adultery. She he's accusing her of adultery. Come on. Oh, that's really I mean, which is actually true. There's a guy this is sort of as the relationship is breaking up. There is this Italian guy that she doesn't say in her memoir whether they like really slept together. But like, she's like, I turned to him for comfort.

But it's also like the fucking balls on John Lennon, who has slept with probably 500 other people during their marriage to be like, I'm really offended that you like had sex with one other person. But when a woman cheats on you once, it's worse than you cheating on her a thousand times. Exactly. And then this is just so completely wild to me. The one time they actually talk about the terms of the divorce, he brings Yoko with him. So he shows up at her house to have a sort of like sit down, how are we going to divide everything up with Yoko on his arm? So yeah, he's just like not being functional in any way. It's awful. I mean, you know, and I think to the extent that there is blame for Yoko in this

like courtship period, it is like she she knew all this. You know, it's not clear, you know, exactly what she knew about his relationship with Cynthia. He may have been lying to her about like Cynthia is terrible and we're already separated. Like who knows. But it is like, like I do think there's some culpability for Yoko. Yeah, you have culpability if you are aware that, you know, he's the one who's choosing to treat his wife that way. And she's the one who's allowing him to do that as a consequence of his relationship with her. Like to some degree, she knows what she's facilitating. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is that I think you can acknowledge culpability here and say like, yeah, like this sucked. Like he cheated on his wife and did so in a way that was

hurtful. And that still can have no bearing on whether the sort of mythological version of her is real. Yeah. You know, like we can we can use the shared culpability to find nuance rather than to support a villain. And also, I mean, I think all of the hatred of Yoko erases John's terrible behavior. I mean, this is like, yes, indefensible shit. It's actually very similar to what happened with Marie-Anne Twinette. As a French person, you weren't, it was much harder to hate the king than to hate his wife because the king was ordained by God to lead the French people. That's a hard belief to surrender all of a sudden, even if you're having a revolution. But the queen was just some Austrian woman he married, who everyone had already kind of hated for 20 years anyway.

And I think that this is, you know, it's hard to hate John Lennon. It's easy to hate women, apparently, always. Also, the terrible behavior of men is always seen as sort of intrinsic to their character. Like, well, John's going to be John. And like maybe part of being an artistic genius is being a terrible husband. Absolutely. We also kind of believe that too in America for some reason. Whereas her behavior is always sort of something she chose to do, right? It's somehow extrinsic to her. I think there's an idea that she was artistically valuable enough to be able to do whatever he wanted to his romantic partners. I mean, this is connected to the idea of the male genius that whatever he did was in service to his greatness or was part of his greatness,

and we can't question it. But with her, we can be like, well, she wasn't even really an artist. She wasn't even really talented. So you're essentially saying this person's work is so valuable to me that I don't have to hold them to any kind of a moral standard. Right. And also, I mean, this is a total tangent. But this is one year later. Yoko also ends up in a divorce and custody dispute because of Tony. And so it appears that her and Tony Cox have actually broken up functionally many years before, but they stayed married for like business visa, whatever reasons. So their marriage was kind of already basically platonic at this point, but they're sharing custody of her daughter, Kiyoko. Later on, after she marries John,

after the marriage sort of officially dissolves, there's a custody battle in which she wins custody of Kiyoko. And then Tony Cox kidnaps Kiyoko, moves overseas and joins a fucking cult. What? So he joins something called the Church of the Living Word and changes Kiyoko's name to Ruth Holman, which is why Yoko can't find Kiyoko for three decades. They're not right until 1994. Oh my God, yes. This is like when someone's life is just like too eventful, you know, that alone would be like a very eventful life if that was the one thing that happened to her. I know. And I can only mention it in this episode for like one sentence, but I'm like, I want to do like a whole episode on this. Like what actually happened here?

We should. Let's put a pin in that. Yes. So basically at this point, Cynthia leaves John's life. Cynthia sees John and Yoko sort of appear in public as a couple the first time on TV. Like she's completely cut out at this point. And she only gets the equivalent of $240,000 in the divorce, which is unbelievable. Really unbelievable. That's incredible. And she takes it because she also wants custody of Julian. She doesn't want to have a big fight over Julian. Wow. And so one thing that's really fascinating is Julian talks about how he grew up as like kind of like a lower middle class kid. And so psychologically, what's really interesting is John, until the last six months, year of his life, completely rejects Julian. That with all

of the anger that he has at his father for leaving him when he was five, he left Julian when he was five, right? And so in the same way he repeats the mistakes of Mimi, he also repeats the mistakes of his own father. And so what Julian says is that Julian is the living embodiment of his regret and how bad he feels for being a shitty father. Later on, he appears to have been a very good father to Sean, his child with Yoko later. That becomes his way of atoning for his failure with Julian. So he wants to be a good dad to Sean. But Julian is kind of the victim of that, right? That he's like, well, I can't go back and fix what I've done to Julian, but I can make it up with Sean. Yeah. And as a consequence, you ignore your first child who's a reminder to you of your

own shame that you passed on the trauma that you experienced. Exactly. I think there are probably a lot of men who have difficult relationships with children they have when they're relatively young or who are abusive or who are absent and who then are able to get their acts together later in life. Yeah. It's like it sucks, but it's just recognizable to me as human behavior. You don't want to be reminded of your fuck ups, right? You want to be reminded of what you're doing that you're proud of. And so to look at a child that you haven't seen in a year or two and totally fucked over his mother and he grew up kind of poor because of your selfishness, I get why you wouldn't want to hang out with that kid, right? And we don't want to acknowledge

our failures and we don't want to deal with the consequences of those failures, especially when you have this shiny new baby at home that's years away from being able to communicate with you about its resentments or even from forming those resentments. So the last little story about Cynthia is when she and John break up, the rest of the Beatles kind of break up with her too, right? The wives stop talking to her. Ringo is one of her neighbors and it gets strained between them, but what's really interesting is one day Paul comes over with one red rose to sort of apologize for everything because they've known each other since they were 17, right? They all went to the same schools. She's been around forever. And on the way over, he composes this song, Hey Jules

to Julian and he sings her the song that will eventually become Hey Jude. But all of the lyrics about like, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. So who is that song being sung to? Julian. Wow. It's like the one sort of like act of decency in the middle of all of like the shittiness that is swirling around a lot of these people in late 60s. That's an incredible song, right? Like it sort of like enters your heart and then expands. Yeah. The context of that is so interesting and so emotional to think about. Like you're writing this song like for the son of your bandmate who is like estranged from this child and this family. So you're like not going to be a part of their life anymore, but you're writing this song for

them that kind of feels like acknowledges the depth of that feeling. And like I'm continuing on with this guy who treated you horribly, but like I care about you and my allegiance is with you in some way. Yeah. The Beatles are pretty great. We've circled back around. Everyone knows that song and that it would ever once about anyone is just a strange thing to realize. Yeah. And sung to the person that it's about, which like totally gets me. So John and Yoko get married in March of 1969. They have been sort of publicly a couple since late the last year. And this is where, I mean, as far as the breakup of the Beatles goes, a huge thing at this time is that John just becomes totally codependent with Yoko.

That makes sense. After essentially this night that they spend together in his house when Cynthia comes in the next morning, that's the first time they make love. Yeah, I know. It makes me feel weird. They're basically literally insane. Like there isn't a day that they spend apart after that. This is where the tensions start to build with the rest of the Beatles when he brings Yoko into the studio. Well, that makes sense because like I wouldn't like it if we had to record the show with your boyfriend sitting there the entire time. And this is the thing is that a lot of these tensions are really understandable in that George, Paul and Ringo

did not sign up for this. They're like, we're in a band of four people. Yoko's not a member of the band. And so it's a little bit weird that she's sitting next to you while you're playing guitar. What is she doing here? And so the accusation against Yoko is that sort of she horned in on this deliberately, but it's quite clear that like John couldn't be without her. Like this was John pulling her into the studio with him. Right. It's not ambition. It's his codependency. Totally. And also jealousy too, that there's a story that only appears in one book and I haven't seen it anywhere else that he makes her write down a list of all the men she has slept with and sort of go through each one of them, which is like fucking textbook abuser shit. But I haven't

seen that in other like that doesn't actually sound like the kind of story that Yoko herself would tell because she is really protective of John's legacy and she's always maintained that he was never abusive or had a bad temper or anything with her, which other people actually dispute. Other people have seen him shouting at her. Sean, their son says that he once yelled at him so loud that he had to go to the doctor for his eardrum. Wow. But Yoko doesn't talk about that. It's very interesting. And so I don't know the source for the claim that he made her write down this list. It does sound like something he would do, but it doesn't sound like something Yoko would say he did. So I don't really know what to think about that. But also knowing what we know

about John, the idea that he would be going, they do these marathon recording sessions of like 18 hours, all hours of the night, the idea that he would leave Yoko at home where she could do anything she wanted, that would threaten him. So I don't know how true that is, but I think that there's like some level of that in there. I think they can all be true at once. I think you can imagine there being a level of jealousy there and also a lot of dependency and all sorts of other motives. I mean, our attachments are complicated, but it does seem that whatever the mix is that she was there because of his desires and not because of her own. Yes. And also what's really interesting is he loved the shit out of her. There's no question

about this. Basically, the thing that starts to break up the Beatles at this time is that John becomes much more interested in her work and her way of doing art than he is in the Beatles. She has done this thing where she'll put a member of the public in a bag and you can talk to that person and it's kind of like, you know, we're getting rid of race, we're getting rid of class, and at some point him and Yoko do this thing where they both get into a plastic bag and sort of have the press there talk to them. And it's like, he loves her ideas. Yeah, of course he does. He's like, oh, we can just play a bunch of fay games with the media. Like, yes. My career doesn't have to be about teenagers screaming at me.

And a really important shift at this time is that instead of trying to impress Paul with everything that he's doing, he wants to impress Yoko. He just becomes less interested in pop songs. He becomes less interested in like Paul making him do 65 takes of some Ringo song that he's not even that interested in. He's just like, I just want to hang out with my wife and engage in like the form of creativity that she inspires out of me rather than the form of creativity that you guys inspire out of me. And so it's like people assigning moral value to the fact that he's changing as a person. Another thing they start doing, which I think is really interesting, is they start doing all this political stuff. So do you know what this thing called the bed in?

I was just going to ask. I was like, I know there was a bed related protest somewhere in there. 01:02:00,400 --> 01:02:02,960 It was like, did that have to do with Vietnam? Yeah, it's basically like instead of doing a honeymoon, they did essentially this art project. And it's basically like from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., they just stay in bed and they invite the press to come and talk to them. And so the logic is we're famous people, we're getting married. Our names are going to be on the cover of newspapers anyway. So we want the word peace to be next to our names, right? That's a way of promoting peace. This is 1969, right? It's

after the Tet Offensive. Like Vietnam is starting to become much more obvious as like not a great idea. And so there's much more sort of student protesting. What's really interesting, there's actually, you know, there's footage of 100% of the time that they were doing the bed in. And people fucking hated it. People hated John. People hated her. Why? The footage is really interesting because it's so palpable that nobody who's there to criticize them is there to defend the Vietnam War. It's not like you guys are wrong. The Vietnam War is necessary for the North Vietnamese to be defeated and for capitalism to spread around the world because it's better than communit. That's never the argument. All of the arguments against

John and Yoko are basically tactical, right? It's like you're only doing this to get attention. You're only doing this to sell records. Why do you think there is such a hostile response? I mean, this to me is completely this end of the 60s thing, that there is the sense of ownership over John as kind of like the frontman of a boy band, right? There's that sense of ownership happening. There's also, you know, it's really palpable in the footage of people that go there to basically argue with them of like, you're dumb hippies. There's people arguing with them in their bed in about like, well, if the war is so serious, why are you making these sort of like funny, wacky statements? And you know, the song Give Piece of Chance is so sort of like childlike,

like why aren't you being more serious? And Yoko says, well, look, if somebody's smiling, they're not going to go overseas and kill somebody. It's like perfectly designed to piss off like quote unquote serious people. At one point she says, well, you know, if I was alive when Hitler was around, I would have slept with him and then there wouldn't have been World War II. I mean, you also have to wonder how much of this is actual naivety and is instead just sort of like fake commentary or like trolling kind of. Yeah. And I also think what's really interesting is, you know, thinking about this, it's not clear to me that she's wrong. Like what's interesting is like no one ever really makes a like, you're incorrect argument. It's just like

you're silly and you're stupid. How can your work possibly be helpful in this big serious world? Exactly. How could whimsy and play be useful? And of course, people still make that argument. But yeah, it's an unprovable argument and it's based maybe more on your own sensibilities and on a demonstrable fact. Completely. And it's based on your sensibilities, but it's like pretending to not be based on your sensibilities, right? It's based on like common sense. Like this is how things work. Like you're not supposed to say that people should be happier because like that's not a serious argument. Like maybe if everybody was happier, there wouldn't be so much war. To me, it's like not all that untrue. The thing is that people who are radically in touch with the truth often

are saying things that are so far away from the except way of thinking that they just sound like incomprehensible non sequiturs. Because they're so outside of this logic of like, no, no, no. We are all adults. We are all serious. More is a necessary and essential part of society and masculinity, I guess. Like how dare she suggest that things could ever be radically different. I think that's part of it too is that anyone who's like, you know, we don't have to do this. People get mad at that argument. They're like, no, like it has to be this way. Like there has to be war. There has to be this much violence. How dare you try and take out of our hands this belief we're clinging to that the reason there's this much pain in the world is because there must

be. I mean, you know, the disproportionality of the hatred of John and Yoko at the time is really interesting to me because what they were advocating for like, fine, you think it's stupid, fine, you think it's naive. They're not saying like, go burn down everybody's house. Yeah. Go and like, assassinate all of the people architecting the war. They're not putting out the anarchist cookbook. They're just like, we are lying in our bed and there doesn't have to be war. Like, yeah, who are they hurting? Being naive and Pollyanna ish on issues of politics is like, there are much worse ways to be. I mean, you're preaching to the choir. My child. I knew you would be a receptive audience for this argument. But it's almost like, you know, I mean, this is why to me it seems so wrapped up

in this idea of like the hippie movement being over. The corruption of John is a huge part of this, right? That instead of making music, he's getting sidetracked with these silly childlike political projects. Oh, no. John Lennon is making too much art. That's what ended this. You know, it's just no one should have done anything in 1970 because no matter what you did, you'd be blamed for ending the sixties. Right. And so this is basically where we get to like the last gasp of the Beatles. Like this is where the band really starts to break up. I mean, if you know, if you really want to say who broke up the Beatles, is it the Beatles? Paul says John broke up the Beatles, that John was the one that sort of announced that he was quitting. And, you know,

his interests, he just wasn't interested in the Beatles anymore. He was much more interested in doing Yoko stuff and doing political stuff. And the fact that they were both on heroin a lot, like didn't help. He and Yoko were? Yeah, they were both pretty rough heroin addicts at the time. One thing that Yoko says now is that luckily neither one of them ever shot up because they were really afraid of needles. Also, they had a super shitty drug dealer who used to cut their heroin with a bunch of baby powder. So they were getting like really shitty heroin. And so apparently there was so much in it that at one point they told their dealer they're like, this smells like baby powder. And he's like, Oh, it's supposed to smell like baby powder. No big deal.

That's how heroin always smells. I don't want to sound like too square, but like the fact that they're both just doing a ton of drugs at this time, to me it explains why John starts acting so impulsively at the end of the 60s. Like there's a lot of things that he starts doing that he just like doesn't think through. Like the Beatles are supposed to start recording one of their new albums. And they're like, Okay, show up at the studio on July 1st. You know, July 1st comes around and then they're like, Where's John? He's like, Oh, I'm in Scotland on vacation. He's just kind of running on whatever his impulses tell him to do. And so there's this point where George leaves the band in a huff. Like I'm sick of Yoko being here. I'm sick of this.

Like everyone is checked out and phoning it in. I'm sick of this. Fuck this. And then at the meeting, they sort of call like a house meeting to like talk about, you know, the future of the Beatles and what's going to happen. And John brings Yoko to the meeting. And it's like, you know, anything you say to me, you can say to Yoko, which is like, it's not listening to the needs of like people that you're in a band with that it's like, dude, Yoko's fine, but like you can also have a job. It's like his identity can only be based around one thing at one time. And so for a while, he was Mr. Beatle and now he's Mr. Yoko. Yes. That's a good way of putting it. And so the last thing that I want to mention that breaks up the Beatles

is there's this whole narrative of Yoko broke up the Beatles, but you could just as easily make the argument that their financial manager broke up the Beatles. Really? Talk about that. Before all of this is happening, their longtime financial manager who found them at the very beginning named Brian Epstein, he dies of a drug overdose. And so they need to get a new manager. And so this guy, his name's Alan Klein, he will later go to prison for tax fraud. He's someone who he managed Sam Cook, he managed Hermann's Hermits, he managed the Rolling Stones, he's always wanted to be the manager of the Beatles. He reads a biography of John Lennon and then somehow gets a meeting with John and Yoko at dinner. And he spends the entire dinner

flattering John and saying, oh, I love this song. Oh, did you write that song? Oh, how interesting. And he even knows the parts that John played. So he'll be like, well, I'm not that wild about this song, but I love the piano in it. And then John will be like, I played the piano in it. He does exactly what Yoko is accused of. He also sort of like pretends to be more like working class than he is to try to sort of appeal to John's like, I want to pull up people from the working class like me sort of vibe. And so on the spot, John signs up with him. John, like without consulting any of the other Beatles, just like, yep, we're in, we'll sign with you, you'll be our new manager. And so he sort of shows up the next day and just tells the other Beatles we have a new

manager. Wow. So this guy, this like random business manager who they've literally only known for like a week basically just like takes over the band. He starts firing everybody at their record label because they have a record label called Applecore. He gets everybody to sign a contract with him, but Paul refuses to sign, which is really interesting. And then there's like all these later court cases of Paul trying to disentangle himself and blah, blah, blah. Like the court cases of the Beatles will be going on when like the sun swallows the earth. But what's really interesting is like, I think first of all, to give some credit to the Yoko broke up the Beatles argument, like none of this was really known by the public at the time. Like I think, you know, the financial

arrangements of famous people are extremely important and their relationships with people like their agents and their managers are like central relationships in their lives. But those aren't really visible to the public. Right. Because the agents and managers don't publicize themselves. Exactly. And so all of this behind the scenes wrangling and the fight about like, you know, who should own our rights? And like, how should we be running this, this record company that like none of us really know how to run? All of this stuff was totally behind the scenes and nobody had any idea about this until years later. And so one of the reasons why Yoko got caught in the crossfire is because like she's visible, right? Like she's on the cover

of newspapers. Yeah. And because we're so used to blaming women, it's the easiest thing to do. Yes. And also to not like give men the credit of like, well, maybe they're just fighting over money stuff. Like maybe it's not, maybe it's not that interesting. Maybe they're just like bitching at each other about like royalty rates and stuff. Right. We always want the reason for a big dramatic split to be big and dramatic. And for there to be kind of like one reason, like John had a new girlfriend and she ruined everything. And also that, that the villain isn't a member of the band and that there is a clear villain and that someone came from outside and split them up. Like it's just, it's a version of the story that lets you maintain a lot of your

illusions about who the people in the band are. It makes total sense that we fell back on it. Yeah. Yeah. And so they sort of, you know, they record an album and then they sort of record another album as a kind of farewell. The Beatles released their last album in 1969 or maybe it's early 1970. But by the end of 1970, all four of the Beatles have released solo albums. So it's basically like, it's over. Yeah. What sort of starts the dominoes is John saying like, I'm out guys. But like, all of these cracks had been there. This is, you know, this is five years of increasing distance. And so is Yoko a part of that? Like, sure. But it's not clear that she's like a big part of that. And it's not clear that there was any intention on her part,

particularly. Yeah. No, it makes sense. I mean, I think it's just again, it's a story where we chose to blame a woman for something that she was only tangentially involved in. Yeah. And it's like, why is it bad that a band broke up at all? Like, did we want the Beatles to stay together forever? Did that seem like a reasonable expectation? I mean, this is my favorite myth about Yoko Ono that I spent a lot of time on Beatles message boards this week, which nobody should ever do. And so one of the theories is that John wanted to get the Beatles back together in the 1970s. And Yoko stopped him because like she hated Paul and Linda for some reason. I mean, none of this is true. Even that is like this weird sense of ownership of like, if only the

Beatles would get back together, you know, eight years after they broke up, then like they'd produce music just as good. And it's like, I mean, first of all, have you seen the fourth season of Arrested Development? Secondly, it's like this weird desperate attempt to like get back something that's fundamentally gone. I think there's also, yeah, and the fact that as fans, like this is a, I think a very well represented phenomenon, fans feel betrayed when artists change fundamentally or when their work evolves in a way, because like the Beatles are doing completely different work at the end of their careers, they were at the beginning. And it's interesting how as people who consume albums or movies or songs or vlogs, like we get openly hostile toward the creators

who we love because they connect with some part of us through their work. When their work changes and grows away from that, it's almost like we respond the way we do in relationships. Like if you're in a relationship with someone and you start growing apart and you're like, no, like stop it, like you're supposed to stay the same for as long as I need you to be the same. And I don't like this. And you don't want to blame the person that you love for changing. And so it just feels better if you can blame like, if they got really into fly fishing, you're like, this is the fault of fly fishing really. I mean, one of the things that I find totally fascinating is there's this footage of, you know, John and Yoko will, you know,

fly into a city and get to their hotel. And of course, there's like a throng of fans outside their hotel and people will shout like chink at Yoko or like, which isn't even accurate as well. Or they'll shout, they'll just shout yellow at her, which is like, give me a break. There's footage in the documentary imagine of this woman standing outside of a hotel and greeting John and saying, she's worse than Cynthia. She's horrible, which is just as well as being like indefensible. It's also just weird human behavior where it's like, okay, you like the Beatles enough to wait outside of some random hotel for hours, like in the rain to catch a glimpse of John Lennon, right? For 10 seconds. And then you're going to tell him that you hate his wife. And then it's like,

your wife sucks. Like, it's so, it's so weird. And also that suggests that you have a feeling of ownership about them, right? Because it's like, your first wife was bad enough. But this one is even worse. And it's like, is it just bad that he's marrying anyone? Like, what is this about really? Yeah. Like, we should blame him for the stuff that he actually did do wrong. Like, it's funny, because you don't see a lot of popular, you know, media about like John Lennon, you know, interesting later career, great second marriage, lousy first marriage. Let's make fun of him for that if we're gonna make fun of him for something. And like, terrible father and good father at the same time. Great artist and codependent schoolboy. I mean, to me, it mirrors the way that John was

in the relationship, right? Where it's like, you belong to me, but if you do something I don't like, then fuck you. Yeah. So I guess really, like, a nice thing for us to know as fans is that the people whose art we love are going to be capable of abusive behavior inevitably. And we can at least not contribute to that by engaging in abusive dynamics with them. Yes. That's a tip. We have a tip, finally. Yeah, if you're if you're gonna stand outside of somebody's hotel room, just sing, hey, Jude, do that.