Ringo Starr discussed Yoko Ono’s role in The Beatles’ breakup. Shockingly, John Lennon had the opposite perspective on the situation. John also discussed what helped him through the backlash that he and Yoko suffered.
Ringo Starr said Yoko Ono and another star got blamed for The Beatles’ breakup
During a 1981 interview with Rolling Stone, Ringo revealed his feelings about The Beatles. “They are my brothers, you see,” he explained. “I’m an only child, and they’re my brothers. I’ve always said that if I ever spend all my bread, I can just go and live with one of them, and vice versa, ’cause we all love to spend it.”
Ringo said he had a special connection to Yoko. “I always know there’s a home for me with Yoko,” he said. “She’s taken a lot of s*** — her and Linda [McCartney]. But The Beatles’ breakup wasn’t their fault.”
Ringo Starr said The Beatles broke up because they all went through personal changes
Ringo had his own explanation for the band’s dissolution. “It was just that suddenly we were all 30 and married and changed,” he said. “We couldn’t carry on that life anymore. From 1961, ’62, to around 1969, we were just all for each other. But suddenly you’re older, and you don’t want to devote all that time to this one object. It was time it ended.
“We stopped because we’d had enough,” he continued. We’d gone as far as we could with each other. And I’m sorry, but I’m not here to re-create anybody’s past.” The “You’re Sixteen” singer said he was more interested in modern gigs than the gigs of the past. Despite being most famous as a member of The Beatles, Ringo didn’t see the band as the main force of his life anymore.
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John Lennon agreed and disagreed with Ringo Starr’s assessment of the Fab Four’s breakup
The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono includes an interview from 1980. In it, John discussed the dissolution of the group. Like Ringo, he said he was not interested in reliving the past. He said he could never be the man he was in the 1960s again, and his fans could not be who they were in the 1960s either.
However, he also contradicted Ringo in a major way. John said The Beatles were over the moment he met Yoko. He said plenty of male friend groups were broken up by a marriage, but The Beatles were different because they weren’t just a bunch of barflies.
John noted that The Beatles’ breakup really bothered people. He said that the public was very nasty toward him and Yoko following the breakup. Regardless, the couple’s love survived. John said he only survived that period of his life because of love and prayers. That’s quite a statement coming from a provocateur who infamously claimed his band was “more popular than Jesus” and wrote irreligious songs like “God” and “Imagine!”
Ringo and John had differing views of Yoko’s influence on The Beatles but they both dismissed the idea of recreating the past.
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