Those of you who were around in 1966 and old enough to have had an opinion, what was your stance on Lennon’s “We’re more popular than Jesus” comment? How did people in your community react? Did it affect your fanship, assuming you were a devoted fan to begin with? Did you think he should have retracted the statement, or did you support him in merely clarifying it?
(Mods, if you think this belongs in another forum, by all means move it.)
Just to put the whole quote out there:
Well, I just shrugged. I was spending a lot more time listening to the Fab Four than I was listening to any preachers. I guess for me they were more popular than Jesus.
I don’t recall any social disturbance over his statement. I think most everybody just let it go. It was 1966, and people weren’t as uptight about things then as they are now, or at least the religious right wasn’t as influential.
I was in college then, so maybe my immediate surroundings didn’t lend themselves to outrage over what a rocker had to say.
I was a bit young, but I never heard anyone shocked or offended by it. I didn’t know any “church people” when I was little.
I wasn’t much of a fan either; oh, I liked some, but I wasn’t hardcore.
Besides, they were more popular than Jesus.
There wasn’t much reaction that I saw in my community (suburbs of Washington, D.C.). I don’t recall it being brought up at home, in school, or in church. I did meet a girl from Meridian, Mississippi, and found out that there was quite a reaction there - they had burnings of Beatles records. Struck me (then a teen) as a barbaric and stupid response. Strikes me now as an extremely barbaric, extremely stupid response.
I was only eight that year, and I don’t recall any kind of fallout from it in Canada.
If you take into consideration that this comment was buried in an interview where John was asked his personal opinions, published in England without incident, then misquoted entirely out of context by an American teenybopper magazine, maybe it sheds a different light on it. He was decrying the state of the kind of world where fewer young people went to church than listened to Beatles records and paid attention to the careers of musicians. That context was left out of the sensationalist headlines and denouncements of John Lennon in the American press.
When I was a bit older and able to view what happened with a better grasp of behaviors and motivations, it only made me question the sanity of American bible thumpers. It’s 40 years later, and I am still at a loss to understand how anyone thinks that burning piles of records is a sane, logical thing to do. Isn’t it odd that nowhere else on the planet did they freak out and boycott The Beatles. It was an unfathomable reaction by a group of people whose motivations and behaviors are mostly unfathomable anyway.
He did a poor job of apologizing, mainly because he wasn’t sorry he said it. Mainly he was goaded into it in a live press conference with cameras rolling. What else could he have done?
“I’ll probably get into trouble for saying that, now…”
I remember being very puzzled by it at the time myself. I was 13, and enough of a budding cynic to think “Jesus who?”. It was the freakin’ Beatles, people! Of coursethey’re more popular! Jesus hadn’t had a hit in years!
I was 12 at the time, and a huge fan of the Beatles. His comments had no effect on me. My parents were displeased, but not displeased enough to make me stop listening to their records constantly. I thought that the record burning in the bible belt was silly and weird.
Pree-cisely.
Yeah, they really held his feet to the fire. Many times since then, I’ve seen musicians, artists, writers, and so forth, defend their work or statements by clarifying them while making it equally clear that they stand by them. You can do that now: PC hasn’t truly squashed freedom of expression; it’s just caused more arguments. But you couldn’t then, and someone had to be first.
Didn’t mean much to me: it didn’t strike me as a particularly outrageous sentiment. Religious feeling in the US in the time was on a decline, and most definitely more people listened to the Beatles than went to church regularly.
Too young to remember it happening at the time but when I was in high school when John Lennon was killed. I had one friend who was a Beatles freak and he cried and cried. Someone else told him he was a fool for crying because John was the anti-christ for saying he was more popular than Jesus.
“But he was more popular than Jesus at the time.” I said. Anti-christ guy got a verbal beat-down from the rest of us. Looking back I’m not sure it was because we were a bunch of heathens or because the Anti-Christ guy was being an ass to a guy who was genuinely grieving.
Ditto to the above. The whole furor seemed to take place in an alternate universe to the one in which I was living.
Of course, that’s also true for most of the religious controversies since right down to the current one about the Da Vinci Code.
I was in college at the time, and didn’t know one person who was offended. Many of us really did believe that organized religion was on its way out, and I think Lennon accurately articulated that, and had no need to apologize. And Jesus hadn’t made an album since before rock ‘n’ roll.
If the complete context is the quote given by Marley23, then I’d say that John was better off being taken out of context. He’s not saying that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and that’s a *bad * thing; he’s saying it’s an *inevitable * thing.
I was 13 and in parochial school at the time, and I just shrugged. But I do remember that there was quite an uproar about it generally.
Later accounts of Lennon’s comment have exaggerated public reaction to it, relying the same isolated anecdotes instead of looking at the big picture. The whole mini-flap was over in a week. It’s not as if we all had nothing better to think about.
I agree, they were bigger than Rod, after all Rod wasn’t even a name at the time and Maggie May was years away…
Oh The Beatles sorry Wrong universe
Reporter:What do you think it prooves?
Ron: It prooves you’re all daft of course I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that now too…
The Beatles were just embarking on their tour of the US. For the duration, they had death threats against them, and KKK members picketing outside the stadiums where they played. Some people were not willing to forget their impression of what he said, and were prepared to go to extremes to prove their point, however dull it may have been.