I was seriously pissed. I became a fan at age 13, when the White Album came out, so mostly I just got to experience their denouement. I spent the early 70s willing them to get back together.
It made me feel like a developing fetus.
It made me hate Ono even more
Yeah, Ono. Forgot about what she “contributed”.
Q
I was young when the broke up, but to me it didn’t make much difference as the individual members were still making records.
Oddly enough from the break up time till 1975 Ringo Starr had the most chart success of all the former Beatles. He had a nice impressive run of top ten hits and two #1s.
The Beatles never really collaberated on songs, well at least not much, so you had a “Paul song” and a “John song” etc, which they continued to do with solo careers.
By 1970, the Beatles were being outsold by the Monkees and Donny Osmond, so their moment had passed. Also, there was a sense that it wasn’t permanent; Ringo had quit and come back before, and IIRC so had John. You know how non-reactive you are when you hear about Aerosmith or the Red Hot Chili Peppers splitting up, because you know it’s temporary and anyway they’ve kinda worn out their welcome? Right then, the Beatles were kinda like that.
I was lucky enough to see (although not ‘hear’ due to the screaming) them at one of their Christmas shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1964. I’ve still got the programme.
When they stopped touring, it seemed more exciting than disappointing: they were entering a new era of studio experimentation, which proved to be much more rewarding than the live shows. I don’t remember them announcing that they had stopped touring until much later, so we didn’t know at the time.
When they actually did break up, it just seemed sort of inevitable. Most of the great people of the sixties were moving on to something different. the mood was changing. Yes, it was sad - in fact I still have great nostalgia for that era.
I was considerably more upset by Freddie Mercury’s death than by the dissolution of the Beatles or by any of their deaths.
I was the youngest of four kids - Elspeth was 14 years older, M. 10 years older and Bill was 8 years older. We had very different tastes - Elspeth was into traditional jazz - Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, with a little bit of folk/blues like Richie Havens and Taj Mahal thrown in. M. was the closest to our parents in terms of her tastes - Roger Whittaker, Nana Mouskouri, Rod McKuen, Simon & Garfunkel. Bill loved rock - Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf. I started early on buying records, and the first single I ever bought was ‘Born to be Wild’, for my sixth birthday in 1968. Even in those days, I enjoyed bands like Lighthouse and The Guess Who which seemed to be reaching for something further than the really unadventurous pop music we got on the local AM radio station. (Does anyone else remember a band called Major Hoople’s Boarding House? I do, because in 1975 CKX musta played “I’m Running After You” daily between 7AM and 8:30AM - we had to listen to CKX before school because CBC was out of Winnipeg and wouldn’t have the school closings for Brandon… Damn, just typing it in has given me that friggin’ chorus for an ear-worm.)
The Beatles were the one band that we could all consistently agree on, and it was as if we had decided that we would all get different albums. Elspeth had the first four, M. had Help, Rubber Soul and Revolver, Bill had Sargeant Peppers and the White Album, and I got Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let it Be.
I was eight when they broke up, and I didn’t know all the back story, all the squabbles, all the drugs - I just knew that they’d broken up, and I remember being really upset. It was as if part of my family had broken up. I also just could not understand how they could have sung all those songs about peace and love and yet, they couldn’t work it out.
Like cjepson, I spent most of the 1970s willing The Beatles to get back together…
I was six and don’t really remember it at all, probably wasn’t even aware of it at the time, although my mom bought all of their albums and I still remember loving Sgt. Pepper’s, and later being seriously creeped out by “Blue Jay Way.”
Absolutely, positively not true. They collaborated on almost every song for the first several years. This is documented in every biography of them.