How John Lennon’s Jesus outburst changed course of pop history
“CHRISTIANITY will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
So said John Lennon of The Beatles in an article that appeared in the London Evening Standard 50 years ago tomorrow. The comments, which were published as part of a series by journalist Margaret Cleave titled How Does a Beatle Live? generated little response in Britain.
But when the quotes were reprinted in US teen magazine Datebook they provoked a ferocious response, particularly in the southern states of America. Apologies from Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Lennon himself did little to quell the anger and one radio station organised a “Beatle Boycott”, urging people to take their Beatles records and memorabilia to designated places to torch them.
Lennon’s comments were ill-considered in as much as he clearly hadn’t realised what a reaction he would get from the hundreds of thousands of fans in The Beatles’ biggest marketplace, just as they were set to begin another tour there.
But the mid-1960s in the United States was a time of great volatility and danger. John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and Malcolm X two years later. In 1968, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy would suffer the same fate.
Source: Yorkshire Post
