John Lennon Dropped Clues He Was Ready to Quit the Beatles in This 1968 Hit

Lennon embedded subtle hints about leaving the Beatles in songs like “Glass Onion.”
He said, “I had to either be married to them [the band] or Yoko, and I chose Yoko.”
McCartney later stated Yoko was not to blame; the group was already breaking up.

Long before the Beatles’ official split in 1970, John Lennon was dropping subtle clues that he was ready to walk away.

In “Glass Onion” from the 1968 White Album, Lennon references a number of the Fab Four’s recent hits. The lyrics drop nods to Beatles classics like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Lady Madonna,” “Fool on the Hill” and “Fixing a Hole.”

Lennon also revisits the Magical Mystery Tour classic “I Am the Walrus,” with the line, “I told you about the walrus and me, man. You know that we’re as close as can be, man. Well, here’s another clue for you all. The walrus was Paul.”

In discussing the song, Lennon noted that he intentionally made the references confusing, challenging listeners to dig deeper for hidden meaning in the track.

“I threw the line in—’the Walrus was Paul’—just to confuse everybody a bit more. It could have been ‘the fox terrier is Paul,'” he once said.

“I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledygook about Pepper—play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.”

However, in one of his last interviews with David Sheff, Lennon revealed, “The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko, and I was leaving Paul. I was trying … I don’t know. It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul, you know, ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion, this, this stroke, because I’m leaving.”

Over the years, fans and music historians have speculated endlessly about what caused the Beatles to break up — was it money, creative differences or relationships?

Lennon addressed the question directly in a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone, “I had to either be married to them [the band] or Yoko, and I chose Yoko.”

Paul McCartney offered a different perspective decades later. In a 2012 interview with British broadcaster David Frost, McCartney said that Yoko Ono “certainly didn’t break the group up, the group was breaking up.”

He adds that without her introducing Lennon to the avant-garde, songs like “Imagine” might never have existed.

“I don’t think he would have done that without Yoko, so I don’t think you can blame her for anything,” McCartney said.

“When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him. So it was time for John to leave, he was definitely going to leave [one way or another].”

Source: Isabella Torregiani/parade.com