Why You Don't Marry Groupies (Yoko Ono Edition)
- Fred
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
This was one of the lead stories at CNN today: Yoko Ono Details Pain of Post-Beatles Life in New Documentary.
Garbage. All the way around.
But as I worked on other Beacon of Speech articles, I noticed Yoko was on a PR Blitz:
Rolling Stone: How John & Yoko Conquered New York: Inside the Making of ‘One to One’
People: John Lennon and Yoko Ono Doc Shows a 'Different' Side of Ono, Says Director: 'A Mother in Pain
Newsweek: One to One: John & Yoko Dives Into John Lennon’s Post-Beatles Life With Yoko Ono
USA Today: The biggest reveals in new Yoko Ono biography, including John Lennon infidelity
New York Times: ‘One to One: John & Yoko’ Review: A Year in the Life
Aaaaarrrggghh-
I am going to let you peek behind the curtain here at BOS. My Mom, who helps me with technical aspects of the website, her favorite band is the Beatles. I grew up in a household filled with Beatles music from birth.
My partner at Beacon of Speech, Ted, his favorite band is the Beatles. He has a photo of John, Paul, George and Ringo hanging in his guest room. Not 20 years ago, right now, in 2025.
My favorite band is....
Alice Donut. By the time I was 16 years old, I was sick and tired of the Beatles.
But whenever the topic of the Beatles has cropped up, I was always quick to point out that the Beatles may have been the greatest band in Rock History, but their egos kept them from doing what all those Beatles Fans ultimately wanted, and that was a reunion.
That is, until I watched the Get Back Documentary.
After watching the Get Back Documentary, I am 100% convinced that the number 1 reason the Beatles broke up is because of Yoko Ono. There's no way to sugar coat it, there's no way dance around it.
All these woke warriors and purveyors of revisionist history want to tell you how complicated the relationships were in the Beatles, all of that is crap.
The Beatles, at its core, was the writing partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. George Harrison filled out the band, Ringo was the best drummer the other 3 could find. Whether you want to admit it or not, the Beatles was a job for John, Paul, George and Ringo.
From BOS in 2022: First of all, minor spoilers contained within for Get Back. (Remember, Get Back happened in real time over 50 years ago.) I must have mentioned to Ted, at least 5 times, how opulent it was to rent a movie studio to record your next album when you were only using the space about the size of my living room.
For those of you idiots at home who think Yoko Ono DIDN'T break up the Beatles, you have to watch Get Back. In the later years of the Beatles, I had often seen Yoko sitting around, literally doing nothing. In Get Back, she is there almost every second John is there, sitting beside him like a mute German Sheppard.
Don't look at Get Back as a music documentary, but a workplace documentary. In the Get Back Office, best mate John is late every day, is disconnected from the process, and has his wife sit next to him answering mail and knitting. IN THE REAL WORLD, THAT SHIT DOESN'T WORK.
Imagine your job, right now. You go to your boss and say "hey, just so you know, my wife is going to be sitting next to me all day while I do my job." Guess who's fired? Or, if you're not fired, guess who's hated by all his co-workers?
You say John was young and naive? No, Yoko was his second wife. John knew what the score was.
You say lots of spouses work together? That's my point. The core of Lennon/McCartney was subverted by Yoko Ono. The new movie focuses on the Lennon/Ono music partnership. That, BY DEFINITION, was breaking up the core of the Beatles.
You think I'm a male chauvinist? Let's flip it around. My wife is a successful surgery nurse at her hospital. The doctors she works with are better looking and make more money than me. How do you think the conversation would go if I asked if I could just sit quietly in the corner of the surgery room and just work on BOS on my laptop when she was working? For a month.
No one is going to be okay with that. From the hospital, to the doctors, to the other nurses, to my wife herself.
Everyone was afraid to say no to John Lennon, because he was John Lennon. Now, being afraid to say no to John Lennon was part of the complicated relationship of the Beatles. Who told Lennon no?
In 1980, if Mark David Chapman had missed his target, Yoko Ono would have been forgotten to history, the crazy second wife, of four or five, of Lennon's wives.
If Lennon was alive today, the public would look at him as the musical equivalent of Nicholas Cage, a genius at his craft, but saddled with a suspicious private life and a propensity for Asian Girls.
Yoko Ono has milked her celebrity for every ounce that it's worth and she is spending her twilight years trying to re-define her legacy. She is 92 years old and spent a decade with Lennon. In the 50 years since his death, and yes, it's been over 50 years, she's been trying to shoehorn herself into the Beatles Legacy, without carving one out for herself.
Glossed over in the Get Back Documentary was that Paul and John were ready to let George walk, they'd just replace him with Eric Clapton. What needed to stay intact for the Beatles to keep working was Paul and John's writing relationship. Yoko Ono broke that beyond repair by showing up to work.... and waiting.
My documentary of Yoko Ono would be most unkind. A widow in her 40's, she inherited a pile of money, and then spent the next half century inserting herself on the business end of the Beatles, trying to convince everyone she wasn't the "bad guy."
[Ask Lennon's first wife if Yoko was the bad guy.]
Yoko Ono's fit in the puzzle is already secured, this wave of media isn't going to change any minds.
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