How John Lennon’s concert in Toronto helped speed The Beatles breakup

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It happened in Canada: This series on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have visited the Great White North, was originally published in 2014

In August of 1966, the Beatles had just arrived in Toronto for a pair of appearances at Maple Leaf Gardens that, unbeknownst to the world, would be among their last. Prior to the shows, in a press conference at the arena’s Hot Stove Lounge, a reporter asked John Lennon if the band — who had failed to sell out the 16,00-seat venue — would ever split up.

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“We obviously are not going to go around holding hands forever,” he replied, eliciting laughter from the assembled press.

Lennon added, more seriously, “we’ve got to split up or progress … it might happen. It’s quite possible.”

The Toronto reporters could not have known, but by the end of the decade, their budding metropolis would soon become the catalyst for the destruction of the greatest band of all time.

In September, 1969, a very different John Lennon stepped into the arrivals lounge at Toronto International Airport.

The 28-year-old had traded his moptop for long hair and a bushy beard, he had married a Japanese artist seven years his senior and the Beatles were now barely on speaking terms.

Lennon himself had grown particularly disillusioned with the Fab Four. He had been showing up to recording sessions blasted on drugs, he had lambasted Paul McCartney’s contributions to the album Abbey Road as “granny music” and he had begun to openly resent the Beatles’ entire rise to fame as a colossal sellout.

“It’s torture every time we produce anything. The Beatles haven’t got any magic you haven’t got. We suffer like hell anytime we make anything,” he would tell music columnist Howard Smith in a Canadian interview.

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Although Lennon had been in Canada only two months prior for his famous Montreal Bed-in, he had been brought back by the gutsy invitation of Toronto concert promoter John Brower.

Mr. Brower’s Toronto Rock and Roll Revival, to be held at Varsity Stadium, had originally been planned as revue of 1950s rock and roll stars, and he had attracted a lineup including Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and modern acts such as Alice Cooper and The Doors.

But amid lacklustre ticket sales and the threat of cancellation, Mr. Brower had called up the London headquarters of Apple Corps hoping to attract Lennon, a well-known fan of Berry and another ’50s rocker on the bill, Gene Vincent.

The plan was for Lennon and wife Yoko Ono to appear merely as emcees, but the restless Beatle shot back that he would only appear if he could perform with a hastily cobbled together non-Beatles group he soon dubbed the Plastic Ono Band.

Mr. Brower had struck the jackpot, and he quickly arranged plane tickets and got the group’s border papers in order. But still, the idea of a Beatle playing an impulsive show in Canada was so unbelievable that Toronto’s CHUM radio refused to broadcast Lennon’s pending appearance, thinking it was a hoax.

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Only when Torontonians saw Lennon being escorted to Varsity Stadium by a protective motorcade of the Toronto Vagabonds motorcycle gang, did word leak out.

Surprisingly, Lennon was frightened at the prospect of a stadium full of Canadians. Lennon had not performed to a large audience in three years, and his band’s only rehearsal had been conducted in the back of the Boeing 707 that had taken them to Toronto.

“I just threw up for hours until I went on … I could hardly sing,” Lennon would say later.

An awestruck crowd greeted the group just after midnight. Not only was it Lennon’s first major performance without George, Paul or Ringo at his side, but he had brought along English guitar god Eric Clapton and future Yes drummer Alan White.

Almost as soon as the band kicked off with a series of 1950s rock and roll standards, though, the crowd soon found that the performance was to be punctuated by the incessant high-pitched screeching of Yoko Ono.

First, she shrieked over renditions of Yer Blues and Cold Turkey, during which she retreated into a tent-like sack on stage.

Then, for 17 straight minutes, she shrieked through a freeform song later identified as “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s only looking for her hand in the snow) / John, John (Let’s hope for peace).”

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“I did an improvisation,” Ms. Ono would tell the National Post in 2000. “I was never exposed to a huge audience like that. I was dazed.”

The Toronto crowd soon began to turn. Witnesses remembered booing, obscenities and even the occasional projectile directed at Ms. Ono.

Canadian rocker Ronnie Hawkins, who would take Lennon snowmobiling at his Ontario estate that winter, did not mince words in his 1989 autobiography.

“As hip as everyone there tried to be, Yoko was too much,” he wrote. “’Get the f— off the stage,’ people started to scream.”

To this day, a live album of the concert, Live Peace in Toronto, continues to alienate even the most die-hard Beatles fans with its notoriously shriek-filled B-side. “This is excruciating pain, both for listeners and for Ono,” reads an otherwise positive Amazon.com review.

All of this was lost on Lennon, who found the experience intoxicating.

“The buzz was incredible,” he told a British music magazine soon after returning to the U.K. “I never felt so good in all my life. Everybody was with us and leaping up and down doing the peace sign.”

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It was a taste of solo life and, in the words of rock writer Ritchie Yorke, who had covered the Toronto concert, Lennon had discovered that there was “life beyond the Beatles.”

Breaking up the Beatles was not a new idea. Ringo Starr had threatened to leave during the sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and earlier in 1969, George Harrison had temporarily quit by storming out of a recording session in a huff.

Lennon had been contemplating leaving since 1966, but he later said he could “never step out of the palace because it was too frightening.”

But only hours after facing 25,000 people in Toronto, a newly emboldened Lennon returned to London determined to finally bury the Beatles once and for all. Those around him said that after his Canada trip, Lennon had become instilled with the euphoria of a new divorcee.

It would be months before the public would learn of the breakup via a press release from Paul McCartney, but in the Beatles Anthology, released in 2000, Ringo Starr himself gave Toronto due credit for the band’s demise.

“After the Plastic Ono Band’s debut in Toronto we had a meeting in Savile Row where John finally brought it to its head. He said, ‘Well, that’s it lads. Let’s end it.’ And we all said ‘Yes.’”

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