John Lennon Said The Beatles Set a Violent Trend Long Before The Who Made It Famous
The Who may have popularized guitar smashing, but John Lennon said The Beatles were tearing up the stage long before the other band. Before The Beatles wore neatly matching suits and sang behind gates and police barricades, they played sweaty, chaotic shows. Lennon described these early performances as violent.
John Lennon said The Beatles were tearing up the stage years before The Who did
In The Beatles’ early years, they played in cramped clubs to frenzied audiences. In order to keep up with their grueling performance schedule — it had them playing multiple shows a day — they began taking stimulants. As they combined these with alcohol, they were often as agitated as their audience.
“We were frothing at the mouth,” George Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “Because we had all these hours to play and the club owners were giving us Preludins, which were slimming tablets. I don’t think they were amphetamine, but they were uppers. So we used to be up there foaming, stomping away. We went berserk inasmuch as we got drunk a lot and we played wildly and then they gave us these pills.”
Lennon said they went beyond frantic playing. They smashed up the stage, much in the way The Who would later popularize.
“The things we used to do! We used to break the stage down — that was long before The Who came out and broke things; we used to leave guitars playing onstage with no people there,” he said. “We’d be so drunk, we used to smash the machinery.”
The crowd was just as violent as John Lennon and The Beatles
The Beatles’ behavior did not stand out as overly violent to their audience. This was because nearly every attendee was doing the same thing. The band recalled that every time they played the song “Hully Gully” in Liverpool, the crowd would start beating each other with fire extinguishers.
“They had truncheons, coshes, knuckle-dusters. There was a shop just around the corner from where we lived where you could buy all this stuff,” Harrison said. “They would have fights and beat the hell out of each other and then the bad guy would get thrown out of the back door, and so an hour later he’d come back with reinforcements and then it was really wicked — blood everywhere.”
According to Harrison, nearly every show ended in blood, sweat, and tears.
John Lennon once criticized The Who’s music
While The Beatles generally respected The Who, Lennon once criticized one of their songs. He didn’t think their cover of “Daddy Rollin’ Stone” was particularly strong.
“And one of the records we always played was in the Ad Lib itself, folks, with all of us sitting there, listening and dancing, looking super stoned, and the record was called ‘Daddy Rollin’ Stone’ by Derek Martin, which The Who later did a sort of version of, like the English usually do of these great records, not too good, that’s including us,” he said, per Lennon on Lennon.
Still, Lennon counted The Who’s drummer, Keith Moon, as a good friend.
