I loved the beach boys and for a while hated the Beatles. Now i still enjoy both. I do remember Johns statement aboiut being more populard then Jesus Christ. That was a VERY UPSETTING statement
Loved both bands.
Lennon’s comment about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus first appeared in an article by Maureen Cleave published in the London Evening Standard newspaper in March 1966 after she had interviewed each of the four Beatles separately. Cleave quoted Lennon as saying: “
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.”
There was no particular controversy or strong reaction at the time; nor when Newsweek in the US made reference to the quote later that month; nor when the interview was republished in Detroit magazine in May; nor when it was published again in the New York Times Magazine’s five-page article on the Beatles on 3 July.
It wasn’t until after 29 July when the US teen magazine Datebook republished the Lennon and McCartney interviews in full and radio stations in the US began stoking anti-Beatles rhetoric. The magazine’s editor chose Lennon's "
most damning comment" for maximum effect but, above it, there was a headline quote from Paul McCartney regarding America that ran: "
It's a lousy country where anyone black is a dirty n****r!" Astonishingly (or perhaps not) McCartney’s quote was largely ignored, but Lennon’s quote drew angry reactions across the United States, particularly in the Bible Belt.
In the wake of organised bonfires of Beatles’ records and memorabilia, McCartney later compared these to Nazi book burnings, citing the controversy as an example of "
hysterical low-grade American thinking."
Britain’s Daily Express columnist Robert Pitman wrote: "
It seems a nerve for Americans to hold up shocked hands, when week in, week out, America is exporting to us [in Britain] a subculture that makes the Beatles seem like four stern old churchwardens." The Jesuit magazine America wrote that: "
Lennon was simply stating what many a Christian educator would readily admit."
The Beatles left London on 11 August for their US tour and both the band’s manager Brian Epstein and press officer Tony Barrow had urged Lennon to apologise, without result. Lennon was unrepentant, stressing that he had only been remarking on how other people viewed and popularised the Beatles. The closest he came to an apology was at the press conference in the Astor Tower Hotel in Chicago at the beginning of the tour. He described his own view of God as "
…not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us," that he was attempting to explain the decline of Christianity [in the UK] and added: "
If you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then OK, I'm sorry."
