4 Beatles Songs That Stirred up the Bad Blood That Led to Their Breakup

There were many more than musical differences at play when it came to the reasons why The Beatles broke up. But frustration over how they should proceed artistically certainly didn’t help the band’s togetherness.

Disagreements about songs and albums boiled over now and again. These four songs stand out as the ones that caused the most animosity, animosity that built up and contributed to the decision to go their separate ways.

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”

The Beatles spent part of their summer in 1968 studying meditation to better deal with the pressures of rock stardom. That tutelage didn’t seem to help much when they returned to the pressure cooker of the studio later that year. As they made The White Album, the four men struggled to maintain the cohesiveness they once knew. “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” served as a catalyst for bad blood. Paul McCartney battled to get the song just the way he wanted it in the studio. His perfectionism started to rankle John Lennon and George Harrison. In fact, Lennon pounded on the piano keys at the start of the song because he was so fed up with McCartney and his waffling about the direction of the song.

“Revolution”

Although The Beatles diversified the material quite a bit as the years progressed, they mostly tended to stay out of the realm of anything too controversial. John Lennon wanted to shake things up a bit. He wrote “Revolution” with the intention of it being the group’s reaction to the turbulent late-60s. Originally, he envisioned it as a folk song so that the message would be clear. (That’s the version, “Revolution 1”, heard on The White Album.) He also thought that it should be a single so that the message would get as much exposure as possible. But even after the band did a rocked-up take on the song, the other members, wary of how it might be perceived, only consented to make it a B-side. That was a move Lennon considered an insult.

“Two Of Us”

The Let It Be project, which was originally titled Get Back, was meant to help bring The Beatles back together. Paul McCartney thought that the four men playing in a room together like the old days might return some of the old harmony. But the scope of the project, including a documentary crew following the band’s every move, removed the intimacy. And some of the old frustrations reared their head during sessions for “Two Of Us”. George Harrison thought that Paul McCartney was micromanaging his guitar-playing on the song. A brief verbal tussle was captured on camera. And Harrison left the sessions later that day. Although he’d return, the fissure between the two men was never quite repaired before the breakup.

“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”

Once again, we’re dealing here with a situation where Paul McCartney’s unwillingness to let go of a song infuriated the other band members. McCartney was fond of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”, even believing that it had the chance to be a single. The other Beatles viewed it as a somewhat silly novelty song. Nonetheless, McCartney insisted on countless takes of the track, one of the first to incorporate a synthesizer into the band’s sound. At the time they were making it, none of the group were quite sure that Abbey Road was going to be the last Beatles album. The painful experience of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” helped remove any lingering doubts.

Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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