Was breaking up The Beatles the “best thing Yoko Ono ever did”?

The record producer Rick Rubin once waxed so lyrical about The Beatles that even a desperate second-hand car salesman might blush: “It transcends everything,” he eulogised, “It’s much bigger than four kids from Liverpool. For me, The Beatles are proof of the existence of God. It’s so good and so far beyond everyone else that it’s not them.” This might sound like a highfalutin thought if it weren’t for the fact that so many people agree with him.

Rubin’s words came in 2013, almost half a century on from the last Beatles release, Let It Be—and that is a significant thing to ponder. You see, there were many other artists that people were getting all godly about in the 1960s. too. While not quite matched the levels of the Fab Four, they had comparable contemporaries. George Martin even feared that their popularity were on the slide in 1966. And, Paul McCartney said himself that meeting Bob Dylan was like discovering “the meaning of life”, proving that they certainly weren’t peerless during their pomp.

However, while Bob Dylan might still remain one of the greatest artists in history, he also has the odd Empire Burlesque blotting his copybook just to show us all that he is human after all. Contrary to Martin’s fears, the Beatles never had this; in retrospect, their trajectory was perfect. They went from enamouring the younger generation with songs that vivified the forthcoming zeitgeist to a band pushing the decade on with experimentation that matched the arc of the children of the revolution. Then, when the remarkable decade came to a close, they said goodbye along with it.

They didn’t give themselves a chance to disappoint. They might have had their own slip-ups in their solo careers, but that was different. The sanctity of the ‘Fab Four’ remained. All the while, these potholes on the solo road to nowhere were deemed merely inevitable. Had they kept going, then no doubt shit like ‘Ebony and Ivory’, ‘Hottest Gong in Town’, or Ringo Starr selling Skechers would have befallen their output as a band, too.

But it didn’t. They called it quits with nothing but glory notched under their name. This is what Nick Cave was reflecting on when he announced at a Carnage Q&A: “I’d also like to say here the best thing that Yoko Ono ever did was break up The Beatles. They’re a band in decline and Yoko Ono stepped in and allowed everyone the freedom to go on to make some really beautiful records.”

Then in a bid to ensure that the wink with which he was making this proclamation was detected by the public, he tagged on that those beautiful albums were cut by “John Lennon and the other guy.” Pithiness aside, there are plenty of people who subscribe to the viewpoint that she broke up The Beatles—notably fewer regard that as a positive.

Was Yoko Ono the best thing that ever happened to The Beatles?

First and foremost, with bad business, fraying relationships, heroin, the inevitable arc of ageing, and a thousand other facets to consider, any conclusion that Yoko Ono alone broke up The Beatles is like pinpointing a single cloud as the only determinant of a flood. Even Cave would admit that no single factor caused the Fab Four to falter. But let’s partake in John Lennon’s favourite pastime for a moment, and imagine that Yoko Ono’s overbearing presence in the studio was the prosecution’s smoking gun: could the defence really retort that the dagger she dealt was secretly a merciful assisted suicide for the band?

If we’re to accept that as a positive, then we’re to accept the questionable notion that they were a band in decline to begin with. Cave is not alone in thinking that they were. As Keith Richards told Esquire: “I understand—the Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles. But there’s not a lot of roots in that music. I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the ’60s, you just get carried away—you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish.”

Interestingly, Ringo Starr himself also echoed this notion. The drummer thought that they were losing themselves in the ego-trip of expansion. “We were more like a band,” he said while comparing Sgt. Pepper with their less experimental, earlier efforts. “I never really liked Sgt Pepper,” he told Elliot Mintz. “I think I felt like a session man on it.”

So, maybe their latter days were not for everyone, but neither was their opening chapter. The beauty of the band, in part, was their evolution. They moved along with the zeitgeist, grabbing a generation by the bootstraps and pushing culture in a progressive direction. As Lennon once stated, “We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And The Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.”

They couldn’t have stagnated. If they had, they wouldn’t be The Beatles, and the ‘60s wouldn’t be the ‘60s. Elvis Presley, before them, had proven how quickly a revolution can lose its zeal if radical liberation suddenly decides to draw a line in the sand. When the Fab Four had to quit touring, that line may well have settled in, but they decided to push on beyond it from the comfort of the studio.

As George Martin explained, “[Sgt] Pepper was a kind of revolution in a way,” he told Paul Du Noyer, “because it marked the change from their writing songs which could be performed on stage, to writing songs which couldn’t be performed on stage.” In this regard, it was a necessary advancement of music.

As their stately, silver-haired producer continued, “I pompously thought that we were creating a new art form, I thought that we were combining the best of both worlds bringing all elements in, classical music, synthetic music and avant-garde music into rock’n’roll and creating something that was really worthwhile and representative of our time.”

How did Yoko Ono inspire The Beatles?

It seemed Yoko Ono had more of a hand in this than she has ever been given credit for. Granted, the strangeness of her laying in bed in the studio might’ve heightened disgruntlement in the group, but they also had a renowned avant-gardist in their midst at a time when they were searching for a new avenue “to let their imaginations soar”.

So, she might have accelerated the already inevitable ending of the band, but did she not also ensure that they went out with a curious, creative bang rather than a milqtoast wimper? Did she not also accelerate Lennon’s development from ‘Please Please Me’ to ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘I am the Walrus’? As he explained himself when weighing up the seismic impact his first exposure to her art had on him, “I thought it was fantastic – I got the humour in her work immediately. I didn’t have to have much knowledge about avant-garde or underground art, the humour got me straightaway.”

Soon enough, even Paul McCartney would be writing tracks with humour, pathos and a vaguely avant-garde spirit in the form of crackers like ‘Fool on the Hill’ and the pioneering ‘Helter Skelter’. Certainly, it’s true that the band might have arrived at these progressive ventures without the subtle intervention of Yoko Ono, but if we’re so quick to point out that she was the catalyst to them calling it quits, then we also have to accept that contrary to what Keith Richards might quip, she was also the catalyst to their most wildly creative zeniths, too.

It’s merely an added bonus that she helped to break them up at the peak of that point before things fracture, liberating them to usher their imagination into a newly unfettered direction as solo stars who honed their craft amid chemistry that could never be replicated, fated to fizzle, but transfigured from a sparkle to a full-on firework’s display that we’re still positively reeling from to this day.