(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 4 March 2026 15:00, UK
Like all British acts, The Beatles would have told anyone how important it was for them to break America.
It can be a Herculean task for anyone to become the biggest pop musician in the States, and the Fab Four didn’t even want to set foot on American soil until they had an actual hit under their belts. But while there were many opportunities for them to make classic tunes, their star power could have been easily turned against them if they had said the wrong thing to the press.
But what’s not to love about four mop-tops that were trying to have some fun performing live? Every single person who watched their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show either fell in love or wanted to be like one of them, and the band couldn’t get enough of extending as much musical hospitality as they could whenever they tousled their hair when they performed live or gave the fans something to work with when they did their Elvis Presley moves onstage. But they also had a lot of opinions and weren’t afraid to hide them.
John Lennon had already been a little bit antsy about not being allowed to talk about the Vietnam War, so when he made his now infamous comments about The Beatles being more popular than Christianity, he didn’t think anything of it. It was supposed to be a comment meant as a more superlative way of looking at their fame, but once it reached the breadbasket of America, people were more than a little bit offended.
WAQY were the first radio station to talk about Lennon’s comments, and the DJ Tommy Charles said that he wouldn’t be playing the band anymore. And so began one of the first official attempts to “cancel” an artist, with Lennon having to go on an entire apology tour to help win back the audience’s favour. But let’s take a closer look at who was actually angry.
Sure, there were more than a few conservative households that wouldn’t have taken kindly to Lennon making those kinds of statements, but many other radio stations in the South started to do the same thing once they heard Charles’s announcement. Everyone and their mother had begun making statements about how they were going to boycott the Fab Four from their stations, but looking at a lot of them, they weren’t exactly regular listeners, either.
Many of the outlets at the time were more used to playing country and western music half the time since they were in the Bible Belt, but that didn’t stop Charles, later recalling, “We stopped playing their records. It’s a shame because they’re talented boys. They are as good as or better than any group today, but we think it’s time somebody stood up and told them to shut up.” But, really, Lennon’s comments were a softball compared with where rock and roll would go.
This was already a slippery slope towards where censorship was going, and since the other bible thumpers of the day would go so far as to claim that playing records backwards indoctrinated kids, it’s not like Lennon was the worst of their problems. But if these stations already considered someone like Johnny Cash to be one of the most controversial artists in the world, anything remotely teenage would have practically made them burst into flames.
And looking back, did Lennon’s comments really cause the downfall of civilisation? Not in the slightest, but it did at least point to one of the bigger problems affecting the world today. The Beatles were more than willing to speak their mind, but just because they ruffled a few people’s feathers didn’t mean that they should be treated like a scourge upon society.
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