![]() ![]() Fittingly for a band that had become so consumed by conflict, the last Beatles song committed to tape was “I, Me, Mine” even more fittingly, it was a George Harrison song. “Three songs for me three songs for Paul three songs for John, and two for Ringo!” The last official Beatles recording sessions, for the album Let It Be, were on January 3rd and 4th of 1970 John was not even present, vacationing with Yoko Ono in Denmark. “Over the last year or so, we worked something out which was still a joke, really,” he told Howard Smith a year before. “I had such a lot of songs mounting up that I really wanted to do, but I only got my quota of one or two tunes per album,” he said mildly on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, referring to the increasingly tense time, from The White Album through the troubled Let It Be and Abbey Road, when each of the three main songwriters in the band had grown so attached to their individual visions that they began to see others in the room as obstacles. Paul hightailed it off into new love and a second round at domesticity John gazed into the ugliest parts of himself and wailed Ringo retreated into the schmaltzy pre-rock ’n’ roll standards of his youth.Īnd then there was George, who exhaled deeply, stretched, and flourished. The solo albums appeared immediately, like bruises on a wound, and each had the quality of argument brought to a deposition, a side of a story argued. Just as there had been a Fab Four Beatle for every adolescent discovering the giddy thrills of rock and roll in the ‘60s, there was a divorced Beatle for every teenager caught between screaming parents in the ‘70s. In their death throes, the group would become rock music’s proxy divorcees for the ensuing decade. Like everything else the Beatles did, their dissolution in that year invented a new way for a band to be-in this case, painfully and publicly splintered. But 1970 remains a mysterious fulcrum point: Whenever a new study is issued on separation rates, our progress or regression is always measured “since 1970.” Kramer won Best Picture in 1980, the number of divorces had nearly doubled again. From 1965 to 1970, the number of divorce filings nearly doubled, and in the wake of similar laws pending in other states, the rate would surge through the beginning of the next decade. ![]() ![]() One year earlier, California then-Governor Ronald Reagan had signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, freeing couples from the burden of having to produce evidence of wrongdoing in order to legalize their separation. In 1970, the year the Beatles officially called it quits, divorce was on the American mind. ![]()
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