On April 10, 1970, fifty years ago, Paul McCartney made public the Beatles break up for the first time.
A year before Yoko Ono had a decisive influence on John and opened the doors of his mind, an event occurred that would be the beginning of this separation: the death of the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, on August 27, 1967. Brian was the discoverer and the one who kept it all together with two spirits and ways of conceiving not only music but the world, of two personalities as different as McCartney and Lennon.
That tune, highlighted on The White Album, may rightly have purported the ending of The Beatles but the purpose of Lennon remained trained on the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Beatles had grown fascinated with India and the teachings of the Maharishi when the four traveled to meet the guru and study Transcendental Meditation under his teaching. But, by the moment the group had left, Lennon was calling the Guru a “cunt” and a “twat” in a new tune he had composed for him, later titled ‘Sexy Sadie’.
“That’s about the Maharishi, yes,” recalled Lennon later in his life. “I copped out and I wouldn’t write ‘Maharishi, what have you done? You made a fool of everyone’. But now it can be told, Fab Listeners.”
“Sexy Sadie”, a composition by John Lennon with Paul McCartney at the piano and center at the Maharishi Yogi, of whom Lennon did not keep good memories after his stay in India and checking that carnal pleasures prevailed over the guru.
John Lennon had directed himself away from music and had started to focus not only on the alluring warmth of Yoko Ono but of heroin as well.