60 YEARS AGO TODAY:
3/4/66 – John Lennon’s comment that “The Beatles are more popular than Jesus” is published for the first time in Great Britain. When those comments appear again out of context in the United States a few months later, a new “Ban The Beatles” campaign was started.
The comment came during an interview Lennon was doing with British journalist Maureen Cleave that ran in The London Evening Standard. Truth be told, it garnered virtually no reaction at all back home in Great Britain ...
But when Datebook Magazine picked up the quote for a summer issue ... right before The Beatles were scheduled to make what would be their last tour of The United States, there was major outrage, particularly in the South's Bible Belt area, where a boycott of Beatles music, "Stamp Out The Beatles" campaigns and effigy burnings became the norm. (More on this later this year as our 1966 60 YEARS AGO TODAY Calendar continues)
For the record, here was Lennon's original quote as given to Cleave:
In an article titled "How A Beatle Lives," a series that featured interviews with all four Beatles by a journalist that they all considered to be a friend, John said:
"Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I'll be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first – rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
