The Beatles Record John Lennon Truly Hated: An Abortion
John Lennon had little patience for the weaker moments in The Beatles’ catalogue, but one release in particular drew an especially harsh verdict from him. Looking back on the band’s recordings, Lennon considered the group’s Hollywood Bowl performance so poor that he dismissed it with a single brutal description: “an abortion.”
Lennon was often one of The Beatles’ toughest critics, particularly after the group split. The breakup left him with a complicated relationship with the band’s legacy, and he was prepared to distance himself from a significant portion of their work. Even so, he recognised that The Beatles had created an extraordinary body of music.
Across their 12 official albums, the band produced some of the most influential records in rock history. At their best, they seemed capable of making music that went far beyond the conventions of their era. Lennon’s feelings became less forgiving, however, when he looked back at some of the group’s earliest recordings.
In those first years, Lennon was still figuring out the full potential of his voice. His development as a songwriter was equally apparent. It was not until songs such as ‘In My Life’ and ‘Help!’ that he began to sound completely comfortable with his own identity as a lyricist and performer.
By then, however, The Beatles were reaching the end of their life as a touring band.
The decision to stop performing live made sense. Their increasingly elaborate studio productions were becoming difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reproduce on stage. The volume of the crowds also meant that audiences could barely hear the music itself. As the group moved further into studio experimentation, the demands of touring simply no longer suited them.
That did little to reduce the public’s appetite for The Beatles.
After the split, the band’s management had every reason to keep releasing material that would maintain interest in the group. Some of those projects were highly successful. The Red and Blue greatest hits collections released in the 1970s became important additions to the Beatles catalogue.
Other releases were much harder to justify in Lennon’s eyes.
The Beatles’ live performance at the Hollywood Bowl was one such example. Lennon was reportedly enthusiastic about collecting Beatles memorabilia from the period, but that did not mean he had any affection for the recording itself.
As Lennon put it:
“I think I’ve got them all. There’s one of a Beatles show at the Hollywood Bowl which was an abortion, and there’s others from everywhere we played, obscure places here in the States. It seemed someone was taping it everywhere.”
The criticism is particularly understandable given Lennon’s attitude towards the recording studio. He had increasingly embraced the studio as a place where The Beatles could shape and refine their sound. Compared with those carefully produced records, the Hollywood Bowl performance was inevitably going to sound primitive.
Even by the standards of a rough live recording, the album is difficult listening. Much of the music is overwhelmed by the enormous screams from the audience, leaving the songs themselves buried beneath the noise. At times, it can feel less like a conventional concert recording and more like standing beside a 747 while The Beatles attempt to play somewhere in the distance.
That technical weakness is precisely what made the record so unappealing to Lennon. The polished studio sound that had come to define The Beatles was nowhere to be found. What remained was an imperfect document of a band attempting to perform while caught in the middle of an extraordinary cultural phenomenon.
Yet there is also something compelling about the recording.
For all its flaws, the Hollywood Bowl album offers a rare glimpse of what Beatlemania actually sounded like. The screaming, the distorted music and the sheer chaos surrounding the performance are part of the historical record. The songs may struggle to emerge clearly, but the atmosphere is unmistakable.
Lennon may have considered the recording an “abortion,” but that same roughness gives it a quality that the band’s meticulously produced studio albums could never capture. It preserves the overwhelming reaction The Beatles generated when they stepped onto a stage at the height of their fame, even if Lennon himself would rather have forgotten the performance.