“He Got Pretty Wired”: How The Beatles’ Little Secret Led to the “Only Violence Ever Had” Between George Harrison and John Lennon

With all the machismo that often surrounds the rock ‘n’ roll world and its inhabitants, it’s no wonder that so many rock bands have become aggressive toward one another at some point in their careers. Even without the massive egos and on-stage pressure, working with someone in close quarters can be difficult. The Eagles, Aerosmith, and, more recently, Jane’s Addiction, are all no exceptions. And neither were The Beatles.

Videos by American Songwriter

The Beatles’ most ubiquitous conflict is certainly the months-long breakup that bookended their time together as the Fab Four. But they had their fair share of rows while they were cutting their teeth, too. According to John Lennon and George Harrison, the worst of this aggression came out in the hours-long gigs they would play in Hamburg, boosted by dangerous mixes of booze and uppers.

How The Beatles Killed Time During Their Lengthy Nightclub Sets

Even the most seasoned musician is bound to feel at least a little weary after playing at performance-level for four hours straight, and The Beatles were doing it while they were just starting out. With the help of upper pills handed out by the Hamburg nightclub waitstaff, the musicians managed to play their rock music for hours on end—some of which were spent getting rather, er, creative with the stage production.

“The things we used to do!” John Lennon later recalled in Anthology. “We used to break the stage down. That was long before The Who came out and broke things. We used to leave guitars playing on stage with no people there. We’d be so drunk, we used to smash the machinery. And this was all through frustration, not an intellectual thought. ‘We will break the stage, we will wear a toilet seat round our neck, we will go on naked.’ We just did it through being drunk.”

As it is wont to do, this drunkenness also lent itself to spats between bandmates. Lennon said Paul McCartney tried to tell him about rows “about who was the leader,” but that he “couldn’t remember them.” He continued, “All the arguments became trivial, mainly because we were f***ed and irritable with working so hard. We were just kids.”

The Only Violence Between John Lennon and George Harrison

There have been decades’ worth of speculation about and criticism of the relationship between John Lennon and George Harrison. Both musicians’ comments about the other varied throughout their post-Beatles lives, muddying the water further. However, they both insisted they were never physical with one another, no matter how frustrated one got with the other. Except for one time…okay, okay, two times.

“George threw food at me once on stage,” Lennon said, per Anthology. “The row was over something stupid. I said I would mash his face in for him. We had a shouting match, but that was all. I never did anything. And I once threw a plate of food over George. That’s the only violence we ever had between us.”

Harrison attributed these tense feelings to the side effects of Preludins, the uppers the band took to play through the night. “You’d be up for days,” he said. Then, “You’d start hallucinating and getting a bit weird. John would sometimes get on the edge. He’d come in the early hours of the morning and be ranting, and I’d be lying there pretending to be asleep, hoping he wouldn’t notice me.”

Photo by Ambor/ullstein bild via Getty Images