John and Cyn hug each other tightly as they say their good-byes at London’s Heathrow Airport. The band arrives in Chicago and checks in to the Astor Tower hotel, in Chicago’s Gold Coast. It’s August 11, 1966, the night before the Beatles are to play the first of two shows at the International Amphitheatre, and John is sitting in a wooden chair inside his suite on the twenty-seventh floor, fighting to gain control of his shaking hands.

“If anything were to happen to any of you,” Brian tells them, “I’d never forgive myself.”

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Nobody told me there’d be days like these.

—“Nobody Told Me”

On August 12, John and his bandmates enter Tony Barrow’s suite, where under the press man’s watchful eye they’ll face nearly three dozen reporters. John sits down solemnly and leans across a table into a solitary microphone.

“I wasn’t saying the Beatles are better than Jesus or God or Christianity,” John explains. “I could have said TV, or cinema, or anything else that’s popular, or motorcars are bigger than Jesus. But I just said Beatles because, you know, that’s the easiest one for me. I just never thought of the repercussions. I never really thought of it.”

He tells the assembled reporters that when his words were “put into a kid’s magazine [DATEbook],” his original intention “just loses its meaning or its context immediately…and everybody starts making their own versions of it.”

Paul feels for his bandmate and friend. “Because John’s quote was taken out of context, it was widely misunderstood,” he’ll say in a 2019 interview. “He was actually making a point about church congregations shrinking, therefore I felt very bad for John during the whole episode.”

“I didn’t want to talk because I thought they’d kill me,” John later says of that face-off with the press, “because they take things so seriously [in the States]. I mean, they shoot you and then they realize it wasn’t that important.”

That night, thirteen thousand forgiving fans “hail Beatles in Chicago,” as Salt Lake City’s Deseret News reports. At the August 13 stop, Detroit’s Olympia Stadium, picketers messaging JESUS SAVES—JOHN SINS and LIMEY GO HOME! are vastly outnumbered, the Associated Press reports, by nearly thirty thousand fans “not deterred by the story of protest kicked up recently by Beatle John Lennon.”

Cleveland Municipal Stadium is to host the band on August 14. But even as a Baptist minister warns parishioners that any concert attendees among them face expulsion from the congregation, the Vatican sides with John: “It cannot be denied that there is some foundation to the latest observations of John Lennon about atheism or the distraction of many people.”