Events leading up to final tour
In June 1966, Yesterday and Today—a compilation album created by Capitol Records for the US market—caused an uproar over its cover, which portrayed the grinning Beatles dressed in butcher's overalls, accompanied by raw meat and mutilated plastic baby dolls. It has been suggested that this was meant as a satirical response to the way Capitol had "butchered" the US versions of their albums.[132] Thousands of copies of the album had a new cover pasted over the original; an unpeeled "first-state" copy fetched $10,500 at a December 2005 auction.[133] In England, meanwhile, Harrison met sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train him on the instrument.[134]During a tour of the Philippines the month after the Yesterday and Today furore, they unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace.[135] When presented with the invitation, Epstein politely declined on behalf of the group, as it had never been his policy to accept such official invitations.[136] The group soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to taking "no" for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the band and they escaped the country with difficulty.[137] Immediately afterward, they made their first visit to India.[138]
Almost as soon as they returned home, they faced a fierce backlash from US religious and social conservatives (as well as the Ku Klux Klan) over a comment Lennon had made in a March interview with British reporter Maureen Cleave:[139] "Christianity will go," Lennon said. "It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will 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 alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."[140] The comment went virtually unnoticed in England, but when US teenage fan magazine Datebook printed it five months later—on the eve of the group's final US tour—it created a controversy with Christians in the American "Bible Belt".[139] Epstein publicly criticised Datebook, saying they had taken Lennon's words out of context, and at a press conference Lennon pointed out, "If I'd said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it."[141] Lennon claimed he was referring to how other people viewed their success, but when prompted by reporters he concluded by saying, "If you want me to apologise, if that will make you happy, then okay, I'm sorry."[141]
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