Yoko Ono didn’t break up the Beatles, she kept the band together — and Lennon from falling apart: book

nypost.com:

turned 30. The two have maintained a close relationship since.)Sheff notes that Lennon officially broke up the Beatles on September 20, 1969.

At a meeting at the Apple offices in London, he informed the other band members and their manager that he was “all in on his partnership with Yoko.”The conversation turned to a discussion of a potential new record deal, and Lennon told them, “You don’t seem to understand, do you?

The group is over. I’m leaving.”“It was natural. John moved on,” Voorman says in the book. Sheff writes that Lennon’s 1971 hit “Imagine,” his most famous and beloved post-Beatles song, was not only co-written with Ono — who did not receive credit — but was “a synthesis of Yoko’s philosophy and her conceptual art.” In 1964, she’d released a book of drawings and instructional poems called “Grapefruit.” It had lines such as “Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time,” and, “Imagine your head filled with pencil leads.” It would prove greatly influential to Lennon.“Though John wrote the melody [for “Imagine”], the idea, title, and lyrics were inspired by Yoko’s concept of wish fulfillment,” Sheff writes. “It was specifically inspired, John said, by ‘Grapefruit.'”In 1980, Lennon told Sheff that Ono had essentially been a cowriter on the song’s lyrics. “I wasn’t man enough to let her have credit for it,” the music legend admitted to the writer the month before his assassination. “I was still selfish enough and unaware enough to sort of take her contribution without acknowledging it.