How John Lennon’s impulsive decision to play a 1969 concert in Toronto helped speed the Beatles breakup

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Over the next two months, more than five million foreigners will come to Canada on their summer vacation. For the rest of the summer, theNational Post presents this series on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have taken time out from shaping world events to pay us a visit — and how that visit shaped them. Today, how a Toronto rock concert killed the Beatles:

In August of 1966, the Beatles had just arrived in Toronto for a pair of appearances at Maple Leaf Gardens that, unbeknownst to the world, would be among their last. Prior to the shows, in a press conference at the arena’s Hot Stove Lounge, a reporter asked John Lennon if the band — who had failed to sell out the 16,00-seat venue — would ever split up. “We obviously are not going to go around holding hands forever,” he replied, eliciting laughter from the assembled press. Lennon added, more seriously, “we’ve got to split up or progress … it might happen. It’s quite possible.” The Toronto reporters could not have known, but by the end of the decade, their budding metropolis would soon become the catalyst for the destruction of the greatest band of all time.