The Beatles' 1966 US tour tour, the band returned to Shea Stadium in New York, where they performed to an audience of 45,000, compared with the 56,000 world record attendance they had achieved the previous year. After the 1966 tour, they would become a studio band and focused exclusively on record production. In March 1966, Maureen Cleave interviewed John Lennon and the rest of the Beatles as part of a "London Evening Standard" series on the theme "How Does a Beatle Live?" During the Lennon interview at Kenwood, Cleave noted Lennon's interest in Christianity and religions, to which he replied: Although the article went largely
Religious views of the Beatles the "Evening Standard" that the Beatles had become "more popular than Jesus". The comment went unnoticed until in August the same year, the American magazine "Datebook" published it, inciting protests against the Beatles. The band were threatened, their records were publicly burned, and radio stations refused to play their songs. After the Beatles' 1966 US tour, Harrison broadened his interest of Indian culture to Hinduism. He and his wife Pattie Boyd went on a pilgrimage to Mumbai to meet gurus. In 1968, all four Beatles went to Rishikesh in northern India to study meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Although