I consulted many published sources, and pretty much came up empty-handed as to an actual, direct explanation for their absence. Most just simply note they didn't attend. As far as I can tell, none of the Beatles have ever been asked, nor have any ever offered up an explanation. The only source I could find that even really comments on their absence is the book When They Were Boys: The True Story of the Beatles' Rise to the Top by American journalist Larry Kane. Kane calls their absence from Mal Evans' funeral "surprising, considering the enormous contribution he made as a pal, an employee, and an affectionate protector of their bodies and their privacy".

However, Kane notes that their absence was not out of character for the Beatles. The Beatles already had a track record of not attending funerals, dating all the way back to the death of former bandmate Stuart Sutcliffe in 1962:

"It was not the first time the boys, usually so sensitive to others, ignored the rites of passage. Stuart Sutcliffe, so instrumental to the crafting of their style, and even their name, their birthright, was not honored appropriately either when he died in Hamburg after his painful ordeal."

Michael Seth Starr's biography of Ringo Starr (no relation), Ringo: With a Little Help, notes that none of the Beatles went to the 1967 funeral of their manager Brian Epstein, either:

"None of The Beatles attended Epstein's funeral on August 29[, 1967,] knowing their presence would only turn the solemn occasion into a circus and upset Epstein's grieving family..."

In fact, in the book Memories of John Lennon, edited by Yoko Ono, the Beatles' assistant Peter Brown recalled that the Beatles were explicitly asked by the Epsteins not to come:

"The funeral was held secretly and the Beatles were asked not to attend out of concern that it would turn into a press orgy."

However, Michael Starr's book does note that all four Beatles did attend a memorial service for Epstein a couple months later.

Going forward in time, Kane writes that, upon the 1997 death of Beatles' friend, confidante, and former PR representative Derek Taylor, only George Harrison attended his funeral.

If the mods don't mind me breaking the 20 year rule too badly, similar things happened in more recent years. Neither Paul McCartney nor Ringo Starr attended the funerals of roadie/business manager Neil Aspinall when he died in 2007, or of producer George Martin when he died in 2016, though McCarntey did attend a memorial service a couple months later for Martin. And both McCartney and Starr had visited Aspinall while he was sick in the hospital, shortly before his death.

Of the two deceased Beatles, John Lennon did not have a formal funeral upon his death in 1980. His widow, Yoko Ono, instead issued a press release asking for a long moment of silence:

"There is no funeral for John. Later in the week we will set the time for a silent vigil to pray for his soul. We invite you to participate from wherever you are at the time."

Ringo Starr and his wife did travel to New York City the following day to offer their condolences in person, however.

In 2001, George Harrison did not have a funeral that either McCartney or Starr could attend, either. Instead, Harrison's immediate family and a few of his religious friends/associates traveled to India and spread his ashes in the Ganges river. However, in the Martin Scorsese documentary George Harrison: Living In the Material World, both McCartney and Starr recalled visiting Harrison in his final days, as he lay sick in bed. Both would also participate in the memorial Concert For George held at the Royal Albert Hall on the first anniversary of his death.

But back to Evans. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison, at least, probably did have reasons not to attend beyond the fact that they didn't regularly attend funerals for their close associates. Lennon's wife Yoko Ono had just given birth to their son Sean about three months earlier, after a difficult pregnancy, and after the couple had suffered two previous miscarriages. The cross-country travel may have been too much for them to attend, and doctors often advise not to travel with newborns before they have had all their shots. Lennon may have not felt comfortable leaving his wife and child behind and traveling alone, either, given the circumstances.

In McCartney's authorized biography Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, it is somewhat insinuated that McCartney may have not been willing to leave the UK at the time, due to his father's declining health:

"Shortly afterwards [i.e., after Mal Evans' death], Paul's father, Jim, died of bronchial pneumonia at his home in Gayton in the Wirral on 18 March 1976, at the age of seventy-three. He had been ill for several weeks."

Harrison, too, lived in the UK at the time, and just the burden of the travel may have discouraged him from attending.

That leaves Ringo. He lived in Los Angeles at the time, which is where Evans died and his funeral was held. Why didn't he go? I cannot find any answer to that question. But it is important to remember that, in the 1970s, the ex-Beatles still couldn't do much of anything without attracting media attention, and facing "the inevitable question" of "Are the Beatles ever going to get back together again?" All four declining could very much be explained the way that Starr's biographer explained their absence from Epstein's: "their presence would only turn the solemn occasion into a circus" by the media, drawing all the focus away from the deceased and toward the (partial) reunion of the ex-Beatles.

One more thing I would like to address: I think it is very much in dispute that Mal Evans died in an intentional "suicide by cop" situation. According to police, as reported contemporaneously by the Los Angeles Times, Evans pointed his unloaded air gun at the police, and that's when they opened fire. However, in the Beatles Anthology book, Paul McCartney recounts the event as though the police just opened fire as soon as they saw Evans. McCartney wasn't there that day, but he makes it pretty clear that he doubts the official police version:

"Mal Evans got shot by the L.A. Police Department in 1976. It was so crazy, so crazy. Mal was a big loveable bear of a roadie; he would go over the top occasionally, but we all knew him and never had any problems. The LAPD weren't so fortunate. They were just told that he was upstairs with a shotgun and so they ran up, kicked the door in and shot him. His girlfriend had told them, 'He's a bit moody, and he's got some downers.' Had I been there I would have been able to say, 'Mal, don't be silly.' In fact, any of his friends could have talked him out of it without any sweat, because he was not a nutter. But his girlfriend — she was an L.A. girl — didn't know him that well. She should not have rung the cops, but that's the way it goes. A thump on the door, 'Where is he? Where is the assailant?' Bang, bang, bang. They don't ask questions. They shoot first."

In her autobiographical book entitled John, Lennon's first wife Cynthia Lennon also hinted that she didn't believe the official story of Evans's death. In an ironic twist, the night that her ex-husband was shot and killed, she was spending time with Ringo Starr's ex-wife Maureen ("Mo"), and they got to discussing Evans's own violent death (emphasis mine):

"He'd gone to live in Los Angeles where he began drinking and taking drugs. It was there, on January 4, 1976, that the police had been called by his girlfriend during a row. She claimed that Mal had pulled a gun on her, and when they burst into the apartment the officers found Mal holding a gun. Apparently he pointed it at them before they shot him. It was only after he died that they found the gun wasn't loaded. It was a tragic story, and we could only imagine that Mal had been under the influence of drugs. The Mal we knew could no more have shot someone than flown to the moon. Whatever the true story, his death had shocked us all and that night, our talk around Mo's fireplace was of what a good man he had been and how awful his premature death was. To us, the idea of being shot was almost unimaginable-how could it have happened to such a good friend?"

The truth may never truly be known, but by all accounts, the entire event was very out of character for Mal Evans.

Kenneth Womack has been announced as releasing a biography of Mal Evans in 2023, and I suspect that this will likely have a much more final word on this topic than anything I write here based on other biographies that don't focus on Mal Evans at all, really only mentioning him and his death in passing.

Peter Brown and Steven Gaines' quite gossip-y The Love You Make discusses Mal Evans' post-Beatles life:

One of Ringo's frequent nightclubbing pals turned out to be none other than Mal Evans, the Beatles' road manager. When the Beatles disbanded, Evans was at a loss for something to do. As Neil Aspinall put it, 'he went from fixing telephones to Shea Stadium overnight. He lived with the stars for a decade, and then suddenly he was an ordinary man again.' Bored with his wife and children, he left Engalnd and moved to Los Angeles in the early seventies following the rock and roll action. But no work he could find in the US could equal the exhilaration of working with the Beatles, and Mal's life began to disintegrate. By 1976 he was living in an apartment complex in West Hollywood with some young girl, drinking and heavily into drugs, seeing Ringo or John or one of the guys as they passed through town.

Brown then describes Evans' death at the hands of the police, and closes off the topic with this paragraph:

There is a macabre twist to this already terrible story: Mal was cremated and his ashes lost in the mail. When John Lennon heard the story, he couldn't help but quip that Mal had wound up in the dead letter department.

Peter Brown and Steven Gaines' book is...a difficult issue. You briefly see footage of Peter Brown in Get Back, as he was involved in the Beatles' management, and he's mentioned in 'The Ballad Of John And Yoko'. The book is also gossip-y and not particularly reliable. It may well be that Brown & Gaines put those words in Lennon's mouth, but it also does sound like Lennon's dark sense of humour.

As to what the Beatles were up to in January 1976, when Evans seems to have passed away and when his funeral would have been, it's easier to know what the Beatles were doing on any particular day during the Beatles' run than afterwards, when there was less focus on them - even the biographies focused on the individual members are often focused on Beatles stuff rather than afterwards.

• Paul McCartney was on a world tour with Wings for most of the end of 1975 and in the first half of 1976, with a break over the winter of 1975/1976.He and Linda apparently visited John and Yoko at the Dakota in New York for Christmas. In January-February 1976, he and Wings recorded the Wings At The Speed Of Sound album at Abbey Road in London.

• George Harrison released a single, 'This Guitar Can't Keep From Crying' in December 1975, which likely involved some transatlantic promotional responsibilities. He attended the hearings of the New York 'She's So Fine'/'My Sweet Lord' copyright court case in February 1976. The Peter Brown book (which, as I said, is very gossipy and not always reliable) claims that Harrison was also meant to submit an album in to his new post-Apple record company, A&M, in January 1976 (under the Dark Horse label), which did not happen; the album that did come out (Thirty Three and 1/3) eventually came out on Warner in November 1976 after being completed in September.

• John Lennon had spent a lot of time in Los Angeles between 1973-1974 on his 18-month-long 'Lost Weekend', separated from Yoko Ono, drinking with Ringo, Harry Nilsson, and others (including Mal Evans). Lennon returned to Yoko in New York in late 1974, I think, and Sean Ono Lennon was born in October 1975. At this point, Lennon withdrew from public life for several years.

• Ringo in December 1975-January 1976, like Harrison, was involved in contract negotiations around post-Apple record contracts, eventually signing to Atlantic Records, and releasing his first album on Atlantic, Ringo's Rotogravure in September 1976. Ringo had also started a record label in 1975, first called Ring O' Records and then Able Label, which released some music (including a single by Dirk & Stig of the Rutles in 1978). He also still appeared to involved in the LA drinking scene in 1976, having finally divorced Maureen Starkey in 1975.

When it comes down to it, the former Beatles were effectively lynchpins in major international business operations of some sort - usually record companies, but not always - with a fair bit of money potentially riding on their whims. This may have prevented some of them from taking several days out to travel to LA to go to Evans' funeral, if they were inclined to, as those days might delay finishing the next album and that might be a major problem given other upcoming commitments (etc).

They also, to some extent, all had substance abuse problems after the end of the band; there is discussion of George Harrison's cocaine habit in 1974-1975 in the Peter Brown book, and John and Ringo did a lot of drinking, often together as they separated from their wives. Paul McCartney has discussed in the past that he had a long-held cannabis habit (culminating in his arrest in Japan in 1980). These may have made it difficult/inadvisable to travel internationally (as I think was the case for Paul and perhaps George). Additionally, for John Lennon in January 1976, he may have been wishing to put his LA days behind him, focusing on being a father to his 3-month-old son, and that may have necessitated skipping the funeral.

Additionally, Mal Evans, according to Howard Sounes' Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, was writing a memoir that was due to be completed about a week after his untimely death. It may have been that this memoir would have been, like Peter Brown's biography of the band, full of information that the Beatles did not want broadcast to the world; after all, the Beatles severed ties with Peter Brown upon the publication of The Love You Make in 1983. As such, it is potentially the case that Ringo or the others no longer wished to associate with Mal because he was intent on breaking confidences for his memoir.

Finally, the presence of the Beatles, and the media circus around them, may have disrupted what Evans' family may have wanted to be a more private affair. If all or even some of the Beatles had reunited in public for the funeral, it might have been newsworthy, and this would have been an enormous distraction from the sad business of a family member dying. It may have been that Evans' family did not invite the Beatles to the funeral for that reason, or that they may have declined to attend because they did not want to intrude upon a family's grief by inviting in a media circus. (see /u/texum's great post in this thread for more on their history with funerals).

The Peter Brown book also alleges that Evans' girlfriend who called the police on him, sent the bill to clean the carpet after his death to Apple (the Beatles' organisation, not the computer company). Whether this is true or not - as previously mentioned, the Peter Brown book isn't terribly reliable - it may speak of some tension between Evans' family and people in the Beatles' orbit at the time such as Brown.

It also might be the case that the Beatles were hard-hearted about such things. I suspect that we will find out more upon the publication of Womack's biography of Evans, and the subsequent release of Evans' diaries.

Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!