10 of the Weirdest George Harrison Songs
Finding the weirdest George Harrison songs wasn’t hard because the former Beatle recorded many in his long career. Songs like “Crackerbox Palace” and “Thanks for the Pepperoni” were never intended to make sense.
10. ‘Piggies’
George’s White Album tune is definitely one of his weirdest songs. However, the silly child-like lyrics have a deeper, more serious meaning. In his 1980 memoir, I Me Mine, George said “Piggies” was a “social comment” on the upper-class system at the time. George’s mother, Louise, added the hysterical lyric, “What they need’s a damn good whacking!”
9. ‘Old Brown Shoe’
“Old Brown Shoe” is strange for many reasons. It’s a love song at heart, but it’s uncertain how the lyric, “Now I’m stepping out this old brown shoe,” fits in. It could reflect a person’s journey from one life to the next once they have found love. Besides that, the lyrics of “Old Brown Shoe” are weird because there’s a constant “duality of things,” George wrote in I Me Mine. “Yes no, up down, left right, right wrong, etcetera.” Everything is disoriented. The song was weird for George to record as well. He played the piano, which he rarely did.
8. ‘Savoy Truffle’
“Savoy Truffle” is weird because of its subject matter. George confessed he wrote it for his friend Eric Clapton, who loved sweets. Clapton had had a lot of work done on his teeth, and his dentist told him he was done eating candy. The song was George’s way of teasing his friend.
7. ‘Thanks for the Pepperoni’
George’s “Thanks for the Pepperoni” doesn’t take its name from pizza. During an interview with Billboard, George revealed he named the song after something a famous comedian once said. In Lenny Bruce’s Religions, Inc., the comedian talks about the pope and says, “And thanks for the pepperoni.” The tune is a random instrumental, so George plucked something from the ether to name it.
6. ‘Art of Dying’
For those who don’t know the depths of George’s spirituality, “Art of Dying” must be odd. However, the tune speaks about some serious things about life. It’s about karma and reincarnation. George believed that if you made big enough ripples in this life, you could be forced to walk the earth for millions of years in various reincarnations to make up for it. He also believed there was an art to dying. After meditating and chanting for most of his life and being one with God, George lit the room when he left his body. It was seamless.
5. ‘I Remember Jeep’
George’s “I Remember Jeep” is another weird instrumental with an even stranger title. The former Beatle named the tune after Clapton’s dog. Jeep allegedly went missing around the time the two guitarists were working on George’s All Things Must Pass in 1970. However, Clapton must have found him because Jeep appeared on some of the musician’s album covers.
4. ‘Blood From a Clone’
“Blood From a Clone” is a classic case of George using music to vent his frustrations. Around the time that he wrote the tune, George was upset about how the music industry had changed. He didn’t want to make music that sounded like everything else on the radio. George also didn’t want to do the things the record companies had started demanding, like interviews, music videos, and heavy promotion. While the song has a strange name, the music is also jarring. It’s almost as if George went out of his way to make it as bizarre as possible with weird noises just to go against what the record companies were looking for.
3. ‘Wreck of the Hesperus’
“Wreck of the Hesperus” is another weird-sounding song. It describes how George was feeling in his haphazard career at the time. By the time George released the song on 1987’s Cloud Nine, he’d let go of many things that plagued him, including the things that frustrated him about the record business. It was about making fun of your perceptions of yourself.
2. ‘His Name Is Legs (Ladies and Gentlemen)’
On top of having a weird name, “His Name Is Legs (Ladies and Gentlemen)” has some strange lyrics. Take the entire first verse: “Oooh, oooh/ Everything is Dinky Doo/ Everything you do/ You, the king of La-Di-Da/ Pretty very out far/ Never oversits, he understands/ Like the back of the hand/ He should sing in a band, oh yeah.” There’s really nothing else to say about the tune besides the fact that it’s one of the weirdest George Harrison songs.
1. ‘It’s Johnny’s Birthday’
“It’s Johnny’s Birthday” is a weirder version of The Beatles’ “Happy Birthday.” George wrote it for his former bandmate, John Lennon when he turned 30 in 1970. It’s essentially filler that sounds more like a carnival tune than a birthday song. It gets even weirder when in the middle of the song as it starts playing backward, as if someone is rewinding it.
Ultimately, George made the music he wanted, whether it was weird or not. The former Beatle had a knack for following his own path. He didn’t really mind if fans thought his songs were strange.
