The Beatles Felt George Harrison’s Songs ‘Didn’t Really Matter,’ Claimed an Engineer
John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote the majority of The Beatles’ songs, but George Harrison began taking his writing seriously in the band’s later years. He wanted to contribute more to their albums. Unfortunately, this wasn’t always easy for him. Lennon and McCartney often overlooked his contributions to the group. When Harrison could get songs on the albums, nobody took them seriously in the recording studio.
The Beatles didn’t take George Harrison’s songs as seriously as their others
By the second half of the 1960s, Harrison was making a concerted effort to write more music. During this time, he wrote songs like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Something,” and “Here Comes the Sun.” While these were hits for the band, the other Beatles rarely treated them like they had potential.
“In general, sessions where we did George Harrison songs were approached differently,” audio engineer Geoff Emerick wrote in his book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. “Everybody would relax — there was a definite sense that it really didn’t matter.”
Nobody would say this to Harrison, but it was clear that they felt this way.
“It was never said in so many words, but there was a feeling that his songs simply didn’t have the integrity of John’s or Paul’s — certainly they were never considered as singles — so no one was prepared to expend very much time or effort on them.”
George Martin would step in if the other Beatles weren’t taking George Harrison’s songs seriously
Longtime Beatles producer George Martin was guilty of not taking Harrison as seriously as Lennon and McCartney. Still, he paid the guitarist more respect than his bandmates did.
“If Harrison wanted to do one more take but nobody else was interested — and they usually weren’t — that’s where George Martin would step in and assert his authority,” Emerick wrote. “In that way, he served as the intermediary between George and the other Beatles: he would intercede if he thought John or Paul were taking the piss, not giving their full effort.”
Martin’s efforts did little to quell the frustration boiling up in Harrison, though.
“Despite that, they were never as focused as they were when we were recording one of their own, and that had to have spawned some degree of resentment in the lead guitarist,” Emerick wrote. “In many ways, he was still being treated as a junior partner.”
The guitarist grew increasingly frustrated with this treatment
Emerick was right. Harrison was frustrated with his bandmates and grew to resent them as time passed. He admitted that he wasn’t very confident when he brought songs to his bandmates. It seemed though, that more confidence wouldn’t necessarily have helped.
“Yeah, well, I wrote some songs — in fact some songs which I feel are quite nice which I’ll use on this album — I wrote about four years ago,” he said on WABC-FM radio, per Beatles Interviews. “But, uhh, it was more difficult for me then to, you know, get in there to do it. It was the way the Beatles took off with Paul and John’s songs, and it made it very difficult for me get in. And also, I suppose at that time I didn’t have as much confidence when it came down to pushing my own material as I have now.”
He admitted that his biggest problem was with McCartney.
“[M]usically it was like being in a bag and they wouldn’t let me out the bag, which was mainly Paul at that time,” he said. “The conflict musically for me was Paul. And yet I could play with any other band or musician and have a reasonably good time.”
