The Beatles Song George Harrison Wrote While ‘Wretchedly Jetlagged’
In the latter half of the 1960s, George Harrison began writing more songs for The Beatles. While he hadn’t had much interest in songwriting early in the band’s career, he took it more seriously in later years. He was so dedicated to songwriting that he wrote one song while reeling from jetlag.
George Harrison wrote 1 Beatles song while suffering from jetlag
In 1967, Harrison traveled to Los Angeles with his wife, Pattie Boyd, road manager, Neil Aspinall, and friend, Alex Mardas. He went from the airport to his rental home, where Beatles press officer Derek Taylor was due to meet him. Taylor was running late, though.
“By the time we got there the song was virtually intact,” Taylor said, per the book A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song by Steve Turner. “Of course, at the time I felt very bad. Here were these two wretchedly jetlagged people and we were about two hours late.”
Still, Harrison used the wait time to write “Blue Jay Way,” a song he named after the street where he was staying.
“But here, indeed, was a song which turned up in Magical Mystery Tour (the film) through a prism with about eight images, with George in a red jacket sitting and playing piano on the floor,” Taylor said.
Derek Taylor said the George Harrison song wasn’t as deep as it seemed
Over the years, Taylor saw much analysis about nearly all of The Beatles’ songs, including “Blue Jay Way.” After witnessing Harrison work on the song, Taylor believed the lyrics were more literal than people thought.
“Taylor was amused by what people made of the song,” Turner wrote. “One critic thought the line in which George urged his guest not to ‘be long’ was advice to young people telling them not to ‘belong’ (to society, that is). Another acclaimed musicologist believed that, when George said that his friends had ‘lost their way’, he meant that a whole generation had lost direction.”
Instead, Taylor thought the song was about Harrison waiting on his friends.
“It’s just a simple, little song,” he said.
He was hard on his songs early in his career
While Harrison was happy writing songs even while jetlagged, he was initially rather hard on his lyrics.
“The words are always a bit of a hangup for me,” he said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “I’m not very poetic. My lyrics are poor, really. But I don’t take any of it seriously. It’s just a joke. A personal joke. It’s great if someone else likes it, but I don’t take it too seriously myself.”
He may not have ever taken his writing seriously if he hadn’t been around John Lennon and Paul McCartney. While they eventually frustrated him with their lack of interest in his songs, they inspired him early on.
“To get it straight, if I hadn’t been with John and Paul I probably wouldn’t have thought about writing a song, at least not until much later,” he told Guitar World in 1992. “They were writing all these songs, many of which I thought were great. Some were just average, but, obviously, a high percentage were quality material. I thought to myself, If they can do it, I’m going to have a go.”
