George Harrison Read His Album Reviews but Didn’t Care What They Said
George Harrison once revealed that he read his album reviews. However, that didn’t mean he cared about what they said. He read them out of curiosity, but they didn’t affect him or his playing. Anyway, George wasn’t making music for the critics.
George Harrison said he read his album reviews but didn’t care about them
The former Beatle never liked explaining himself or his songs. He said whatever he was trying to say was plain as day in the lyrics. If they weren’t obvious, he was OK with fans’ interpretations. However, George wasn’t making music for anyone but God. In the mid-1960s, Ravi Shankar taught him that “God is sound.”
So, it’s surprising that George cared enough to read about what others said about his music. George explained he read some reviews if he came across them.
“I canceled all my newspapers five years ago, so I don’t really know what people say,” he said. “If I do see a review of an album I’ll read it, although it doesn’t make too much difference what they say, because I am what I am whether they like it or not.”
George said people like dissecting famous people in reviews out of frustration
In 1975, George told Dave Herman at WNEW-FM (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters) that the press got gratification from dissecting musicians viciously.
“Frustration,” he said. “I think it’s frustration, is a reason why … I don’t know, maybe a lot has to do with the stars, the planets, I mean like those stars. Because sometimes I’ve seen that type of thing happen in the past—well, it happened to me before, as a part of the Beatles.
“We went through a thing of going up and up and up, and part of the up is by people, that people contribute to your success by writing things about you. By getting behind you, you know? And a lot of the time, because they want to just go out and do that on their own… like, initially, you try and promote yourself and the record company and the press agents and that sort of thing.
“But say in the Beatles’ case, once it starts rolling along, people just get behind it and write good things and then it gets up to a point where so much has been said, and then they decide to take it from a different point of view and decide to … write about your faults.”
George explained that that sort of thing happened when The Beatles faced financial problems with Apple. Then, the press constantly played a game of giving them good and bad press whenever it suited them.
“The thing that bothers me is if it comes from different directions, it’s okay,” he said. “But when it seems to come from one basic source, then it bothers me because it seems to get more of a personal thing than just an actual point of view.”
The guitarist couldn’t let negative press affect him
George said you have to either agree with reviews and “commit suicide” or take them with a pinch of “hate, salt.”
“You know, really, just—because I could read criticisms of myself and if I’m in a decent mood, I’ll think, ‘Well that’s unfair that is … maybe that’s fair,'” George said. “But if you get depressed you start agreeing with them. If you start agreeing with them, then you just go do yourself in. But I wouldn’t do that because enough things happen to prove that it’s not exactly how they see it.”
George said he once read a negative review and thought the author was only trying to provoke him to get an interview. However, the paper didn’t print exactly what the writer thought of George. Sometimes papers just wanted negative reviews even if there weren’t any.
“I mean one situation with the rock press, for example, was one guy who came to write an article because he disagreed with another article that had been written in his paper,” George said. “And so, he said, ‘I’ve seen seven of these concerts, and I disagree, and I want to write it from my point of view.’ Then his article came out and it was not really good at all.
“And I thought, well, he’s just … he was just cheating me, just to get in to talk to me. But then he just wrote a letter to me and sent what he wrote and to compare that to what they printed. He just said, ‘They just cut out any favorable references to the music, or to the response from the audience.’
“It made me feel, ‘Oh, forget it. They’re just trying to nail me now,’ and that’s it, that’s all it is.”
George received a lot of negative reviews during his 1974 tour of America. It never really stopped as he released more music. When he didn’t, the press called him a hermit. They even hounded him in his final days. However, George thought the press was mostly dummies. They were the ones you dubbed him the “quiet Beatle,” after all.
