George Harrison Said He Was in ‘Another World’ While The Beatles Recorded ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour’
George Harrison said he was in “another world” while The Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Magical Mystery Tour in 1967. He’d recently experienced the essence of spirituality in one of the holiest places in India. It put things into perspective for him.
George Harrison wasn’t impressed with what The Beatles had in mind for ‘Sgt. Pepper’
In Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene wrote that George felt awkward being back in London after returning from his six-week trip to India. During his trip, he meditated and read spiritual texts at the base of the Himalayan mountains. The beautiful experience catapulted George into spirituality like nothing else.
So, it’s understandable how hard it was for George to return. It was especially hard for him because The Beatles hadn’t had a spiritual awakening and weren’t coming up with exciting ideas.
“He didn’t want to be a fab Beatle again,” Greene wrote. “The band was his job, and as a responsible member he would continue to play lead guitar and sing harmony, but meditation was revealing to him an inner person with creative energies and original ideas straining to be expressed.”
George was willing to keep the peace and go on being a band member. However, he wasn’t impressed with the idea Paul McCartney came up with for their next album.
“George wanted to know who he was and who God was, and anything unrelated, however innovative, failed to hold his interest,” Greene continued. “Paul had come up with an innovative idea for their current album. The Beatles would pretend to be someone else, a make-believe group called Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and every time one of the Beatles sang, he would pretend to be someone in the made-up band.
“The idea left George cold and bored. They had been working on the album since November, and there was still no end in sight.”
George was in ‘another world’ when The Beatles recorded ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and ‘Magical Mystery Tour’
The Guardian described George’s time in India as “an immersion that led to a chain reaction of musical and spiritual epiphanies.”
They continued, “On his return, his contribution to ‘Sgt Pepper’ was the quietly assertive ‘Within You Without You’; much of the album left him cold. He was scarcely more enthusiastic about ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ While McCartney worked on the title track in the studio, Harrison produced coloured crayons from his painted sheepskin jacket and started drawing pictures.”
Later, George said, “My problem, basically, was that I was in another world. I didn’t really belong; I was just an appendage.”
It also didn’t help that Paul and John Lennon were churning out mediocre songs in “an assembly process” or that his bandmates treated him like a glorified session man.
George added images of revered gurus to ‘Sgt. Pepper’s album cover
Even though George couldn’t be back in India, he incorporated aspects of his spiritual life into The Beatles’ work. George added images of revered gurus to the album cover of Sgt. Pepper as clues to the spiritual aspect of him.
“To photos of Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Laurel and Hardy, and other twentieth-century icons, he added Yogananda, Yogananda’s grand guru Lahiri Mahasaya, and Mahasaya’s guru Sri Mahavatara Babaji,” Greene wrote. “The photos, he would explain in later years, were ‘clues to the spiritual aspect of me,’ but such moments merely made bearable a job he no longer cared to do.”
George might’ve not liked working on Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour, but at least he could add aspects of himself that made him feel better. He wasn’t afraid to leave a spiritual impression on all of The Beatles’ following albums.
