George Harrison Said This Beatles Song Was ‘a Bit of PR for God’
George Harrison was the most spiritual member of The Beatles and tried to incorporate his faith into his everyday life. Over the course of his career, both with The Beatles and as a solo artist, Harrison wrote songs about his spirituality. He was not behind one of The Beatles’ songs that he thought was good publicity for God, though.
George Harrison said this Beatles song was spiritual
In 1967, The Beatles released “All You Need Is Love.” John Lennon wrote the song after their manager, Brian Epstein, informed the band that they were to appear on the Our World broadcast. This was the first-ever live, multinational broadcast and allowed the band to get their new song to millions of listeners. They recorded the song in the studio with a number of other musicians.
“I remember the recording, because we decided to get some people in who looked like the ‘love generation,’” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “If you look closely at the floor, I know that Mick Jagger is there. But there’s also an Eric Clapton, I believe, in full psychedelic regalia and permed hair, sitting right there. It was good: the orchestra was there and it was played live. We rehearsed for a while, and then it was: ‘You’re on at twelve o’clock, lads.’ The man upstairs pointed his finger and that was that. We did it — one take.”
Harrison believed it was fitting that they brought such a sense of togetherness to the studio. He thought the song itself was spiritual.
“Because of the mood of the time, it seemed to be a great idea to perform that song while everybody else was showing knitting in Canada or Irish clog dances in Venezuela,” he said. “We thought, ‘Well, we’ll sing “All You Need Is Love,” because it’s a subtle bit of PR for God.’ I don’t know if the song was written before that, because there were lots of songs in circulation at the time.”
The guitarist spoke about wanting to be ‘God-conscious’
Harrison wanted to explore his spirituality after taking LSD for the first time.
“It was like opening the door, really, and before, you didn’t even know there was a door there,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “It just opened up this whole other consciousness, even if it was down to, like Aldous Huxley said, the wonderful folds in his gray flannel trousers.”
His primary goal in life became being “God-conscious.”
“I want to be God-conscious,” Harrison said, per the book Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison by Joshua M. Greene. “That’s really my only ambition, and everything else in life is incidental.”
George Harrison released his own ‘God-conscious’ song after The Beatles
After The Beatles broke up, Harrison released “My Sweet Lord.” He wanted the song to be explicitly religious and included repetition of “Hallelujah” and “Hare Krishna.”
“I wanted to show that ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Hare Krishna’ are quite the same thing,” he said. “I did the voices singing ‘Hallelujah’ and then the change to ‘Hare Krishna’ so that people would be chanting the maha-mantra before they knew what was going on.”
