George Harrison Said The Beatles Had a ‘One-Sided Love Affair’ With Fans
By the mid-1960s, George Harrison had grown weary of the fame that came with being in The Beatles. He did not want to tour and was growing increasingly resentful of the way John Lennon and Paul McCartney overlooked his songwriting. He said that part of the reason he was so exhausted was because he had to give everything to the band and its fans.
George Harrison said The Beatles gave everything they had to fans
Throughout the 1960s, The Beatles experienced a level of fame that was both life-changing and oppressive. They had the freedom to do practically anything creatively, but they couldn’t go out in public without fans ambushing them. Harrison said that this was an incredible amount of pressure to endure.
“We were put under the heaviest pressure,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “I don’t think anybody had had as much pressure as The Beatles; maybe in some way Elvis, but it was not quite as intense as with us. Part of the pressure of the time was the mania that was going on, plus the drugs and the police, and then the politics — everywhere we went there was political upheaval and riots.”
Through all of this, The Beatles had to make and perform music. While they had zealous fans, Harrison didn’t think their passion could compare to what The Beatles had to give to the public.
“It was a very one-sided love affair,” he said. “The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but The Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is much more difficult to give.”
George Harrison did not like it when fans asked about a Beatles reunion
Harrison felt relief when the band stopped touring and, eventually, parted ways. Practically as soon as they broke up, though, people began to question the former Beatles about a reunion. Harrison resented this.
“They’ve got the films – Help!, A Hard Day’s Night, Let It Rot, Tragical History Tour,” he told Rolling Stone in 1979. “They’ve got lots and lots of songs they can play forever. But what do they want? Blood? They want us all to die like Elvis Presley? Elvis got stuck in a rut where the only thing he could do was to keep on doing the same old thing, and in the end his health suffered and that was it.”
He said that while Beatlemania was fun for fans, he hadn’t liked being at the center of the storm.
“The Beatles fortunately did that hit-and-run. But every year we were Beatling was like twenty years; so although it might only have been five or six years it seemed like eternity,” he said. “That was enough for me, I don’t have any desire to do all that. It might have been fun for everybody else, but we never saw the Beatles. We’re the only four people who never got to see us. [Laughing] Everybody got on a trip, you see, that was the thing. We were just four relatively sane people in the middle of madness.”
He initially assumed the band would get back together
While Harrison took a hard, anti-reunion line in 1979, he was more amenable to the idea in 1970. He said he would try his best to work with his former bandmates again.
“I’ll certainly try my best to do something with them again, you know,” he said in an interview with WABC-FM radio (via Beatles Interviews). “I mean, it’s only a matter of accepting that the situation is a compromise. In a way it’s a compromise, and it’s a sacrifice, you know, because we all have to sacrifice a little in order to gain something really big. And there is a big gain by recording together — I think musically, and financially, and also spiritually.”
In a stance he would later reverse, Harrison said The Beatles owed it to the world to work together again.
“And for the rest of the world, you know, I think that Beatle music is such a big sort of scene — that I think it’s the least we could do is to sacrifice three months of the year at least, you know, just to do an album or two,” he said. “I think it’s very selfish if the Beatles don’t record together.”
The four Beatles ultimately did not work together again, but the individual members worked together in various ways over the years.
