A George Harrison Song Features a Line Secretly Written By John Lennon

George Harrison often wrote songs by himself, even when he was with The Beatles. He rarely got help from Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who were busy collaborating. However, Harrison often proved that he didn’t need his other bandmates, as he had a very successful solo career once The Beatles ended. However, George Harrison did need a little help from his friends a few times, including John Lennon on one solo song. 

George Harrison had help from John Lennon on ‘All Things Must Pass’

All Things Must Pass was the first solo album released by Harrison after The Beatles ended in 1970. The album featured many of Harrison’s best songs, including “My Sweet Lord”, his first solo No. 1 hit. Harrison wrote the titular song on the album before The Beatles broke up. He tried to entice his fellow bandmates into recording “All Things Must Pass” at the Get Back sessions in 1969, but they didn’t have much interest. 

In the Get Back documentary, Harrison gets stuck while writing the second verse. Lennon suggests the line “a mind can blow those clouds away,” stating that the line would be more “psychedelic.” Lennon didn’t receive any credit, but this line did make its way into the song. 

While Harrison kept Lennon’s suggestion in the song, the “Something” singer had more interest in the spiritual aspect of the track rather than the psychedelic. 

“When I wrote All Things Must Pass, I was trying to do a Robbie Robertson–Band sort of tune and that is what it turned into,” Harrison wrote in his memoir I, Me, Mine. “I think the whole idea of ‘All Things Must Pass’ has been written up by all kinds of mystics and ex-mystics, including Timothy Leary in his psychedelic poems.”

Lennon and Harrison disagreed on how much influence they had on each other

While George Harrison claims to have done most of his songwriting alone, John Lennon felt he had more influence over him than Harrison admitted. For example, Lennon helped Harrison with “Taxman”, one of the most political songs Harrison wrote for The Beatles. However, Harrison claimed Lennon did not influence his music in his memoir.

Lennon was frustrated by these comments and said Harrison idolized him because he was older and more experienced in other areas. Harrison said Lennon exaggerated his influence and was too preoccupied with Paul to concern himself with George. 

“Well, that’s what he thought,” Harrison said in a 1987 interview. “I liked him very much, he was a groove, he was a good lad, but at the same time, he misread me. He didn’t realize who I was, and this was one of the main faults of John and Paul. They were so busy being John and Paul, they failed to realize who else was around at the time.”

Harrison shared that he left out Lennon’s input on “Taxman” from his memoir because he didn’t want to get into disputes over who did what with The Beatles. 

“He was annoyed because I didn’t say that he’d written one line of the song ‘Taxman,’” he explained. “The point to that was I also didn’t say how I wrote two lines to ‘Come Together’ or three lines to ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ I wasn’t getting into any of that. I think in the balance, I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have with me.”