Roger McGuinn Said Playing Beatles Songs Seemed Like a ‘Bad Memory’ for George Harrison
When The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn spent time with George Harrison, he began playing Beatles songs on his guitar. It felt natural enough; Harrison had spent much of his youth in The Beatles and helped create many classic songs. McGuinn said that while Harrison did play the songs with him, he didn’t seem to enjoy it. Harrison’s wife was stunned to find them playing Beatles songs.
George Harrison began to worry that The Beatles were in danger
The tours and hoards of adoring fans were exciting for Harrison at first, but he said that he began to tire of it.
“I sensed this in 1965, and I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want ticker-tape parades,” Harrison told Rolling Stone, adding, “‘I don’t want to be put on this big pedestal.'”
Fame no longer excited him, and he grew increasingly nervous about the dangers the band faced while touring.
“I mean, planes with engines on fire and things like that,” he said. “Every time we went to Texas, we nearly got wiped out. The first time just by the police not listening to our advance man tell them how to handle the situation. We landed on the runway in Houston; they put about four police at the airport, and so there were thousands of kids. They were actually running along the runway, and the pilot just turned the engines off and let the plane coast to a stop. Within a few minutes, they were all over the plane. They were on the outside of the plane, knocking on the windows and all over the wings. It was ridiculous.”
The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn said George Harrison didn’t like to play Beatles songs
By 1966, Harrison felt that being in The Beatles was “a horror story … awful … manic … crazy, a nightmare.” It was a bit of a relief when the band broke up in 1970. Years later, Harrison was at Tom Petty’s house with McGuinn, who began playing Beatles songs on his guitar.
“In later years, I was hanging out with him and Olivia at Tom Petty’s house in Los Angeles,” McGuinn said, per the book George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thomson. “I started playing a couple of Beatles songs and he was kind enough to indulge me, but Olivia said, ‘George, what are you doing?'”
Harrison explained that McGuinn had wanted to play the music. This made The Byrds musician realize that Harrison didn’t reflect fondly on his time with the band.
“‘Well, Jim [Roger McGuinn] here wanted to play these songs …'” McGuinn recalled Harrison saying. “I got the feeling from him that it was a bad memory, something he didn’t want to go back to.”
George Harrison and Roger McGuinn spent a great deal of time together
Harrison and McGuinn had been friends since the 1960s, after meeting at what McGuinn described as a disastrous concert.
“After the show, we met George and John, and they said, ‘Great show, guys,'” McGuinn told Rolling Stone. “We went, ‘Oh, man, how can you say that?’ We hung with them when they came out here later, and they were really nice. This was also ’65, they were playing the Hollywood Bowl. They were up in the hills here, in one of the houses, a place with a gate and guards and the little girls camped up on the hillside. They sent a limo down for us, and we came winding up the road, through this gate. It was like a movie.”
Harrison later took inspiration from McGuinn while writing “If I Needed Someone.”
“George wrote ‘If I Needed Someone’ off the lick from ‘The Bells of Rhymney,’ and he sent it to us in advance and said, ‘This is for Jim’ because of that lick.”
