In the 1960s, George Harrison was lumbered with the nickname ‘The Quiet Beatle’. Though he may have been quieter than his bandmates, the description is mostly inaccurate. If the name pertained to his relatively meagre songwriting catalogue with The Beatles, it wasn’t for lack of trying. As documented in Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back, Harrison became frustrated with his lack of album real estate and engaged in several heated arguments with Paul McCartney.
Among those who contested Harrison’s status as the “quiet” Beatle was his close friend and fellow Traveling Wilbury Tom Petty. The ‘Free Fallin’’ singer once told Rolling Stone that Harrison would, in fact, “never shut up” with a chuckle. “He was the best hang you could imagine,” he added warmly. Similarly, Mick Jagger remembered Harrison as quiet when he wanted to be but also “funny and combative”.
Far from quiet, Harrison was simply not one for small talk. If you had him talking about spirituality and Indian classical music, I have no doubt that he would never “shut up”. Adding to Harrison’s “quiet” disillusionment during The Beatles’ final years together was a degree of creative dissonance.
While McCartney was happy with writing “fruity” songs like ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, Harrison favoured spiritual or deeply meaningful songwriting such as that heard in ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
Like Lennon, Harrison preferred more abstract, artistically inventive compositions rather than radio bait. Though Harrison was clearly happiest creating esoteric Eastern-influenced music like that heard on his debut solo album, Wonderwall Music, he never lost his ear for an accessible ballad or energetic pop song, as conveyed by his propulsive Traveling Wilburys oeuvre.
With nods to ‘Taxman’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ valid in the conversation, it is safe to claim that Harrison’s songwriting for The Beatles reached a peak in the 1969 album Abbey Road. Not only did the song bring Harrison’s most popular song and the most streamed Beatles track on Spotify, ‘Here Comes the Sun’, but it also brought his unbeatable love song, ‘Something’.
Speaking to Ritchie Yorke in 1969, just after the arrival of Abbey Road, Harrison gave his account and opinion on each track on the album. When discussing ‘Something’, Harrison noted that he began writing it during the White Album sessions but didn’t manage to have it finished in time. The delay was partly due to his intentions to rewrite the titular line.
“There was a James Taylor song called ‘Something In The Way She Moves’, which is the first line of that,” he explained. “And so then I thought of trying to change the words, but they were the words that came when I first wrote it, so in the end, I just left it as that and just called it ‘Something’.”
Continuing, Harrison said song reminded him of Ray Charles’ work and suggested that it was his favourite of his songwriting attempts to date. “When I wrote it, I imagined somebody like Ray Charles doing it,” he added. “That’s the feel I imagined, but because I’m not Ray Charles, I’m much more limited in what I can do, then it came out like this. It’s nice. It’s probably the nicest melody tune that I’ve written.”
Indeed, ‘Something’ is a melodic and lyrical delight and undoubtedly one of Harrison’s finest achievements. Impressively, the song managed to turn the head of Frank Sinatra, who was otherwise unimpressed with The Beatles and their progressive rock ‘n’ roll racket. Ol’ Blue Eyes famously called ‘Something’ “one of the best love songs I believe to be written in the past fifty or a hundred years.”
