By the mid-1960s, George Harrison had grown disgruntled with his role in The Beatles. He didn’t enjoy fame and felt that his bandmates’ ego-mania kept him from achieving his full potential. When the band broke up, though, he couldn’t escape his legacy. Harrison felt that The Beatles would always live on in the way that major historical figures did.
George Harrison said The Beatles were like two infamous historical figures
Years after The Beatles broke up, Harrison continued to field questions about when they would get back together. He didn’t think it was necessary. Their music would continue to live on despite the split.
“The Beatles can’t ever really split up, because as we said at the time we did split up, it doesn’t really make any difference,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “The music is there, the films are all there. Whatever we did is still there and always will be. What is there is there — it wasn’t that important.”
He said they were like many other historical figures in this way — their legacy would live on even long after they were gone. Harrison chose two extremely infamous figures to make this point.
“It’s like Henry VIII or Hitler or any of these historical figures they’re always going to be showing documentaries about: their name will be written about forever and no doubt The Beatles’ will be too,” he said. “But my life didn’t begin with The Beatles and it didn’t end with The Beatles. It was just like going to school. I went to Dovedale, then I went to Liverpool Institute and then I went to The Beatles University for a bit and then I got out of university and now I’m having the rest of my life off.”
George Harrison still didn’t think The Beatles had that much power
Though Harrison believed the band would continue to have relevance long after their breakup, he didn’t think the band was all that important.
“The bottom line is, as John said, it was only a little rock ‘n’ roll band,” he said. “It did a lot and it meant a lot to a lot of people but, you know, it didn’t really matter that much.”
He didn’t think the band was nearly as powerful as other people made them out to be.
“I suppose in the mid-Sixties when the hippy stuff was starting we had a lot of influence, but I don’t think we actually had much power,” he said. “(For instance, we didn’t have enough power to stop some crazed Oliver Cromwell coming round to bust us all).”
Ringo Starr thought they should have done more with their power
Ringo Starr disagreed with his bandmate. While they might not have been able to, as Harrison said, stop someone like Oliver Cromwell, they had a great deal of influence over the general public. Starr believed they could have done more with this power.
“I feel now, on reflection, that we could have used our power a lot more for good,” he said. “Not for politics, but just to be more helpful. We could have been some bigger force. It’s an observation, not a regret — regrets are useless. We could have been stronger for a lot more causes if we’d pulled it together.”
Still, he found it surprising that actual world leaders saw them as a threat.
“For me it was a really great rock’n’roll band and we made a lot of good music which is still here today,” he said. “But I know what John and George mean — we were just a little band from Liverpool. What always amazed me was that people like De Gaulle and Khrushchev and all these world leaders were shouting at us. I could never understand that.”
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