For all of the great music that they made together, the ending of The Beatles’ career was anything but harmonious. As much as they tried to patch things up when working through their lawyers, the Fab Four had grown too much apart for the band to salvage their relationships, leading to multiple sparring sessions in the press. While John Lennon directed most of his vitriol towards Paul McCartney at the end of the breakup, he maintained that George Harrison didn’t have what it took as a solo star on his first solo album.
Even though Lennon and McCartney were known as the twin forces behind the band, Harrison was slowly becoming one of the biggest songwriters of his generation in the background. Compared to the massive stockpile of songs that his songwriting counterparts made, Harrison was on his own creating unique masterpieces, embracing the sounds of Indian music on the track ‘Within You Without You’ and lending his skills to classic Beatles tracks like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
Although Harrison may have been able to write phenomenal songs, none of the band members gave him the time of day. Even when working on music for what would become Let It Be during the last phase of their career, Harrison constantly fought to get his songs heard, making snide comments about no one joining in when performing the song ‘I Me Mine’.
As the rest of his bandmates began floundering for new material once the group split, Harrison had a stockpile of songs ready for All Things Must Pass. Describing his experience as the equivalent of being musically constipated for years, the album allowed Harrison to spread his wings as a songwriter, working his magic across hits like ‘Wah-Wah’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’.
Though Lennon would be the last Beatle to put out an album of solo music with Plastic Ono Band, he wasn’t nearly as kind to what he heard from Harrison. Of course, Lennon was known to treat Harrison like a little brother, but he openly mocked his rustic approach to rock and roll when he saw the layout for the first time.
Hearing that it would be a triple album, Lennon thought that Harrison was doomed from the start, with the guitarist recalling, “I remember John was negative at the time, but I was away, and he came around to my house, and there was a friend of mine living there who was a friend of John’s. He saw the album cover and said, ‘He must be bad, putting three records out. Look at the picture on the front; he looks like an asthmatic Leon Russell’”.
Three records turned out to be the charm for Harrison, though, becoming one of the first success stories of The Beatles’ solo careers and launching Harrison to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. After the breakup, Harrison would be the most successful of his bandmates, as the rest of his former collaborators played catchup, from McCartney’s Ram to Ringo Starr’s Ringo.
The chilly atmosphere between Lennon and Harrison didn’t last long, though, with Harrison eventually lending the occasional guitar part to various songs on Lennon’s album Imagine. The Beatles may have been becoming a thing of the past, but no matter how many putdowns he faced, Harrison turned himself into one of the biggest songwriters in the world from the ashes of his old band.
