Thankfully, his 1991 Japanese tour reconnected him with many of his tunes.
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George Harrison didn’t think ‘Something’ would do well
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According to Joshua M. Greene’s Here Comes The Sun: The Spiritual And Musical Journey Of George Harrison, George was insecure about “Something.”
He played it for friends shortly after writing it. When he finished singing, George “looked up and saw his guests sitting motionless, enraptured by what they were hearing. The song ended, and one by one they emerged from the music’s magic hold,” Greene wrote.
“‘Do you think it’ll sell?’ George asked sheepishly. Pattie smiled, accustomed to his insecurities. As long as she had known him, he had been an enigma, sometimes exuding self-confidence, sometimes doubting whether he could do anything right.
“When they met, he had invoked in her, as he had in thousands of young women and men, the excitement of superstardom. It seemed unthinkable back then that beneath the glory there lived someone with such doubts about himself. The psychology of the human being was so much more complex than his image.”
George had a pretty good reason for being insecure. For years, John Lennon and Paul McCartney brushed him and his songs aside. Since he couldn’t get more than two songs on a Beatles record, George initially offered “Something” to Joe Cocker.
Thankfully, George got to record “Something” with The Beatles. Although, by then, the group was working virtually separately. “Something” became a No. 1 hit after Billboard changed its practice of counting sales and airplay separately. The song also earned a prestigious award, an Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically.
George started liking ‘Something’ again after performing the song during his 1991 Japanese tour
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Either immediately after recording it or somewhere along the way, George lost touch with “Something.” Thankfully, his 1991 Japanese tour made him fall back in love with a lot of his older songs.
In 1991, George agreed to a 12-show tour of Japan with Eric Clapton and his backing band. Despite his dislike of touring, George couldn’t say no because he liked jamming with a band. There were many other benefits to doing the tour.
It would help him stop smoking and get him out of the rut he was in at the time. George didn’t need to organize a band, and he would be playing to a relatively tame audience. It was also a short tour. There was nothing George could lose.
George also got to reconnect with some of his songs and play them correctly live. He told Goldmine’s Timothy White, “I really enjoyed doing ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘Piggies.’ ‘[While My] Guitar Gently Weeps‘ is always a killer, but it’s unbelievable what Eric plays on that live!… I’ve been at other people’s concerts where they say, ‘Come on and do ‘Something!’ [chuckles] But the thing is, you really need to rehearse my tunes.
“So that’s the nice thing about having gotten into the arrangement with Eric’s band playing them–it was an excellent band!”
White asked George how it felt performing “Something” again. He replied, “I really enjoyed playing ‘Something’; I’m back into that song again. We were doing the Beatle ‘White’ album and somebody–Paul, I think–was working in the studio we were in, overdubbing something, and I didn’t have anything to do. I went into the next studio, which was empty, and wrote that tune.”
George said his old songs felt new when he performed them for the first time during his 1991 Japanese tour
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Before his Japanese tour, the last time George played the songs on his setlist was when he recorded them. Since that was the first time George performed them, they felt like new songs.
In 1992, George told Scott Muni at WNEW-FM (per George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters), “A lot of the songs that I had done, I had wrote them and then I recorded them, I sang it that one time on the record, and never, ever done them since.
“So to me they’re like new songs—like ‘I Want to Tell You’ and ‘Old Brown Shoe,’ even ‘Taxman,’ I’ve only ever sang it the one time. ‘Piggies,’ you see, I’ve never really done that one before, and all my new songs like ‘Cloud Nine’ and ‘Cheer Down,’ ‘Devil’s Radio,’ even something like ‘Isn’t It a Pity’ has been around since 1970, that song from All Things Must Pass.
“But the first time I ever performed it. It’s really good for me to … see, it’s like singing new songs.”
George never explained why he lost touch with “Something.” Regardless, that 1991 Japanese tour allowed him to reconnect with some of his older songs, whether he’d performed them before or not. Fans got to hear them live for the first time, but unfortunately, the last. The 12-show tour was George’s last.
