George Harrison, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney were the primary songwriters for The Beatles. Lennon and McCartney wrote most of the songs and, at least in the first half of the 1960s, wrote them together. While many of them became massive hits for the band, Harrison didn’t find them all that impressive.
George Harrison wasn’t thrilled by the songs John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote together
Harrison’s sister, Louise, described her brother as a people pleaser.
“George was always the one who tried to please,” she told the Saturday Evening Post in 1964 (via The Guardian). “When the fire needed more coal, he would always say, ‘Mummy, I’ll do it. Let me get the shovel.’ Or, when we’d be going to church, George would polish everyone’s boots.”
He didn’t extend the same treatment to his bandmates, though. Harrison offered a lukewarm assessment of Lennon and McCartney’s writing. At this point, they had written songs like “Love Me Do” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“Well,” he said, “the songs that Paul and John write, they’re all right, but they’re not the greatest.”
The Beatle said something similar about his own writing
While Harrison’s words sounded a bit harsh, he said something similar about his own songwriting.
“The words are always a bit of a hangup for me,” he said, per The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “I’m not very poetic. My lyrics are poor, really. But I don’t take any of it seriously. It’s just a joke. A personal joke. It’s great if someone else likes it, but I don’t take it too seriously myself.”
Eventually, though, he took his own writing more seriously. He wrote songs like “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” for the band.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t encourage George Harrison as a writer
Lennon and McCartney didn’t let Harrison’s assessment of their writing stop them. They continued to write most of the songs for the band. When Harrison began pushing to contribute more songs to the albums, they didn’t take him seriously.
“But it’s true: it wasn’t easy in those days getting up enthusiasm for my songs,” Harrison told Guitar World in 1992. “We’d be in a recording situation, churning through all this Lennon/McCartney, Lennon/McCartney, Lennon,/McCartney! Then I’d say [meekly] can we do one of these?”
He believed this was one of the primary faults with Lennon and McCartney. It led Harrison to grow frustrated with the band and his bandmates, who had once been his closest friends.
“[Lennon] didn’t realize how I was, and this was one of the main faults with John and Paul,” he said, per the book George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thomson. “They were so busy being John and Paul they failed to realize who else was around at the time.”
Because of this dynamic, Harrison felt a sense of relief when The Beatles broke up. He could finally release the songs he wrote without needing to appeal to his bandmates.
