By the time The Beatles broke up, there was very little love lost between George Harrison and Paul McCartney. The two friends butted heads continuously as McCartney seemed keener than ever to enact his creative vision without the input of his band and, in turn, left Harrison feeling like a mere session musician. He would, on occasion ask his friend what it was he wanted to be played rather than adding any of his own thoughts to the riff requested.
And Harrison had a lot of thoughts. It would be another large reason why the two men struggled to find peace with one another — Harrison’s songwriting had grown immensely and he now demanded the due attention it warranted. It was a balancing act that both McCartney and John Lennon, as the group’s principal songwriters, found tough to stick out. By the time the band split, they left the group as four solo artists ready to take on the world.
But that didn’t mean that the group didn’t hold appreciation for one another and, when the dust settled on being in the most famous band of all time, that appreciation only grew. By the time the surviving Beatles came together to share their thoughts as part of the Anthology, McCartney would not only pick out his favourite song from Harrison but also shed some light on the arguments they shared.
Many people will point to Harrison’s work on Revolver as the moment he began to truly stretch his legs when it comes to lyric and music writing. However, for McCartney, things came much later. For Macca, the best tracks were ‘Something’, the Abbey Road hit, ‘Here Comes The Sun’, which featured on the same record and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps‘, which landed on The White Album.
Speaking about the song ‘Something’, McCartney shared: “I thought it was George’s greatest track – with ‘Here Comes The Sun’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. They were possibly his best three. Until then he had only done one or two songs per album.” While much of that wasn’t Harrison’s choice and instead enforced by the band, McCartney thinks that Harrison himself wasn’t too confident in his work. “I don’t think he thought of himself very much as a songwriter, and John and I obviously would dominate.”
It was a tough gig for Harrison, though McCartney suggested any notion that he and Lennon intended to take over the recording session wasn’t on purpose: “Again, not really meaning to, we were ‘Lennon and McCartney’. So when an album comes up, Lennon and McCartney go and write some stuff – and maybe it wasn’t easy for him to get into that wedge.”
However, things changed as the 1960s came to a close, and Harrison found his voice following a working trip with Bob Dylan. “But he finally came up with ‘Something’ and a couple of other songs that were great,” shared Mccartney, “and I think everyone was very pleased for him. There was no jealousy. In fact, I think Frank Sinatra used to introduce ‘Something’ as his favourite Lennon/McCartney song. Thanks Frank.”
The three songs have gone down as some of the best, not only of Harrison’s career with the band but arguably some of the greatest The Beatles ever produced. Paul McCartney may have been a domineering musician, but he certainly knows a hit when he hears one.
