The idea of George Harrison being the quietest member of The Beatles is one purely perpetuated by the fact that the Fab Four’s guitarist was smart enough to know when he was being watched. He may have been more reserved in public than his fellow bandmates, but Harrison was far from mute, and behind closed doors, he was an opinionated individual who didn’t hold back.
Famed for his caustic wit and scything words when nobody was looking, to imagine Harrison as a shy and retiring figure is to miss the true value of his character. Harrison wasn’t quiet; he was discerning. Especially by the end of The Beatles’ reign, as they approached Abbey Road and the closure of one of the most momentous chapters in pop music history, Harrison was earnest about his art.
The guitarist had started to flex his muscles creatively. With every passing year, his ability to craft incredible songs was beginning to loom large in the rearview mirror of The Beatles’ principal songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In fact, this seriousness led Harrison and, by this time, thanks to Lennon’s drug habits and disinterest in being a pop star, the band’s leader, McCartney, to fall out with one another.
While Harrison took longer to establish himself as a songwriter than his two bandmates, his turn up in form couldn’t have come at a more necessary time for the band, if only they had been willing to listen. Spending half a decade learning from McCartney and Lennon aided his growth exponentially. Nevertheless, once he was ready to fly from the nest, Harrison felt like he was having his wings clipped.
Harrison had one of the richest veins of songwriting the music business had seen throughout the 1960s and possessed the songs required to be a star in his own right. In a short period toward the end of the decade, Harrison crafted beloved tracks such as ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and ‘Something’, which proved his talent, but he struggled to have his voice heard within the band.
This fallout was enough to see the guitarist quit on at least one occasion, and would usually see him squirrel away to the country with Cream guitarist Eric Clapton to forget the trials and tribulations of being in the biggest band in the world. Harrison could have accepted his songs playing second fiddle if McCartney and Lennon’s compositions were of a higher standard. Yet, in his mind, he felt some were much lower quality than what he brought to the table.
At this stage of his career, McCartney was well known for his whimsical songwriting style. It certainly came to fruition on Sgt. Pepper, which saw the rest of the band react with rockers on The White Album, and on Abbey Road, McCartney was once again turning the recording studio into a music hall production. He was responsible for writing tracks that his partner Lennon would later refer to as “granny shit” would irk most of the band, but one song has often been cited as pushing them all over the edge — ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’.
“Sometimes Paul would make us do these really fruity songs,” recalled Harrison. “I mean, my God, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was so fruity. After a while we did a good job on it, but when Paul got an idea or an arrangement in his head…” the trail off here is critical. The song is famed for having been relentlessly recorded and re-recorded to fit with McCartney’s vision. Ringo Starr, usually affable in every way, even complained of the song, saying, “The worst session ever was ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. It was the worst track we ever had to record. It went on for fucking weeks. I thought it was mad.”
Meanwhile, Lennon wasn’t much kinder to the composition. During an interview with David Sheff for Playboy in 1980, he admitted, “I hated it”. Lennon continued: “All I remember is the track – he made us do it a hundred million times.”
The singer was quick to take aim at the track’s quality, too: “He did everything to make it into a single and it never was and it never could’ve been. But [Paul] put guitar licks on it and he had somebody hitting iron pieces and we spent more money on that song than any of them in the whole album.”
For McCartney, it was all par for the course, “They got annoyed because ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ took three days to record. Big deal.” However, it was McCartney’s determination to continually perfect the song while neglecting Harrison’s sheer volume of classic tracks in his locker that would have likely left a sour taste in the guitarist’s mouth. After all, for this session, songs like ‘All Thing Must Pass’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’ were turned down in favour of this “fruity” song.
While compiling material for an album was simple during their early days, this became increasingly difficult as they grew as songwriters and splintered off into different directions. The Beatles were no longer operating as a unit but as four individuals who fostered contrasting incompatible creative visions. Furthermore, Harrison was well within his rights to be frustrated at wasting three days of his life on ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ when it could have been spent recording material that eventually established his solo career.
