In 1969, George Harrison temporarily left The Beatles. He had long been growing discontent with his role in the band and he finally decided he’d had enough. He eventually returned to the group, but his bandmates didn’t seem too concerned about the fact that he’d quit. When Harrison walked out, they began jamming together.
The Beatles began jamming when George Harrison quit the band
While The Beatles were recording Let It Be, George Harrison decided he’d had enough of the band.
“It was a very, very difficult, stressful time, and being filmed having a row was terrible,” he said in The Beatles Anthology. “I got up and I thought, ‘I’m not doing this anymore. I’m out of here.’ So I got my guitar and went home and that afternoon wrote ‘Wah Wah.’”
According to Ringo Starr, the rest of the band didn’t even realize Harrison had left.
“George left because Paul and he were having a heated discussion,” he said. “They weren’t getting on that day and George decided to leave, but he didn’t tell John or me or Paul. There’d been some tension going down in the morning and arguments would go on anyway, so none of us realized until we went to lunch that George had gone home.”
Once they did realize this, they didn’t go after him. Instead, they started jamming together.
“When we came back, he still wasn’t there, so we started jamming violently,” Starr said. “Paul was playing his bass into the amp, and John was off, and I was playing some weird drumming that I hadn’t done before. I don’t play like that as a rule. Our reaction was really, really interesting at the time.”
George Harrison quickly returned to The Beatles
Several days later, the rest of The Beatles met with Harrison to convince him to rejoin the band.
“I was called to a meeting out in Elstead in Surrey, at Ringo’s house that he bought from Peter Sellers,” Harrison said. “It was decided that it would be better if we got back together and finished the record. Twickenham Studios were very cold and not a very nice atmosphere, so we decided to abandon that and go to Savile Row into the recording studio.”
They finished recording Let It Be and went on to work together on Abbey Road before officially splitting up.
Paul McCartney took the blame for his bandmate leaving
Harrison left The Beatles because of Paul McCartney. He felt his bandmate was condescending and overlooked his contributions to the band. McCartney admitted that he could be too controlling of his bandmate.
“If I made a suggestion and it was something that, say, George didn’t want to do, it could develop quite quickly into a mini-argument,” he said. “In fact, George walked out of the group. I’m not sure of the exact reason, but I think that they thought I was being too domineering.”
McCartney believed he often let his excitement carry him away, to the immense irritation of his bandmates. He admitted he saw Harrison as a younger brother and tended to treat him as such.
“So, being close to each other in age, we talked — although I tended to talk down to him, because he was a year younger,” McCartney said. “I know now that that was a failing I had all the way through the Beatle years. If you’ve known a guy when he’s thirteen and you’re fourteen, it’s hard to think of him as grown-up. I still think of George as a young kid.”
