In terms of most Beatles recordings, John Lennon and Paul McCartney tended to be the de facto leaders of everything. Even when watching the documentary Get Back, you can hear both of them having a casual conversation in private in which Macca calls Lennon the boss and himself the secondary boss of the group. That didn’t leave room for much creativity in their original songs, and while the Nerk Twins liked what George Harrison was doing with Indian music, they weren’t quite sure about ‘Within You Without You’.
For anyone following Harrison until that point, it was impossible not to see this coming. Ever since getting interested in Indian instrumentation, Harrison had spent the last few years trying to bring both the spiritual and musical side of his new favourite genre into the mainstream. While ‘Taxman’ was the more palatable version, there was no getting in the way of it on this song.
Even though Sgt Pepper wasn’t meant to be a commercial album with smash singles on it, ‘Within You Without You’ was still an oddity. Harrison is the only Beatle playing on it, and the rest of the track is rounded out by various Indian musicians to play everything from the tabla to sitars to taburas.
Then again, it’s not like the song isn’t intriguing in its own way. There’s not really a central hook like in many Fab songs, but listening to it is more about experiencing the lyrics than anything else, as Harrison muses about him and his friends talking about those who hide behind walls of illusion.
Despite their adventurous spirit, engineer Geoff Emerick remembered Lennon and McCartney’s hesitation to go through with it, saying in Here There and Everywhere, “I could tell that they were a bit dubious. ‘Yes, it’s all very nice,’ I could imagine they were thinking, ‘and it’s all very well played, but it isn’t Beatles, is it?’…I guess they went along with it for the sake of band unity”.
Regardless of it being a bit of a long song by Beatles standards, ‘Within You Without You’ was still a powerful piece of music, especially towards the end when the various Indian musicians start trading lines back and forth before settling down into a calm before the verses come back in. And it’s not like the band was about to return to their old ways of writing pop songs anyway.
After setting the world on fire with Sgt Pepper, every Beatle ended up diving even further into experimentation. Lennon would end up making his own avant-garde pieces to use on the album, while Harrison managed to make some of the purest Indian-flavoured music that he could think of, whether that was incorporating abnormal rhythms into ‘Here Comes the Sun’ or creating amazing pieces like ‘The Inner Light’.
Most artists would have been proud to get that kind of music out of their system, but this wasn’t a passing fad for Harrison. This was music being adopted as a lifestyle, and if you look at the rest of his solo career, his lyrics and melodies would be indebted to his Indian heroes like Ravi Shankar.
