10 George Harrison songs that should have never been released
George Harrison never had time throughout his solo career for much filler. Sitting on his hands while John Lennon and Paul McCartney painted masterpieces had to have been hard, and when he finally started to strike out on his own, he had a great standard for quality that none of his former Beatles could touch after the breakup. When he did start to run out of steam, though, the results were either downright boring or one of the most unintentionally hilarious songs ever released.
Because Harrison was never one to half-ass anything. Throughout his solo career, every song he made came from his heart and soul, and that normally meant switching something around to the point where it felt either just weird enough to work or turning in a musical clusterfuck on the back half of an album.
Although some moments from his glory years are marred by bad production or the occasional flimsy line, the core problem with some of his later works comes from being worked like a dog by his record company and wanting to spend his time anywhere else rather than in a vocal booth laying down whatever he needed to churn out for the big machine.
For Harrison, big business and rock and roll never mixed well together, but with years of living in the material world, he developed a sixth sense of what worked and what didn’t. As per his beliefs, though, life is about yin and yang, and the pendulum swing between the two was a bit steeper than most people were willing to stomach on some of these deep cuts.
10 songs George Harrison should have never released:
10. ‘You Like Me Too Much’ – Help!
The amount of disregard Harrison’s songs got in The Beatles is borderline criminal to look back on. The whole point behind them working well together is bouncing ideas off the other person, and with no one in his corner, Harrison was left to sculpt masterpieces by himself. Although the band were trying to be generous on Help!, ‘You Like Me Too Much’ was the only time Harrison struck out really hard on a Fab release.
Since ‘Don’t Bother Me’ gave him a decent start, ‘I Need You’ felt like Harrison finally honing his craft as a balladeer, but his tune on the flip side of the record feels nothing but half-hearted. Outside of a cool honky-tonk piano opening from George Martin, most of the track plods along as Harrison sounds like an over-demanding boyfriend who knows that his girl can’t live without him.
And no matter how many sage pieces of wisdom he made in his later career, lines like ‘It’s nice when you believe me’ going into ‘if you leave me’ sound like he couldn’t think of anything to fill out the verse and wrote something down right before stepping into the vocal booth. Every songwriter has to find their feet eventually, though, but this is the only track from Harrison’s Beatle years that tried to do more than what he was capable of.
9. ‘Bye Bye Love’ – Dark Horse
Much of Dark Horse tends to have a slight asterisk next to it. The album itself was poised to be one of the most dramatic pieces Harrison ever made, and yet the result of his throat problems led to him sounding like he needed a throat lozenge every time he stepped out of the studio. That didn’t mean he stopped being experimental, though, but his take on the Everly Brothers is one of the strangest covers any Beatle has ever made.
It’s not like it’s not on brand, though. Harrison’s wife, Patti, had just started seeing Eric Clapton, and after years of being friends, this felt like the sad epitaph of their time together. Or at least it would be if Harrison sounded like himself. As if to add some levity to the situation, the whole thing is pitched up slightly, meaning that we all get subjected to Harrison’s chipmunk voice that somehow still has a smoker’s cough.
This might have been his way of adding some humour into a desperate situation, but by the time we’ve gone through tunes like ‘Simply Shady’, it’s too little too late. Harrison could have been more reserved about his feelings at times, but leaving nothing to the imagination as he did here is enough to make fans feel a little bit uncomfortable.
8. ‘It’s Johnny’s Birthday’ – All Things Must Pass
There’s a good chance many Harrison fans would gladly burn me alive if anything from All Things Must Pass made it on this list. Almost every one of the tracks on the record is solid gold, and given how many Harrison had in the backlog, it’s astounding that he managed to have some great tunes still left over after he was done. In the middle of the Apple Jam, though, ‘It’s Johnny’s Birthday’ doesn’t quite work merely because of the way it disrupts the flow of everything else.
The whole third disc does have some interesting moments when everyone is cutting loose, but this mindless piece of birthday festivities was only done as a present for John Lennon as per Yoko Ono’s request. And while the tune itself is a facsimile of an old birthday tune, hearing Harrison play with the tape and having it speed up in certain places makes it feel like a bizarro world version of a birthday song.
Although Phil Spector was known for experimenting with different techniques in the studio, this felt like deliberately trying to make something weird and forgetting about what made the song good in the beginning. If it was meant to be a nod to the Lennons’ experimental side, it might have held some water, but that doesn’t make it any less of a slog when listening to the entire album.
7. ‘This Guitar (Can’t Keep From Crying)’ – Extra Texture
As the cinema has taught all of us time and time again, the sequel is hardly ever as good as the original. Although there are occasional films that blow the first one out of the water, like The Empire Strikes Back or The Godfather II, don’t be surprised when most of them go the way of Cars 2 and completely fumble most of their craft to make money instead. It doesn’t come as often in music, but Harrison trying to recapture the spirit of his best song left a lot to be desired on Extra Texture.
The album as a whole already suffers from having little to no hooks on many of the tracks but bringing in ‘This Guitar’ as a sequel to ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is a slap in the face to the original version. While Harrison wrote it as an excuse to get back into playing guitar, it doesn’t have the same mind-bending solo that Eric Clapton had on the first one, nor the emotional punch with its lackadaisical tempo and Harrison’s muted vocal performance.
There are pieces of the tune that work, but when paired next to its musical older brother, it’s like night and day stacked next to each other. If it didn’t have to compete with the original would be one thing, but even outside of its association with The Beatles classic, this would have been considered filler on any other R&B crooner’s album from around the same time.
6. ‘Unconsciousness Rules’ – Somewhere in England
By the early 1980s, Harrison’s schtick had finally started to run dry. There had been moments where everything had worked, but now with punk having come and gone, the neon colours of the next decade had no business with ‘The Quiet Beatle’s spiritual take on rock and roll. Although Somewhere in England started off promising with the tribute to John Lennon ‘All Those Years Ago’, all of the goodwill of the record got thrown in the trash when the label got involved.
The minute that Harrison took the record to his higher-ups, he was told to make something that was more in line with what the kids were listening to these days. While no one had told a Beatle ‘no’ like that before, Harrison took a page out of Neil Young’s playbook and decided to make a song all about the mindless drones who listen to cookie-cutter music and don’t care about the artist behind it.
While I respect the hell out of the guts Harrison had to spit in the face of those suits, ‘Unconsciousness Rules’ is a song you can’t help but feel a little bit sad listening to. Most arbiters of “good music” deserve to be put in their place, but hearing someone as spiritual sound as Harrison getting nasty on record is the equivalent of watching someone like Mr Rogers lose his temper on a group of young children.
5. ‘Far East Man’ – Dark Horse
The whole backstory behind Dark Horse tends to be far too messy for anyone to get into. Although Harrison tended to take the dignified approach whenever he talked about his relationship with Patti Boyd in the press, he turned the whole thing into a glorified soap opera when he came to writing the lyrics to many of the songs on here. And while ‘Far East Man’ is far from the lyrical expose most people wanted, it does have a certain desperation to the way it was recorded.
Coming out of the New Year’s anthem ‘Ding Dong Ding Dong’, this feels like Harrison is drunk at the front of the stage and doing whatever he can to keep himself upright. Although the melody itself is pretty good, Harrison’s performance is what really gets in the way here, sounding like he would just as easily slump over the drum riser at the back of the stage if he’s not careful throughout the song.
And while the song was considered good enough to go on Ronnie Wood’s solo record, it’s saying something when the future Rolling Stone outshines Harrison in every respect on his take on the tune. Harrison certainly had the capability of making a great record out of this, but most of it sounds closer to the kind of music that you’d hear a mediocre bar band play well after they’ve had a few and everyone has left the pub.
4. ‘Tired of Midnight Blue’ – Extra Texture
For all of his spiritual leanings, Harrison was never one to get on his high horse every time he played a song. Inspiration came from all sorts of places, and by the time he began work on Extra Texture, he was more than happy to flex his muscles in the world of R&B and soul. But aside from the inspiration from people like Smokey Robinson, ‘Tired of Midnight Blue’ says more about Harrison’s state of mind at the time than maybe he wanted to say.
The whole track is driven by Harrison staying up too late one night and feeling like hell the next morning, but looking at the background, that wasn’t far from the truth. Compared to John Lennon’s “lost weekend”, Harrison had a few days that were lost forever in Los Angeles, usually spending time drinking and dealing with hangers-on that started to hamper his ability to write the tunes he used to be able to create.
So while this tune is far from the all-time worst thing Harrison ever wrote, it does the best job of saying it all for the record. Harrison was in shambles in Los Angeles, and if this is what he was working with, it’s no big surprise why the song ‘You’ was considered one of the only major highlights from this era of his career.
3. ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’ – Gone Troppo
Out of all Harrison’s mainline studio albums, Gone Troppo was the moment no one seemed to care anymore. He was now making music because he had to rather than making it for pleasure, and considering most of the sessions were completed while he was on vacation, it’s safe to say that he wasn’t as laser-focused as he was on All Things Must Pass. Of all the tunes on the record, ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’ is one of the least salvageable.
While it’s easy to see Harrison was going for the breezy feeling of a Jimmy Buffett record when making the album, ‘Baby Don’t Run Away’ has vocal effects from Hell laced throughout it. Harrison had been known for working with soulful backup singers, but while the booming bass on ‘Really Love You’ was at least funny, this is where the vocal chorus sounds like it’s either making fun of the song title or is being sung from the point of view of a stalker.
And considering how well Harrison worked with strange chord progressions, hearing him trade in his usual schtick for the kind of abnormal chords you’d find in a typical prog song feels like he’s deliberately trying to make everything sound wrong. That kind of approach worked once on ‘Only a Northern Song’, but for a tune that’s supposedly meant to be romantic, this feels like a love song from a separate dimension that reads like a middle finger Harrison had firmly aloft to his record company.
2. ‘Teardrops’ – Somewhere In England
As mentioned before, Harrison doesn’t need to be told what to do. Even if he has some clunkers in his catalogue, it’s best for artists to learn from their mistakes rather than course-correct and make something that sounds like trash from the very beginning. That means getting more songs like ‘Teardrops’, which would mean many more legendary artists becoming absolute laughingstocks.
Since Harrison had already spent time yelling at his record company for making him record his album over again, ‘Teardrops’ was his attempt at throwing them a bone. While the song is admittedly more hip to the trends of the early 1980s, hearing those squelchy synths alongside Harrison’s voice is the most dated piece of rock and roll ephemera ever pressed to vinyl, almost like he ended up accidentally writing the background for a particularly cheesy infomercial that comes on at two in the morning.
Of all the songs on this list, though, this is the one that is honestly worth digging up if you want a cheap laugh and see what Harrison would have been like if he had tried to write a Madonna song. It’s not good by any stretch of the imagination, but very few artists have been able to make a song that is so bad it’s good like this.
1. All of Electronic Sound
Part of the appeal of Apple Records for The Beatles was their ability to stretch out a little bit. Many artists would be falling under their control, and that meant spreading the wealth to people like Jackie Lomax or signing future superstars like James Taylor. But that also meant Harrison could spread out if he wanted to, but for as many people were desperately expecting a solo album, Electronic Sound was Harrison’s first post-Fab gasp, and people are still befuddled at what they heard.
Since the Moog synthesiser was getting introduced to the rock world, this entire avant-garde piece was an excuse for Harrison to test out the equipment. Although its release would get him in trouble with Robert Moog due to him being too liberal with his artistic choices, there’s hardly anything of real value here, often blurring the line between white noise and stuff that would make for better foley sound design in a sci-fi movie rather than anything the public needed to hear.
Although Harrison had a few more months before officially quitting The Beatles, we can at least give this album credit for introducing the band to the synthesiser sounds that would turn up on Abbey Road songs like ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. For anyone with borderline functional eardrums, though, there’s no good reason to give this one a listen.
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