‘All You Need is Love’: George Harrison’s worst guitar track
Saying that anything that The Beatles is the “worst” thing ever should not be taken lightly. After all, if anyone so much as insinuates that any Fab Four tune not named ‘Revolution 9’ is anything less than perfect means that someone is liable to kick their ass. That being said, no band is perfect, and as much as George Harrison could be considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time, not everything that he played guitar has to be touched by the gods to be considered good.
When talking about his core Beatles tracks, though, it’s easy to forgive him for the first handful of albums. The band had to shoot from the hip every time they went into the studio to save on time, and that left Harrison shaking his boots a handful of times when he played his solos. Those might be inherently sloppy, but that’s part of their charm in its own weird way.
Just look at the way that he weaves together a solo for ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. It might seem like he’s slightly apprehensive to get the tune going, but that kind of nervous energy is half the reason why it works so well. The same could be said about his performance on ‘Slow Down’, where he starts weaving together bluesy licks that sound like he is stretching for new sounds every single time he plays.
No, for this list, we would need to move on to when the band was at its absolute peak. They had conquered the world on multiple occasions, and they had already released one of the greatest albums in history in Sgt Pepper. They had no reason to believe that they could be knocked down, but a tune like ‘All You Need is Love’ starts to get much more flimsy the more you listen to it.
But it’s not like you can’t hear what the band is going for. John Lennon wanted to create a song that could potentially heal the world through the power of love, and once they played the tune on the Our World broadcast, it felt like there was some sense of unity in the world for those few minutes. If only it actually had a good guitar solo to go along with it.
Although a lot of time was put into the backing track, Harrison’s solo feels like he never anticipated playing a lead break. While it doesn’t deter from the song in any meaningful way, hearing him play a handful of string bends before crashing out and letting the orchestra take over the instrumental break sounds like he either hit a wrong note or completely lost his place on live television.
Then again, I almost want to be kind to this kind of tune. It was clear that everything had to be done very quickly to get anything resembling a hit onto the broadcast, and with so little time to work with it, Harrison at least managed to get a couple of notes in there, but the fact that even the band’s eventual Rock Band video game transcribes the first half of the solo before having the player mime along to the horn parts really tells you everything you need to know about the guitar line.
It’s not as hideously omnipresent as their cover of ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, but this was one of the first times The Beatles were something that no one predicted they could be: forgettable. Most people were convinced that the band would always be musical gods, but the worst solos aren’t always the ones that are the least competent; they’re the ones that could be taken out of the mix and wouldn’t change the song in the slightest.
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