The Beatles album George Harrison said was impossible to describe: “It still feels very abstract”
All the hallmarks of The Beatles are so commonplace now that they’re almost easy to take for granted.
While rock and roll bands have often tried to make the studio their home away from home whenever they make a masterpiece, the Fab Four were already using Abbey Road as an instrument with George Martin as their guide in the age when most bands were still the product of a garage. But for all of the twists and turns that their music went in, George Harrison had difficulty verbalising the kind of brilliance that they did on some of their records.
Then again, Harrison was always the most clearheaded of all members of the group. Even in the era when everyone was stressed post-breakup, he was the one constantly calling on God to help him through the toughest times in his life while making All Things Must Pass. But that type of patience only comes from years of being kept down by John Lennon and Paul McCartney whenever making those classic records.
Harrison was lucky to get two or three songs on each record, and even when he started making surefire classics, it was hard for anyone to take him seriously. While anyone should have been able to see the potential in a song like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ from the get-go, the fact that he had to draft in Eric Clapton to make sure everyone was on their best behaviour really shows how separated everyone had become by that point.
But when they were making one last record to close this chapter of their lives, Harrison’s songs were pretty much unobjectionable. When Abbey Road came out, ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was the first time McCartney realised that Harrison was giving him and Lennon a run for their money, but the real power of the band came when they saved all of their greatest moments on the flipside of the record.
There’s no way that the band were thinking about making ‘prog rock’ by any stretch, but the medley on the second side of the record is a prototype for those types of songs that would come throughout the 1970s. None of the song fragments have much to do with each other, but their attention to detail in the studio made the whole thing feel like one continuous suite whenever they played through it.
The guitarist was more than happy to have two of his songs featured, but the record was almost impossible for him to describe when it first came out, saying, “You really have to hear all that. But it’s – so far, I can’t – maybe it’s when I get the album finished and in the sleeve, then I’ll get some sort of impression of it, but so far – y’know, like with Pepper and even that White Album, I got an overall image of my own of the album, whereas with this one, I’m at a loss. Y’know, people have said it’s go – it’s a bit more like Revolver. Maybe it is, but I – it still feels very abstract to me, I can’t, like, see it as a whole. Y’know, you get an image of an album.”
But that confusion is something that most of us are still trying to figure out today. There was no way to get used to artists making this kind of epic conclusion, and while there was no consistent theme throughout the entire record, all it needed to do was remind everyone what The Beatles were at the end of the day: a damn good rock and roll band.
There are more than a few times when people could get tonal whiplash in the modern age, going from ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ to ‘Here Comes the Sun’, but the eclecticism that befuddled Harrison is part of what makes the album so endearing. Not every song has to be wrapped around some grand concept, but even without any coherent theme, The Beatles capped off their career as one of the most accomplished musicians of their time.
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