The Resentful One: Did George Harrison really hate Yoko Ono?
As the youngest and meekest of the Fab Four, George Harrison was often known as the ‘Quiet Beatle’, so one would be inclined to think he never really got into confrontations with the other members of the band. While this might have been true to some extent, even little brothers get tetchy in trying times, and with growing maturity as both a musician and a man, Harrison began to be a bit bolder within the band.
Initially, the songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney was the driving engine at the group’s heart, propelling it forward. As such, the spotlight shined mostly on them, perhaps leading to the categorisation of Harrison as the quiet one; perhaps he simply did not receive as much attention as the others. While the Lennon-McCartney team was mostly in the driver’s seat, Harrison’s contribution as an ingenious guitar player and blooming songwriter cannot be emphasised enough. In fact, Harrison’s promise of real songwriting talent began with ‘Don’t Bother Me’, which appeared on the Beatles’ With The Beatles album, years before the likes of ‘Something’.
While much of the documented drama surrounding The Beatles break-up focuses on Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney’s discontent with Ono’s ever-increasing presence in the studio, ultimately, it would be a cop-out to blame years of nuanced struggles between four unlikely lads from Liverpool on one person entirely. Especially, it has to be said, for a person who was only really trying to help the damaged and lost Lennon to find his voice and his artistic soul once more. Having said that, as soon as Lennon started bringing Yoko Ono into The Beatles’ place of work, where before “no girlfriends or wives were allowed”, tensions grew.
In an interview Lennon held with The Rolling Stone following the break-up of The Beatles, he stated: “I had to either be married to them or Yoko, and I chose Yoko, and I was right.” Paul McCartney was fairly open too about his discomfort with Yoko Ono being an overbearing presence. When watching some old footage of The Beatles in the studio, you will notice Ono sat next to Lennon in the midst of the recording session, echoing what Lennon said at that moment. It’s hard not to see how her presence could have, at the very least, disrupted the then-fragile balance of the band.
But did Yoko Ono really break up The Beatles?
On whether McCartney eventually warmed up to Ono, Lennon stated in the interview, “You can quote Paul, it’s probably in the papers, he said it many times at first he hated Yoko, and then he got to like her. But it’s too late for me. I’m for Yoko.” In fact, the flip side of Lennon being “for Yoko” can be seen in the avant-garde artistic development he brought to The Beatles—would magic like ‘I Am the Walrus’ really have occurred without her?
Yet, while that might be hypothetical, the disruption was relatively certain. And it wasn’t just McCartney who was discontent. One must wonder what George Harrison felt about Yoko Ono. When Harrison was interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, Mr Cavett playfully remarked on the chair Harrison was sitting in, “Yoko sat in that very chair”, after which George, coyly, jumped out of the chair, perhaps in a bid for laughs or perhaps as a show of real disdain. So the question remains: how did Harrison really feel about Yoko? Did he, in fact, hate her?
Lennon, in The Rolling Stone interview, spoke about Harrison’s reaction to Lennon bringing Yoko into the coveted inner circle, “And George, s***, insulted her right to her face in the Apple office at the beginning, just being ‘straightforward’ you know, that game of ‘well, I’m going to be upfront because this is what we’ve heard and Dylan and a few people said she’s got a lousy name in New York, and you gave off bad vibes.’ That’s what George said to her, and we both sat through it, and I didn’t hit him. I don’t know why.”
Was George Harrison really the ‘Quiet One’?
One can speculate as to precisely why Harrison not only disliked Ono but also seemingly distrusted her. In his brilliant book, Here, There and Everywhere, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick wrote: “I noticed that something down in the studio had caught George Harrison’s attention. After a moment or two he began staring bug-eyed out the control room window…Yoko had gotten out of bed and was slowly padding across the studio floor, finally coming to a stop at Harrison’s Leslie cabinet, which had a packet of McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits on top.”
He continues: “Idly, she began opening the packet and delicately removed a single biscuit. Just as the morsel reached her mouth, Harrison could contain himself no longer. ‘THAT B**H!'”.
Despite Harrison’s blunt reactions towards Ono, when he sat down with Dick Cavett on his show in 1971, Harrison ultimately revealed that he didn’t necessarily hate her and that, similarly to what McCartney had stated before, he didn’t believe Ono broke the band up.
Harrison also showed love and appreciation for his friendship with Lennon and Ono. “The group had problems long before Yoko came along. Many problems, folks.” After having some time and distance after the Beatles’ break-up to align his feelings with the events that had unfolded, Harrison acknowledged Ono’s lack of direct involvement. Harrison and Lennon would arguably share one of the more trustworthy relationships following the band’s break up. So, if Harrison had indeed hated Yoko Ono, it was only ever for a short time.
Above all, it doesn’t take the world’s leading psychologist to see why Harrison was particularly peeved with the situation. For years, he had been battling to get his songs heard by Lenno and McCartney, and now there was suddenly an external force competing for the finite attention he had to work tirelessly to gain. In this regard, he hated the situation more so than Yoko Ono the individual.
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