The George Harrison remark that birthed one of Paul McCartney’s finest works: “That would be a nice way to start an album”
The greatest inspirations usually come from something completely accidental. As much as a band might pride themselves on having the best synergy with each other and are able to make a song out of nothing, it’s better to have a song that comes together strictly because someone said the right thing at the right time. And even by The Beatles’ standards for making classics out of the strangest things, George Harrison unintentionally gave one of his fellow Fabs one of the greatest pieces of his solo career.
But when the Fab Four were breaking up, things were about to get extremely ugly. None of them necessarily hated each other by the time they broke things off creatively. They only needed a break from each other, but the second that Allen Klein stuck his hands into the business and Paul McCartney had the common sense to leave, it was clear that it was the three of his bandmates against him.
Since Macca was also the first to announce the breakup of The Beatles and went on to sue the rest of the band, it was easy to see a lot of the world blame the pretty-eyed member of the group for screwing his bandmates over. No one knew anything about the scoundrel that Klein was yet, but if the rest of the band was going to survive in any capacity as solo artists, they meant having to go through many different meetings and an endless amount of paperwork.
Then again, Harrison was usually a master at taking those meetings in stride. He eventually got one of his greatest tunes out of the deal when playing hooky to write ‘Here Comes the Sun’, but even in his solo career, ‘Sue Me Sue You Blues’ off of Living in the Material World showed that he at least had a sense of humour about the fact that everything gone blown way out of proportion.
The lawsuit may have been going strong for a while, but McCartney seemed to finally be taken seriously by the masses again. RAM had already left many critics baffled, and fans were equally as confused when Wild Life came out, but McCartney always succeeded when he had his back against the wall, and when working on Band on the Run, he remembered one piece of the song generating from Harrison during one of those meetings.
During yet another day in an office building, McCartney remembered Harrison inadvertently coming up with the line in the middle of the tune, saying, “It started off with ‘If I ever get out of here.’ That came from a remark George made at one of the Apple meetings. He was saying that we were all prisoners in some way, some kind of remark like that. ‘If we ever get out of here,’ the prison bit, and I thought that would be a nice way to start an album.”
And despite every one of his bandmates moving away from their signature sound, McCartney jumped back into the fold with both feet, making the tune the kind of mini version of the epic that he had tried to make on the back half of Abbey Road. The ‘If I ever get out of here’ section might only last for a few seconds, but it’s important to have that heavier section before the clouds part and the band is off and running in the main crux of the tune.
After all, McCartney was the most optimistic of his bandmates, so it was only natural for him to turn that kind of offbeat remark into one of the best tunes of his career. Musically, he had never lost his touch, but in terms of the situation he was in as the villain of The Beatles in many people’s eyes, ‘Band on the Run’ was the best way McCartney could have taken a sad song and made it better.
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