Why George Harrison thought The Beatles were “crummy”
For most musicians, the peak of rock and roll begins and ends with The Beatles. Although the genre started with acts like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, the Fab Four offered the perfect package for anyone with a catchy tune, capturing hearts with everything from raucous hard rock to tender balladry. While they may have had a firm grip on what people wanted to hear, George Harrison never once claimed to be a great musician.
When asked about their musical ability, Harrison felt that he and his former bandmates were far from the best musicians in the world, telling BBC in 1963: “To be a guitarist, you’re supposed to practice a couple of hours a day. But, I mean, I don’t do that. Well, you know, I mean, the thing is… individually, we’re all, I suppose we’re all crummy musicians, really”.
It wasn’t like Harrison was the only one to slag off his musical ability. John Lennon agreed with Harrison’s point: “I haven’t got the patience to practice to become a perfect guitarist, you know. I’m more interested in the combination of my voice and the guitar. So I never go through a day hardly without playing it whether I’m perfecting or not, you know”.
Even when the band went through their experimental phase in the mid-1960s, they often asked their producer, George Martin, what the proper musical terminology was for what they were trying to say. As Lennon remembered: “He had a very great musical knowledge and background, so he translated for us and suggested a lot of things which he did. He taught us a lot, and I’m sure we taught him a lot with our primitive musical knowledge”.
Despite their primitive musical knowledge, Paul McCartney mentioned Harrison being the most adventurous out of the four of them: “George is the one of us who is interested in the instrument,” he said. “The other three of us are more interested in the sound of the group”.
For most of their time together, Harrison constantly pushed himself to see what sounds he could conjure from his instruments, whether that was the musical taste on ‘Something’ or finding the notes to create the sitar sound on ‘Norwegian Wood’. While Harrison remained an explorer, Lennon and McCartney always followed their ears.
Though Lennon always downplayed his musical ability, he would always translate his emotions into his songs, even if it meant not knowing what he was doing half the time. Although McCartney eventually got a better grasp on the medium when working with classical composers, he still admits that he can’t read sheet music, preferring to rely on playing his instrument and seeing what sounds could come from it.
Even in the recent documentary Get Back, Harrison still needed help identifying what chords he could play on the piano, asking Billy Preston what one of the chords was called in ‘Old Brown Shoe’ because he couldn’t play it on guitar. What The Beatles lacked in musical ability, they made up for by following their muse and refusing to let any creative hangups get in the way of a good song.
There’s a lesson in The Beatles’ story for any kid looking to pick up a guitar for the first time. Even though professionals encourage beginners to learn theory basics, not everyone needs proper lessons to sing what’s in their heart.
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