George Harrison’s acid anthem that took a decade to perfect
The 1960s were a heady trip that came to a close when Charles Manson tipped the rhetoric one toke over the line. But before that sour finale, psychedelia had firmly been part of the counterculture revolution. The Beatles made that perfectly clear with their first trippy masterpiece, Revolver.
While acid in the perfunctory sense might be overstated as an influence on the record, it certainly helped to mark a departure. As David Bowie explained regarding his LSD experience, “It was very colourful, but I thought my own imagination was already richer. Naturally. And more meaningful to me. Acid only gives people a link with their own imagery. I already had it. It was nothing new to me.”
The Beatles’ whirring minds were much the same—they had proven themselves capable enough of imagination long before David Crosby started supplying them with acid. However, in another sense, it was pivotal. The radical nature of the group suddenly departing from the norms of society emboldened them to depart from musical norms, too. This venture had a lasting impact on George Harrison, the youngest Beatle, who clearly sensed that the experimentation allowed him to find himself following a coming-of-age previously cloistered by fame.
When they got the chance, the Fab Four eviscerated that cloistering. They weren’t pop stars in a commercial, conservative mould. When their acid adventures became publicly known, they thumbed their noses at the naysayers, making it clear that they were not public property but rather young artists following their own muses.
In his anger at the reaction, Harrison began writing an acid anthem not just about his experiences with the drug but his feelings regarding the backlash, too. “The press had a field day,” he recalled when Paul McCartney revealed their dabbling to the world. “I thought Paul should have been quiet about it – I wish he hadn’t said anything,” he added.
As it happens, the group had been partaking for a long time before Macca made it public. “It seemed strange to me, because we’d been trying to get him to take LSD for about eighteen months – and then one day he’s on the television talking about it,” Harrison revealed in 2000. The outcry, the substance itself, truth versus little white lies and everything else in between all swirled around in his mind as he worked on the song, ‘See Yourself’.
In some ways, the track typified his outlook within the Fab Four. The distant and holistic nature is reflective of how he stood back and saw the larger picture, contributing to the mix in nuanced and subtle ways. The psychedelic heart of the anthem is proof that he was anything but the Quiet One when it came to the music. Above all, the fact that he studiously took nine years crafting ‘See Yourself’ from its inception to its release shows how he had accepted his songwriting was often overlooked, and he refused to get involved in the rat race of the Lennon-McCartney constitution.
He first began writing the song in ’67, but he didn’t release it until ’76 as part of his Thirty Three & 1/3 album. Within that time, he worked out a way to fully encapsulate the various strands of the song. The mystic time signature that flops through variations from 4/4 to 9/8 helps to summon the sense of acid’s distorting ways. There are musical snippets borrowed from ‘All You Need Is Love‘ that harks back to the backdrop of the scene. There’s the otherworldliness of sitar sounds. And a firm look at McCartney’s wreckless and indulgent actions.
So, it isn’t just a trippy little track but a short and sweet song that looks at drugs and the comedown in every sense. It’s a song that is open-minded and honest in every sense. Perhaps only Harrison was truly capable of that.
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