How George Harrison’s favourite Beatles album typifies him: “The best one we made”
None of The Beatles were meant to stay in one place every time they walked into the studio. They had begun as one of the best bar bands in Liverpool that happened to strike gold once they made it across the Atlantic, but after getting tired of the road, the studio had become their personal playground whenever they got a break from Beatlemania. And while George Harrison may have been off to the side a little more in the songwriting department, he knew that some albums helped represent his creative spirit better than others.
Looking back on the way Harrison wrote, he was clearly more reserved than everyone else. Since John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a tightknit bond, it was usually up to Harrison to come up with his own tunes from scratch or somehow find a way to get Lennon to help him resolve the chorus or put together different pieces of songs until they sounded like they flowed better.
While ‘Don’t Bother Me’ was far from Harrison’s best track, hearing him progressing on Help with ‘I Need You’ was already a massive step forward. So when he had some time to flesh things out on Rubber Soul, he could see the band going further, and he couldn’t help but go along for the ride. After all, the band couldn’t play Merseybeat songs forever, and hearing them indulge in the sounds of folk-rock was one of their greatest strengths on tunes like ‘If I Needed Someone’.
Even when listening back to the record for The Beatles Anthology, Harrison remembered this as being the best time that he had with the band, saying, “Rubber Soul was my favourite album. Even at that time, I think that it was the best one we made.” If we take Harrison’s personal favourites out of the equation, what does this album say about his approach to his own solo music?
Harrison was never going to change his sound on a dime, and listening to his solo catalogue, there are a lot of tunes that seem indebted to what his old band started on Rubber Soul. Outside of fully embracing the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’, the soft-spoken love songs and the care-free tracks like ‘I’m Looking Through You’ and ‘Girl’ were setting Harrison up for later projects like Living in the Material World, with many of those tracks being based around acoustic guitars and getting the right feel for the song rather than making anything too advanced.
In fact, looking at his self-titled album from 1979, it’s hard not to see it as a companion piece to Rubber Soul in some respects. The tracks aren’t nearly as good as the Fab Four’s masterpiece, but there are moments that manage to equal the same care-free attitude that came from Harrison’s personal favourite album, down to the laid-back demeanour of ‘Love Comes To Everyone’ or the ballad ‘Blow Away’.
But if Harrison learned anything from Rubber Soul, it was that a good song mattered more than anything. Despite being immaculately produced by George Martin, most of the songs could be performed on an acoustic guitar on their own and still work, which also could be said of half the tunes on All Things Must Pass and almost any Traveling Wilburys song.
So, while Rubber Soul may be seen as an album where The Beatles first started to become clever, this was practically an education for Harrison, taking place over 14 tracks. Most people can write the best song they can, but it’s important to serve the muse before anything else, and from this album forward, Harrison would do nothing but follow the musical voice in his head.
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