When John Lennon accused George Harrison of plagiarism
‘My Sweet Lord’ was a hit single from the off. It soared to the top of the charts all over the world and established George Harrison as a rock star in his own right. Unfortunately, the song’s release was riddled with legal complications. Indeed, just a few short months after the track came out, Bright Tunes Music attempted to sue the former Beatle for plagiarism, arguing that ‘My Sweet ord’ sounded too similar to The Chiffon’s 1963 hit ‘He’s So Fine’. You’d think that Harrison’s old bandmates would have come out to support him. Sadly not. When John Lennon was asked for his opinion about the song, he ended up siding with Bright Tunes, maintaining that Harrison had clearly stolen the track.
In All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon was asked about the ongoing ‘He’s So Fine’/’My Sweet Lord’ case: “Well, he walked right into it,” John began. “He knew what he was doing.” When asked if he thought George had consciously plagiarised the single, Lennon said: “He must have known, you know,” John continued. “He’s smarter than that. It’s irrelevant, actually — only on a monetary level does it matter.”
The court case was a long drawn-out process that very nearly ruined Harrison’s relationship with music. Keen to move on, he offered to settle the case for $148,000. Unfortunately, Allen Klein, Harrison’s bitter ex-manager, wanted to make things as difficult as possible for his former client so decided to push the legal battle into even more convoluted territory. When the trial finally took place, ‘Oh Sweet Lord’ was put under the microscope and inspected at close quarters, emphasising the ‘G-E-D’ and ‘G-A-C-A-C chord progressions the two songs had in common.
Lennon, while critical of Harrison, was well aware of how easy it was to accidentally mimic another song: “In the early years, I’d often carry around someone else’s song in my head, and only when I’d put it down on tape — because I can’t write music — would I consciously change it to my own melody because I knew that otherwise somebody would sue me,” John said in 1980. “George could have changed a few bars in that song and nobody could have ever touched him, but he just let it go and paid the price. Maybe he thought God would just sort of let him off.”
Though the court decided that Harrison hadn’t deliberately copied ‘He’s So Fine’, they did find him guilty of “subconscious plagiarism”. George was subsequently ordered to pay a whopping $1.6million. To make matters even worse, Klein’s company ABKCO went on to purchase Bright Tunes for £587,000, prompting Harrison to sue the organisation. Thankfully, a judge ordered that Klein shouldn’t be allowed to profit from the settlement. After another 12 years, the trial finally came to an end, leaving Harrison a very resentful musician indeed.
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