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The last song The Beatles ever recorded attacked their egos: “I don’t care if you don’t want it”

Tue 1 April 2025 9:28, UK

There can be no doubt that few bands can have a more substantial, unenviable claim to gigantic egos than the Liverpudlian game-changers The Beatles. Their collective genius was on show for the majority of the 1960s, but as the group neared the end of the decade, it was their individual talents that shone more brightly and threatened to end the group as it reached its creative zenith. Many would argue the band only got better with time, but their working relationships

As the end of The Beatles began to seem inevitable, and their working relationships had gone beyond tattered and now seemed just a thread or two away from the chop, it was fitting that the final song they ever recorded, in the spring of 1970, would be George Harrison’s attack on the ego, ‘I, Me, Mine’.

There’s no doubt that the ego had hit the Fab Four like a ton of bricks. They were the most famous band in the world, they had countless hit records and were widely loved by critics too. It would have been a little stranger had they not had over-inflated egos. But for Harrison, it was all getting too much.

Much of the group travelled to and through India during 1966 as part of their transcendental meditation course with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. With this trip, the group found a new sense of self and came back to England with a bunch of new songs under their arm and a new outlook on life.

For many of those on the course, this is where the spirituality ended, but for George Harrison, he kept those teachings in his heart forever. When he arrived back in London and began experimenting with psychedelics, the world, and what’s important in it, seemed to open up to the guitarist. Soon enough, he saw the power-hungry monsters that the Fab Four had become.

Ringo Starr - George Harrison - The Beatles- Far Out Magazine — Credit: Alamy

While his spirituality certainly helped guide him to this realisation, in his autobiography I, Me, Mine, the guitarist claims it was acid that pushed him over the edge: “Having LSD was like someone catapulting me out into space. The LSD experience was the biggest experience that I’d had up until that time.”

Adding: “Suddenly I looked around and everything I could see was relative to my ego, like ‘that’s my piece of paper’ and ‘that’s my flannel’ or ‘give it to me’ or ‘I am’. It drove me crackers, I hated everything about my ego, it was a flash of everything false and impermanent, which I disliked.”

The final song The Beatles recorded

It was something that was seemingly permanent in Harrison’s life at the time. During the time he wrote the song, The Beatles were quite literally falling apart. The group were recording for Get Back and the album wasn’t going well. By this time, Paul McCartney hadn’t quit the group for a short time, and the tension was becoming unbearable, most notably surrounding George Harrison’s emergence as a fully-fledged songwriter.

The track is perhaps most notable for being written alongside Bob Dylan’s tutelage after Harrison had spent some time with the folk singer before returning to The Beatles. Upon doing so, Harrison offered up the song but was routinely ignored by the power couple of the group, Lennon and McCartney. Perhaps the most poignant reflection of these times is Harrison’s ‘I, Me, Mine’, a song that denounced the ego and favoured Hindu texts’ idea of universal consciousness. It’s a moment in time that signified that Harrison’s spiritual and physical worlds would always collide.

The perfect combination of these things, ‘I, Me, Mine’ acted as a cathartic release for Harrison. Speaking as part of the Anthology release, Harrison said of the song: “‘I, Me, Mine’ is the ego problem. There are two ‘I’s: the little ‘i’ when people say ‘I am this’; and the big ‘I’ – ie duality and ego. There is nothing that isn’t part of the complete whole. When the little ‘i’ merges into the big ‘I’ then you are really smiling!”

The song didn’t get off to a great start, though; recording for their documentary captured Harrison telling those in the studio, “‘I, Me, Mine’, it’s called. I don’t care if you don’t want it… It’s a heavy waltz.” But it did also garner a sweet moment as, after a few run-throughs, Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr played the track with Yoko Ono and John Lennon dancing in the middle.

The final song The Beatles ever recorded was, in fact, an attack on the very thing they had become—egos. For Harrison, life should have been a lot sipler for all those involved, as he says in his memoirs about the song,

“The truth within us has to be realised. When you realise that, everything else that you see and do and touch and smell isn’t real, then you may know what reality is, and can answer the question ‘Who am I?’”