The main problem in The Beatles, according to George Harrison
Sometimes group dynamics become cemented early on and never budge no matter how much growth or disparate personal wanderings are had. The Beatles were a case in point. While drummer Ringo Starr was a latecomer—knowing the band in the Merseybeat scene and Hamburg live circuit for years but not officially joining til two months ahead of debut single ‘Love Me Do’—the relationship between the remaining Beatles was forged in the days of their Liverpool youth when rock ‘n’ roll and skiffle was the soundtrack of their suburban teen years.
John Lennon was already fronting the local group The Quarrymen as an art student when first crossing paths with Paul McCartney in 1957. Enjoying the alluring mystique of the cool, elder authority, Lennon easily wielded the role of leader when The Beatles’ genesis began to materialise, recruiting the young McCartney as rhythm guitarist shortly after.
A pupil at Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, McCartney had befriended a 14-year-old George Harrison in the year below him while on the school bus, bonding over a shared love of rock ‘n’ roll. From some insistent push by McCartney, a reluctant Lennon hesitant to bring such a young kid into the group was finally convinced upon hearing Harrison’s pitch-perfect performance of Bill Justis’ instrumental ‘Raunchy’.
Harrison owed McCartney a lot. In a few short years, The Quarrymen became The Beatles and Hamburg club circuits yielded Parlophone record deals and The Ed Sullivan Show‘s American conquer. Yet across those whirlwind years as the Fab Four’s lead guitarist, a perception of the band’s ‘kid brother’ could never quite be shaken off. McCartney naturally lapsed into an unwittingly condescending paternalism, having known Harrison since their mid-teens and keenly brought him under The Quarrymen’s wing.
“Musically it was like being in a bag and they wouldn’t let me out the bag, which was mainly Paul at that time,” Harrison revealed in a 1970 New York radio interview. “The conflict musically for me was Paul. And yet I could play with any other band or musician and have a reasonably good time”.
McCartney would often veer into an eager director role, which could test The Beatles’ patience. It started well enough, Sgt Pepper McCartney’s grand conceptual idea as well as broadly captaining the Magical Mystery Tour television film, but the enthusiastic jump into feature documentary for the disastrous Let It Be sessions pushed the band, and particularly Harrison, to breaking point. Lennon and McCartney too rejected many of Harrison’s compositions, fermenting frustration and a growing vault of demos as far back as Revolver that would see release on 1970’s triple LP All Things Must Pass opus.
“I got the feeling that, you know, everybody changes and sometimes people don’t want other people to change, or even if you do change they won’t accept that you’ve changed,” Harrison further mused. “And they keep in their mind some other image of you, you know. Gandhi said, ‘Create and preserve the image of your choice’. And so different people have different images of their friends or people they see”.
The latter tenure of The Beatles was a stifling moment in Harrison’s life, a block in the way of his increasing spirituality and a working dynamic at odds with the egalitarian bands he was enamoured with at the time, such as The Band. The age-old perceptions that had dogged the inter-relationship since the Liverpool school days had reached their end, McCartney’s sage advice or earnest quasi-managerial steer only accelerated The Beatles’ demise. “He was always nine months older than I” Harrison pithily remarked on 1995’s The Beatles Anthology for ITV. “…even now he’s still nine months older than me…”
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