The musician John Lennon couldn’t stand listening to: “I don’t think it worked”
John Lennon didn’t ever want to be a snob when it came to his favourite music.
He may have relied on rock and roll to make a living for over half of his life, but even when working with The Beatles, he wanted the chance to stretch out and try out new avenues regardless of what anyone else at his label asked from him. He wasn’t afraid to make some of the most avant-garde music of his career, but there were more than a few times when he felt like he couldn’t handle what some of his friends were making.
Then again, it’s hard to think of anything being too weird for John Lennon. We’re talking about the same person who showed his most delicate parts to the entire world on one of his albums, so he was never afraid of making something a little bit strange. And when you look at The Beatles’ career, the only songs he seemed to like the most were often the ones that had a little bit more bite to them than the average pop song.
‘I Am the Walrus’ remained one of the finest songs that he ever made, and even when his bandmates were making their own masterpieces, he worked as hard as he could to put a more twisted spin on everything. He had no time for Paul McCartney’s granny songs, so the least that he could do was make a more sarcastic line on ‘Getting Better’ or remind everyone that life was way too short to be fighting on ‘We Can Work It Out’. But apart from his songwriting partner, Lennon always seemed to be rooting for George Harrison to a certain degree.
Because looking through their back catalogue, Harrison was the underdog in lots of ways. He wanted the opportunity to be a fantastic songwriter like his friends, but since he had no one to bounce ideas off of, he was the one left to his own devices. Lennon could lend a hand when he needed a few one-off lines on tunes like ‘All Things Must Pass’ or when fleshing out the verses of ‘Taxman’. But Harrison was always best when he was being himself, and that meant dipping his toes into Indian music.
Lennon never knew the first thing about how a sitar was supposed to work, but after giving it a go on ‘Norwegian Wood’, Harrison had a completely different world at his fingertips. There were so many new avenues to go down, but even if Lennon loved the idea of Harrison quoting his own heart on tunes like ‘Within You Without You’, it was a bit more difficult for him to get his head around his collaborations with Ravi Shankar.
Shankar was already one of the greatest musicians who ever lived, but even if he had a sitar in his hands, Lennon felt that Harrison bringing his musical role model out on tour with him would have been a huge mistake, saying, “I saw the one [show] without Ravi because he had had a heart attack. But I don’t know… that night the band really cooked. The show I saw was a good show. My personal opinion was that even though I know what George was trying to do, I don’t think it worked with Ravi…”
“I mean, I’m no one to say what works and what doesn’t work, really, but my personal opinion just was that he would have been better without.”
John Lennon
That’s probably what most people wanted to see, but Harrison going on tour without Shankar would have missed the entire point of those concerts. The whole night was supposed to be a celebration of spirituality through music, and while Shankar didn’t always go over well with people who wanted to hear ‘Here Comes the Sun’, Harrison didn’t need someone like Shankar to impress the audience every time he played.
He was trying to make people see what music could do when someone was truly at one with their instrument, and if Shankar was showing him the way, it was only a matter of time before Harrison felt the same way about his music. He was going to get everything done with a slide guitar instead of a sitar, but it was the exact same mentality when they tried to connect with God through their music.
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