“Weak and tired”: the song George Harrison wrote about being depressed in The Beatles
Being in the biggest band the world has ever witnessed is no picnic, particularly if your name is George Harrison. While it would be egregious to claim that the success of The Beatles came overnight, the group witnessed a rapid rise in global popularity after their first few releases in 1962. However, the bulk of that acclaim was built around the songwriting partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, leading Harrison to feel consistently sidelined within the band, a feeling that never fully dissipated as the Fab Four progressed.
Harrison had always maintained something of an outcast position within The Beatles. Even during their earliest period, operating as the skiffle group The Quarrymen, John Lennon had initially refused the guitarist a place in the band owing to the fact that he was younger than the rest. When the band were at their creative peak during the late 1960s, Harrison splintered off on his own to record the instrumental solo album Wonderwall Music as an extracurricular activity.
Those feelings of isolation that became unavoidable for Harrison towards the end of his tenure with the group were seemingly always bubbling away. The only logical way the guitarist could battle with them was to write his own songs, but they were often overlooked in favour of the Lennon-McCartney efforts. The very first song that Harrison wrote independently for the band back in 1963 gave multiple hints about the songwriter’s mindset and position within The Beatles.
Included on the band’s seminal sophomore album With The Beatles, ‘Don’t Bother Me’ was penned by Harrison while the musician was suffering from a bout of illness. Telling a tale of heartbreak and lost love, in a similar vein to many of the band’s early compositions, the song also hints at much darker themes of isolation and depression for Harrison. While, at the time, those feelings might simply have arisen as a result of the illness and doctor-ordered bedrest, they also predicted his feelings towards the band that would arise in later years.
Speaking on the construction of the song, Harrison once revealed to Timothy White, “I was taking that stuff and in bed, all feeling weak and tired but trying to reserve my energy so I could get out of bed each night to do the concert. So it was the first thing I thought of, really, as a lyric.” Although the band were still in their relatively early years during that time, the pressures of endless touring, performing, and recording were already affecting Harrison’s mental health.
Ultimately, ‘Don’t Bother Me’ is not a stand-out track from With The Beatles, often getting lost within the tracklisting. Its love-fueled message of isolation did not provide the record with much original thought, and paled in comparison to the love songs penned by Lennon and McCartney. The guitarist himself admitted as such, saying, “I never really thought it was a great song.”
Nevertheless, the song remains notable as Harrison’s first independent songwriting effort. “I was quite happy that I had written it,” he explained, “because that was the thing. I just thought, ‘I’m going to see if I can write a song because they’re writing them.'” As The Beatles grew, Harrison’s songwriting improved tenfold, producing tracks like ‘Something’, ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, and ‘Here Comes The Sun’.
Without that early song on With The Beatles, however, those timeless classics might never have been written. ‘Don’t Bother Me’ proved that Harrison could write songs on his own without input from the rest of the group. However, the song also represented Harrison’s difficult and often ignored role within The Beatles.
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