‘Sexy Sadie’: The song George Harrison thought John Lennon got wrong: “It’s a bit obvious”
No member of The Beatles claimed to be perfect at their craft. A lot of their best moments were spent learning the studio in real-time and making the best with what they had available at Abbey Road Studios, and the genius normally came from how they used that technology to create songs that made the whole world’s hearts burst. Then again, George Harrison knew enough to realise that not every one of the band’s greatest hits was exactly as accurate as the rest of the rock scene thought.
Granted, it would be easy to go over every single album and see where one song is out of time, or a single guitar tone might not be perfectly in tune. But those are only small blemishes when it comes to their discography, especially when some of the screwups end up becoming classics, like John Lennon using feedback for the first time on ‘I Feel Fine’ or turning his backwards demo into the most innovative pieces of Revolver.
If we’re talking about the albums that are the most rough around the edges, it tends to circle back to the band’s early career. They only had one day to make most of Please Please Me, so it’s easy to forgive them even if not every song is the best performance or if you can audibly hear John Lennon’s cold he was working through when singing ‘Anna (Go To Him)’ or ‘Twist and Shout’.
And by the time the band got around to making Beatles for Sale, you could hear the fatigue setting in for them. They had been through Beatlemania for years at that point, and hearing them sound spent in the studio should have been their first clue that they worked much better behind the glass than having to worry about which songs wouldn’t translate when they performed them live.
When they eventually decided to leave touring behind after Sgt Pepper, it only took them a few more months to get sick of themselves after returning from India. The band had been in each other’s orbit for years, and now that they had come back from working with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, all of them had much different ideas about how their experience had gone half a world away.
Although Harrison did feel enlightened after staying for a while, he always thought that Lennon’s dig at the spiritual guru on ‘Sexy Sadie’ wasn’t entirely accurate, saying, “He was sitting there, and I was saying, ‘Well, John, wouldn’t it be more subtle to call it, say, something like ‘Sexy Sadie’?’ It’s a bit obvious—’Maharishi’. I like that tune. The words, that was John’s concept of what happened to him….But even John was wrong some of the time.”
Even when the band started reconvening later for the Get Back documentary, Harrison was still gung-ho about his outlook on their trip to India. They had all been talking about how they weren’t themselves around the guru, but Harrison still spoke with reverence for the wise sage, saying that the whole point of the trip was to discover who they were inside rather than going along for the pageantry of it all.
Despite his disagreements with Lennon, though, Harrison was always willing to bite his tongue for the good of the song, eventually turning in time working on Imagine after Lennon denounced any kind of Hare Krishna doctrine on Plastic Ono Band. They may have been on wildly different spiritual wavelengths by the end, but the language of music was never any problem between the Fabs.
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